Meet the 12 emerging climate startups pitching at this year's HackSummit

For this year's HackSummit pitch competition, we received applications from over 40 countries of stealth to seed startups working on high impact solutions in climate - picking the final 12 wasn’t going to be easy.

With a chance to present their solutions in front of 800 participating attendees at the event and pitch to a panel of 5 expert judges for a $100k investment - the stakes were heating up.

After much anticipation, it's time to introduce the line up of 12 Climate founders - working on everything from bio based chemicals to green hydrogen, sustainable ingredients to bioreactor bottlenecks.

They’ll take questions from a panel of top judges from the VC and corporate sector, before crowning a top pitch who will receive $100K investment from HackCapital.

Let’s meet the finalists: Who’s who and what’s new? 🔦

Jonathan Ho, CEO and Co-Founder at Allium Bio

Meet Allium Bio: Creating sustainable ingredients to level up the plant-based food industry

Tell me more: Using a novel co-culture fermentation system, Allium Bio is combining algae and mycelium into a functional protein isolate that will allow plant-based teams to achieve better taste, texture and nutrition without relying on soy, pea or functional additives.

Impact potential: Allium Bio is building the picks & shovels for the food industry, a new set of ingredients that every team can rely on to build the next generation of products that are better for people and the planet.

Sotiria Mostrou, Founder and CEO at Biosimo

Meet Biosimo: Offering low-cost bio-based chemicals that significantly reduce CO2 emissions.

Tell me more: Biosimo’s simplified business model has two pillars: production and sales of bio-based chemicals and technology licensing to strategic partners.

Impact potential: By using renewable feedstocks, promoting green chemistry principles, and minimising waste and energy, sustainable chemicals can play a crucial role in protecting the environment and mitigating the impacts of climate change.

Michael Stanton, Co-Founder and CTO at Ki Hydrogen

Meet Ki Hydrogen: Solving green hydrogen’s energy problem

Tell me more: Ki Hydrogen is a deep-tech climate venture developing novel waste-to-hydrogen technology to produce green hydrogen using 75% less energy.

Impact potential: Ki Hydrogen’s technology enables $2/kg green hydrogen production by directly tackling the energy costs which accounts for 70% of the levelised cost of hydrogen.

Zac Austin, CEO at Pacifico Biolabs

Meet Pacifico Biolabs: Developing carbon-neutral fermentation biotechnology, leveraging mycelium and algae to redefine seafood.

Tell me more: Their proprietary fermentation process creates low-cost, nutritious, and hyper-realistic seafood alternatives

Impact potential: With versatile mycelium-algae base-textures, Pacifico Biolabs are rapidly expanding their product offering across seafood products. This enables consumers to substitute out conventional seafood without compromise, removing the environmental damage from seafood supply.

Sammy Bajwa, CEO at Synphonee

Meet Synphonee: Reimagining photosynthesis to create a carbon-negative food, feed & fuel ecosystem

Tell me more: Synphonee is developing a synthetic organism to accelerate carbon capture 6,400 times faster than plants.

Impact potential: The impact of this technology is far-reaching, with direct implications for the agricultural and chemical, food and feed, fuel, nutraceutical, and pharmaceutical industries. If harnessed to its full potential, the team believes it has true trillion-dollar revenue potential.

Monika Tomecka, CEO at uFraction8

Meet uFraction8: Developing novel bioseparation technology to enable gentle and efficient downstream processing of cultivated products

Tell me more: uFraction8 has developed a microfluidics based filter system that enables separation at scale. It has the highest Recovery Rate (99+%) for continuous manufacturing.

Impact potential: uFraction8 has a vision to enable the global transition to sustainable bio-based manufacture to help feed, mobilise and maintain the health of people and ecosystems for the security of our future.

Paul Mahacek, CEO and Founder at AtmoCooling

Meet AtmoCooling: Creating useable land in global deserts

Tell me more: AtmoCooling is transforming coastal deserts into thriving hubs of agriculture, clean energy, and climate resilience using patented large-scale evaporative cooling, seawater, and solar energy.

Impact Potentials: Scalable and versatile, this innovative solution can mitigate climate impacts on over 300 million hectares worldwide, offering a sustainable future for dryland regions.

Makoto Hamamoto Eyre, Co-Founder at Homeostasis

Meet Homeostasis: Transforming carbon pollution into essential battery tech.

Tell Me More: Graphite is critical to ClimateTech. Supply needs to grow more than 18x within the decade to meet North American battery needs alone. By 2030, we will make and sell battery-grade graphite–derived from atmospheric CO2–to the world’s leading manufacturers.

Impact Potential: Homeostasis’ technology can enable the EV battery industry to go carbon negative by the early 2030s, netting a reduction of up to 130 million metric tons of CO2 per year.

Daniel MacGowan von Holstein, Co-Founder and CEO at Kynda

Meet Kynda Biotech: Providing low-cost plug & play bioreactors to address the lack of bioprocessing capacity

Tell me more: Rather than building a central production system for alternative proteins, Kynda will supply its customers with the biotechnology and ongoing operational support for their own production.

Impact potential: By providing clients with this technology, Kynda empowers them to take control of their own food production, reducing the need for large-scale centralised systems and creating a more sustainable and resilient food supply chain.

Tomas Turner, Co-Founder and CEO at Cultivated Biosciences

Meet Cultivated Biosciences: Pioneering a fat ingredient from oleaginous yeast

Tell me more: Cultivated Biosciences solves the problem of texture in plant-based dairy. Using a creamy fat ingredient from GMO-free yeast, it offers the indulgence needed for plant-based dairy to appeal to flexitarian consumers. It has 20+ LOIs from the leading companies in the space, operating at hundreds of liters of bioreactors and working with selected partners on product development already.

Impact potential: Cultivated Biosciences ingredient will save 4.2 tons of CO2 per tons sold, with a potential saving of over 100 Mton/year of CO2.

Karl Khalil, CEO at 2D Membranes

Meet 2D Membranes: Reducing the pollution caused by heavy industry

Tell me more: 2D Membranes has developed a graphene filter which captures CO2 emissions directly at the source. By working with us, industries can reduce their operating costs in a simple, energy-efficient way, while minimising their impact on climate change.

Impact potential: 2D Membranes can lower energy consumption utilizing solvent-free operation which is environmentally friendly with a small physical footprint.

Masoud Talebi Amiri Co-Founder at Qaptis

Meet Qaptis: Advancing renewable energy semiconductor manufacturing

Tell me more: Qaptis is mitigating the carbon emissions in heavy duty transportation by providing an inexpensive retrofitting solution.

Impact Potential: By retrofitting existing trucks, Qaptis enables owners to enter in the emerging market of zero- carbon logistics solutions at a very low-cost.

It’s not too late to join them (and hundreds more Food and Climate Founders) at the HackSummit in Lausanne next month.

The networking platform goes live on 1st May so book today and get access to the attendee list and networking app on Monday.

P.S Use code PITCHFINALIST10 to save 10% on your summit pass.