Source : Emmanuel Schalit
I attended a climate investment conference organized by Chris Anderson who runs TED and also has his own fund (investor in Ayro whose board I am on). We had Elon Musk and Richard Branson joining via video but more importantly I met super exciting companies and I am sharing their names here, not necessarily as investment opportunities (most are past seed stage) but because they represent a good sample of companies that could have a real impact. Now that Unicorns are not fashionable any more, our hope is to coin a new term : Gigacorns. Not based on valuation but on the ability to decabornize at Gigaton scale J. The thing that impressed me the most is that for some of these companies, their impact in 5-10 years could be at gigaton scale
• Batene : Battery tech spinoff of Max Planck institute owning 12 key patents and building ultra-fine metals fibers that replace collectors in batteries and dramatically improve (2x) performance (charging, storage, current, lifetime).
• Origen : Transform Lime (chaux) industry with true zero carbon lime used both for direct air capture and to help decarbonize fabrication of cement
• Sage Geosystems : Solving geothermal anywhere to access massive energy (heat) reserves available at standard drilling depth for oil industry. Founded by very experienced oil&gas operators to pioneer dry-rock geothermal which has massive global potential
• SG H2 : Generate negative emission Hydrogen by using material going to landfills (paper, cardboard, …) to generate Hydrogen while preventing these landfill from emitting Methane.
• Thorcon : Building low cost nuclear power plants (500 MW low pressure molten salt reactors) which can be built in a traditional shipyard in 24 months and brought by sea to be deployed on location. Focused on Southeast Asia at first for regulatory reasons
• Project Vesta : removing CO2 from the atmosphere at gigaton scale through low cost enhanced rock weathering. Using highly abundant olivine rock which when deployed in water (near shore) sequesters CO2 and limits acidification
• BetterMeat : Using fungi fermentation to produce meat at a fraction of the cost and much larger scale than existing artificial meat companies. Aims to become their supplier not necessarily compete with them
• A collection of Maritime decarbonation plays (collectively could amount to a lot of CO2 reduction)
o Ayro (am on the board)o Candela (super impressive traction expanding rapidly towards passenger ferries)
o Flux Marine (Andrew and I invested)
o Glas Ocean (electrification of fishing vessels)
A few things of note for me:
• Core skills are not about software. Software may be eating the world but software will not solve climate. This is about engineering, physics, chemistry
• Starting to see companies who could have massive impact in terms of capture or emissions reduction
• Amount of Capital needed to scale is high and to truly scale they will need to partner with industrial giants (oil & gas, shipping, mining…..) to invent the industrial infrastructure of 2030
• We discussed interesting alternatives to VCs to solve the large funding needs
Happy to share more if anyone is interested