🤑 ClimateHack Vol. 76: Frontier's largest purchase yet

Hi There,

Last week we hosted our first ever ClimateHack meetup in New York 🗽

Over 100 attendees participated for a session about the Climate Capital Stack - with speakers from Keyframe Capital, Trinity Capital, Crux Climate and NY Green Bank.

Next Monday we’ll be back with our second edition of ClimateHack in Zurich covering the built environment with speakers including OPTIML, Rematter, Norm and Übermorgen Ventures.

Want ClimateHack to come to your city next year? Reply to this email with your city and we’ll see if we can make that happen.

In Today’s Edition;

💰 Frontier buyers sign world’s first enhanced weathering offtake agreements totalling $57M.
🔋 Estonia’s UP Catalyst raised €4M for their scalable solution for extracting graphite.
🇺🇸 SF-based Congruent Ventures, raised $275 million for early-stage startups working to reduce carbon emissions.

Digest x Climate

🌳 Love (or loathe) Spotify Wrapped? Oliver Dauert shared a new version: Nature Wrapped.

📈 What’s up? New research from A/O shows that UK venture capital firms invested $1.1 billion in early-stage built world climate tech in 2023, the third-most in the world.

📉 What’s down? Californian EV startup Fisker cut its annual production guidance for the fourth time in an effort to free up $300 million in working capital.

🇺🇸 The UK government launched a £1 million prize for innovative AI-based solutions which support the energy sector, the environment and climate-focused infrastructure.

🤑 Good Read: Sifted explains why climate tech investors aren’t going after IPOs, but instead are chasing the ‘PE Exit’.

💡 Useful: The team at Charm Industrial share their tips for building a successful hardware company.

Carbon x Climate

🌾 Agricarbon, based in Scotland, secured £9 million Series A funding to unlock the $175 billion global market for soil carbon removals. Its technology audits the amount of carbon stored in soils to help bolster confidence in soil carbon sequestration, and it will use the funds to scale its operations.

🗺 French startup Carbon Maps raised an additional €3 million in a seed round extension. It is building a software-as-a-service platform focused on the environmental impact of the food industry, helping companies to calculate their environmental footprint at a product level.

💰 Frontier has facilitated its first set of enhanced weathering offtake agreements with San Francisco-based carbon removal company Lithos Carbon. Its buyers will pay Lithos $57.1 million to remove 154,240 tons of CO2 between 2024 and 2028, marking the largest purchase Frontier has facilitated to date.

🏎 UNDO agreed a carbon removal partnership with McLaren Racing, and will spread over 24,000 tonnes of basalt rock across British farmlands to remove an estimated 6,165 tonnes of CO2.

Construction x Climate

🪵 Spanish startup Strong By Form closed its oversubscribed seed funding round with $5.2 million. It designs timber-based cladding material to replace steel and concrete, and will use the funds to double in size and build an industrial manufacturing facility.

Chemicals x Climate

🧪 Sustainable chemical manufacturer level nine raised €1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Zero Carbon Capital. Its aim is to phase out petrochemicals from the world’s value chains, and it leverages breakthroughs in synthetic biology and nanotechnology to develop next-generation catalysts for use in industrial biomanufacturing. 

🛢 Cepsa is partnering with C2X to develop a new plant in the port of Huelva, southern Spain, which will produce green methanol, made by using green hydrogen and non-fossil sources of carbon captured from the atmosphere or from agricultural and forestry waste.

AgriFood x Climate

🌾 US biotech AgroSpheres secured $25 million Series B funding to “build unprecedented stability in crop biologicals”. Its novel delivery system encapsulates and delivers pesticides to plants in a more targeted approach than traditional methods, helping to reduce pesticide use and avoid biodiversity damage.

🍫 Swiss-Ghanian startup Koa raised $15 million in a Series B funding round led by the Land Degradation Neutrality Fund. It will use the investment to scale its upcycled cacao business - it makes a cacao fruit juice called Koa Pure, alongside a Koa Concentrate 72° (a reduced syrupy version of the juice) and dried cacao fruit powder for other food manufacturers.

🍖 Cultivated meat startup Clever Carnivore raised $7 million in a seed funding round led by Lever VC. It will use the funds to support its expansion plans, as it works towards commercialisation of its cultivated Bratwurst in early 2024.

💨 Dutch fermentation startup Farmless closed its oversubscribed seed round with €4.8 million. It will use the funds to build a pilot plant and accelerate R&D for its climate-friendly functional proteins with a complete amino acid profile, created via a biomass fermentation technique that relies on liquid gases as feedstock.

🤝 New York-based biomanufacturing company Synonym secured investment from Open Philanthropy to further its research into gas fermentation technology for single-cell protein production, and will assess the potential financial benefits of gas fermentation compared to processes that use plant-based carbon sources such as dextrose.

☕️ Beanless coffee company Atomo Coffee, which produces molecular coffee derived from upcycled plant-based ingredients, secured investment from Suntory Holdings Limited. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

🇺🇸 Three US agencies - the FDA, the USDA and the EPA - are collaborating on a strategy to reach the national goal of reducing food loss and waste in the country by 50% by 2030. 

🇦🇪 UAE consortium ReFarm signed an agreement with the FoodTech Valley to build a circular, closed-loop “GigaFarm”, with infrastructure supplied by vertical farming technology company Intelligent Growth Solutions, to boost Dubai’s food security and decarbonise its food industry.

🔎 Some of the world’s largest dairy companies, including Nestlé, Danone, General Mills, Kraft Heinz, Bel Group and Lactalis, have committed to disclosing their annual methane emissions from their dairy supply chains and “creating and implementing a comprehensive methane action plan”.

Energy x Climate

☀️ UK-based Sunsave secured €6.3 million seed funding to make solar power accessible to all UK households with its solar subscription service. It’s designed to address a critical gap in the renewable energy market, where consumers have historically faced challenges with financing, installation quality and system aftercare.

🏭 ACWA Power is partnering with PT Perusahaan Listrik Negara, Indonesia’s state-owned electricity provider, and PT Pupuk Indonesia, a state-owned fertiliser and chemical producer, to develop the largest green hydrogen facility in Indonesia. 

Transport x Climate

🚚 Octopus Electric Vehicles agreed a £550 million debt securitisation facility from Lloyds Bank to finance its flagship EV salary sacrifice programme, which allows drivers to save 30-40% each month on a brand new electric vehicle.

🔋 Eatron Technologies and About:Energy secured funding from UKRI’s Faraday Battery Challenge to develop a first-of-its-kind AI-powered decision engine that extends the lifetime of electric vehicle batteries.

🚀 Former SpaceX engineers have founded Arbor, and are building what they call a “vegetarian rocket engine”, powered by converting waste biomass into syngas, which is then combusted in the presence of pure oxygen to produce pure CO2 and fed through compact turbo machinery to produce electricity.

Materials x Climate

🔋 Estonian startup UP Catalyst raised €4 million seed funding for what it says is the world's first scalable solution that extracts graphite, a critical battery component, from CO2 gases, especially important amidst China's announcement of its plans to curb graphite exports.

💄 Vienna-based Lignovations, which makes ligning-based eco-friendly biomaterials for industries such as cosmetics, coatings and packaging, secured €2.2 million seed funding to expand its operations.

Funds x Climate

🇺🇸 Congruent Ventures, based in San Francisco, raised $275 million for its Congruent Ventures III Fund, 38% more than its original goal, and will use the funds to support early-stage startups working to reduce carbon emissions.

🇳🇱 Dutch renewable energy investor Return closed a second €100 million growth equity investment, with which it will help to advance solar and energy storage capacity development in Europe. 

🇸🇬 Southeast Asian VC Wavemaker Impact closed its debut fund with $60 million, raising 2.5 times its original target to support experienced, sustainability-focused entrepreneurs. It has so far invested in startups such as Agros, WasteX, Rize, Helios, Bumi Baru, and RegenX. 

🇩🇪 Munich-based VC Vanagon Ventures secured “around 20%” of its €30 million target at the first closing of its first fund, with which it will back climate software solutions, including circularity solutions, finance and data solutions, and nature equity solutions.

🇳🇱 Amsterdam’s Rockstart launched its second AgriFood fund. It is targeting €50 million to support up to 50 early-stage, purpose-driven startups in the next five years.

🇮🇪 Irish VC Resolve Ventures launched its new Climate Impact Fund, following successful support from the Irish Innovation Seed Fund. It will support Irish early-stage breakthrough companies working in sustainability and climate tech, with a particular focus on energy, agriculture, mobility, construction, smart consumerism and resource management.

🇨🇭 Collateral Good, based in Zürich, launched a new fund to support sustainable fashion. Backed by HUGO BOSS, the fund has a target size of €100 million and will invest into 20 to 25 startups working across textiles recycling, upcycling raw materials, novel dyeing materials and processes, and supply chain transparency. 

🇫🇷 Partech unveiled its first Impact Fund, with a target size of €300 million to support B2B companies which have reached at least €10 million in revenue, and that are “transforming deeply the value chains they operate in”. 

🤝 Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, the European Commission and the European Investment Bank announced funding commitments to the partnership’s first two European projects: the Ørsted FlagshipONE project, which is the largest e-Methanol project in Europe, and Energy Dome’s Ottana Project, a first-of-a-kind long duration energy storage project.

Memes x Climate

 🥤 Meme credits to Dejan Mitrovic

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Editorial by Arman, Curation by Nicola