A love of food — and, well, cheese — has landed German fermentation startup Formo‘s co-founder Roman Plewka and its team a hefty $61 million Series B round to keep scaling production of their climate-friendly, animal-free cheese. The Berlin-based startup’s first products use a base of Koji protein, a type of fungal microorganism that’s been
GreenTech
Do you have a much-loved jacket with a torn sleeve or pair of grubby kicks gathering dust at the back of your closet? Tingit, a startup out of Lithuania, wants to help people restore their used clothing to its former glory with its newly launched repairs marketplace. The platform lets you use your phone to
The humble garage is so steeped in Silicon Valley lore it’s almost cliché. Yet that’s exactly how Caleb Boyd and Kevin Bush started Molten Industries: in the garage of the Stanford professor’s on-campus home, where Kevin rented an apartment. It had everything they needed: space and, most importantly, power. The two wanted to break methane’s
The challenge of integrating renewable energy sources into the grid is a fast-unfolding startup opportunity. U.K.-based Axle Energy jumped on the chance to accelerate grid decarbonization when the business was founded early last year. The global spike in energy prices triggered by the Ukraine war had pushed the idea of building software to support the
The energy transition is a marathon, not a sprint. But opportunities for acceleration are growing. Swedish startup Greenely* has just spotted one. It’s closing an €8 million Series A funding round to expand its energy management platform into neighbouring Nordic countries (so around $8.7M at current exchange rates). The energy tech startup is serving around
The onshoring of battery manufacturing for EVs started as a trickle during the COVID-19 pandemic. Then it turned into a tsunami. In 2019, just two battery factories were operating in the United States with another two under construction. Today there are about 34 battery factories either planned, under construction or operational in the country. U.S.
The best known mycoprotein is probably Quorn, a meat substitute that’s fast approaching its 40th birthday. But Finnish biotech startup Enifer is cooking up something even older: Its proprietary single-cell fungus-based protein, branded Pekilo, was originally developed in the 1960s and ’70s — by, of all things, the local paper industry. The focus back then
Carbon credits (and the trading thereof) is big business, but it can be needlessly complicated to get those resolved. Goodcarbon just raised a €5.25 million (around $5.5 million) round to put a dent in that market. Let’s take a look at the deck the company used to bring home that sack of cash. We’re looking
At the start of the year, Tesla’s Supercharger team was tasked with the impossible. “We were on an exponential path,” a former team member told TechCrunch, adding that the new targets were “super-duper crazy.” Despite the bottlenecks that such expectations can create, “every time they upped the metric, we met it.” Then, one day in
Jonathan Strimling faced a dilemma. His company had spent nine years working on chemical processes that could turn old cardboard boxes into high-quality building insulation. The good news was the team had finally cracked it: CleanFiber’s technology pumped out insulation — really good insulation. It had fewer contaminants and produced less dust than other cellulose
Here’s the problem: the planet is burning, and there’s not much we can do about it. Forests are in peril not just because of the ravages of climate change, but because the industries that support them remain traditional and under-resourced. Mast Reforestation is building a tech-forward forest-as-a-service company that vastly simplifies and accelerates the process
Dutch social enterprise Fairphone is best known for its mission to build ethical smartphones via a brand that promises fairer wages for supply chain workers and design choices that encourage consumers to cherish and repair the hardware rather than toss last year’s model thanks to modularity and a web shop selling replacement (and upgradeable) spare
Casey Handmer is not intimidated by very large quantities. Trillions of acres. Thousands of gigawatts of solar power. A billion metric tons of carbon. His startup, Terraform Industries, aims to operate at these ambitious scales. The company wants to turn hydrogen and atmospheric carbon into synthetic natural gas at scale. It’s more than a little
When the financial markets go all wobbly, conservative investors turn to scarce resources that are unlikely to plummet in value, including things like silver, gold, palladium and platinum. Diamond Standard wants to add diamonds to that list and has created a blockchain-based system to create tokens that gives investors access to diamonds, much like how
Steering humanity out of the climate crisis demands action in a very literal way. Boots on the ground, people rolling up sleeves and getting hands dirty retrofitting existing infrastructure, such as poorly insulated houses, type stuff. The goal is to re-make our built environment to be energy efficient and drive down carbon emissions ASAP. So
Lun, a climate tech startup out of Denmark, is on a mission to help homes decarbonize fast — starting with heating systems and swapping out boilers for electric heat pumps. What are heat pumps? The technology is a low carbon form of heating which is based on the principle of refrigeration that offers an alternative
The European Commission has laid out another piece of its Circular Economy Action Plan today — adopting a proposal to set common EU rules which are intended to make it easier for consumers to get faulty products repaired. The “right to repair” measures are aimed at reducing e-waste by preventing repairable products from being prematurely
When it comes to sustainable infrastructure development, technology is making terrific leaps and bounds. The money to make it happen, however? That leaves a thing or two to be desired. For one thing, the processes remain largely manual, with financing in this sector remaining reliant on emails, spreadsheets and documents in a variety of formats.
Honda bailed on the Clarity — its only hydrogen-powered car in the U.S. — but the automaker hasn’t quit on fuel cells. That’s the message Honda sent with a peculiar announcement today: It’s putting some old Clarity fuel cells back to work, combining them into a backup power system for its data center just south
Last week, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which protects consumers from deceptive business practices, issued an advisory titled “Keep your AI claims in check.” When it comes to marketing, “false or unsubstantiated claims about a product’s efficacy are our bread and butter,” wrote Michael Atleson, an attorney with the FTC’s Division of Advertising Practices. Artificial
As a Universal Hydrogen-branded plane, equipped with the largest hydrogen fuel cell ever to power an aircraft, made its maiden test flight in eastern Washington, co-founder and CEO Paul Eremenko declared the moment the dawn of a “new golden age of aviation.” The 15-minute test flight of a modified Dash-8 aircraft was short, but it
Climate change is a problem important and pressing enough that investors have begun to grasp the opportunities that arise when trying to solve it. Now, they’ve started to cast their nets wider for other, adjacent opportunities. Tech that serves to conserve the oceans while using it to replace older, more harmful means of generating energy
The big, giant message Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other execs tried to impart during its four-hour Tesla Investor Day was how the company would be the driver of a global shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy. Investors, at least those active after the market closed, weren’t impressed perhaps because it lacked that
