Environment

IBM announced this morning that it has acquired Australian startup Envizi to add to its package of ESG (environmental, sustainability and governance) offerings to help measure environmental impact up and down the supply chain. The companies did not share the terms of the acquisition, but with Envizi Big Blue gets a platform for measuring, managing

Meat has been part of the human diet since before we found fire, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the production of meat at scale is more of a detriment to the environment and the world than a benefit. Across cultures and geographies, animals have been such a vital part of the food chain that

Travel, conferences, hotels, they all have something in common: Everything is designed to be used once, and then discarded. Of course, it would be delightful if everyone was able to not use single-use plastics for their cups, razors, toothbrushes and everything else, but unless consumers rebel, that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. It ain’t just

Putting solar panels on the roof is increasingly realistic for the average homeowner, but they tend to be specialized, aftermarket affairs or else whole-roof replacements. GAF Energy, a division of the roofing giant, claims its new solar shingles are simple enough to install that no special equipment or knowledge is required, making home renewable energy

As a remote island nation in the middle of the South Pacific, New Zealand is experiencing the stirrings of a burgeoning startup scene. The country has historically been capital-starved, but recent investments from the government and foreign investors have significantly increased access to early-stage venture capital funding. Now, certain industries are emerging as potential areas

Shravan Kumar Alavilli Contributor If human societies do nothing, in just a few decades, the planet could warm to levels it hasn’t reached in at least 34 million years, leading to more melting glaciers and floods than ever before — as well as the dire effect of urban heat waves. In 2021, in the U.S.

In the U.S., around 13% of greenhouse gases are spewed out of commercial and residential buildings. You’d be forgiven for scratching your head and asking why. If you tour a typical New York building, you’ll often find that the tech that runs deep in the underbellies of the brick-clad behemoths looks like the 1960s and

Food waste is a $2.6 trillion problem globally as some 40% of food is wasted annually. Full Harvest believes this is a distribution problem that can be solved by digitizing the produce supply chain. The San Francisco-based company’s produce business-to-business marketplace provides a way for produce buyers and sellers to quickly close deals on surplus

Climate change is affecting the way farmers grow their crops, and Phytoform, which knows all about the harsh United Kingdom growing conditions, is out to make crops more impervious. The biotechnology company with headquarters in London and Boston announced $5.7 million in funding, led by Eniac Ventures, to scale its artificial intelligence genome editing technology

The odds are against San Francisco-based electric vehicle battery swapping company Ample. Other companies have tried to build a business on exchanging dead batteries for fresh ones to solve the problem of long EV charge times: Fourteen years ago, Better Place raised nearly a billion dollars to do what Ample’s doing, and it ended up

Seamus Donoghue Contributor Climate change is the issue of our time. From policymakers to the individual, every one of us has a responsibility to do our part to ensure that sustainability and green practices are implemented throughout society. Indeed, governments across the world, from the U.S. to China, are increasingly taking a proactive stance on

Peter Gajdoš Contributor Peter Gajdoš is a partner at Fifth Wall, where he co-leads the Climate Technology Investment team. When I started getting involved in clean tech 1.0 financing back in 2005, “climate change” was some future event. Hurricane Katrina had just happened, and many experts viewed it primarily as a failure of the government

Founded in 2009, Intellihot has been on a mission to make commercial buildings more efficient, by improving the cost and physical footprint of keeping building H2O nice and toasty. The company just announced it raised $50 million to shake up the $81 billionn global HVAC market, with plans to expand internationally. The round was led

Candela makes an unusual style of watercraft called a hydrofoiling boat, which glides above the sea on fins for a smoother, more efficient ride — doubly unusual, in fact, in that it is electrically propelled. The company has raised $24M to accelerate production of its existing small craft and a larger commercial one, in pursuit

During the good number of hours I’ve spent researching and writing about vertical farming in recent months, one key word keeps popping up: proximity. So many of the resources spent on modern farming are devoted to transporting produce long stretches, ramping up carbon footprints in the process. Gotham Greens isn’t vertical farming, exactly, but it

Champ Suthipongchai Contributor Champ Suthipongchai is a co-founder and general partner at Creative Ventures, a method-driven deep tech VC firm investing in startups that address the impact of increasing labor shortages, rising healthcare costs and the climate crisis. More posts by this contributor Investment in construction automation is essential to rebuilding US infrastructure Whether you

U.S. securities regulators have opened a probe into Tesla over allegations from a whistleblower that the company did not disclose to shareholders fire risks from its solar panel systems. The allegations were made by Steven Henkes, a former Tesla employee, who filed his complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission back in 2019, Reuters

Rachel Delacour Contributor Rachel is the CEO and co-founder of Sweep. Previously, she co-founded BIME Analytics, which was acquired by Zendesk. She invests in mainly women-founded businesses, and her achievements have been recognized by La Tribune Women’s award, the French State’s Young Innovative Enterprise Award, and she was named as one of France’s Inspiring 50.

We spend such a tremendous amount of our resources growing, processing, transporting and selling food items. In a world where not everyone has enough to eat, it’s a disgrace that in the US, 30%-40% of food that is produced is never consumed. That’s the problem Spoiler Alert has set its crosshairs on. The company just

Longer-term energy storage is a drag, and a lot of battery tech has been focusing on “how quickly can we charge these batteries so I can drive my EV for another couple of hundred miles.” That’s a fundamentally different problem than trying to capture the power of the sun for 12 hours, before releasing the

Ion Yadigaroglu Contributor Ion Yadigaroglu is managing partner of Capricorn Investment Group and a GP of Capricorn’s Technology Impact Fund. He is an early investor in iconic deep tech companies including Tesla, SpaceX, Planet, Saildrone, QuantumScape, Joby Aviation, Helion Energy, Twelve, Electric Hydrogen, Redwood Materials and others. He serves on the board of nonprofit Ceres

Convincing meat eaters to adopt a climate-friendly diet might get a little easier thanks to Slovenian startup Juicy Marbles, which has come up with a way to create plant-based whole meat cuts, if that doesn’t sound too oxymoronic. ‘Fancy Plant Meat’ is its pithier pitch for a product that aims to provide a vegan alternative

Fairphone, the Dutch social enterprise dedicated to making consumer electronics (more) sustainable and ethical, including by supporting repairability so that users can hold onto their hardware for longer, has announced public testing of Android 10 for the six-year-old Fairphone 2. Owners of the modular handset that was first released back in 2015, running Android 5,

Robert Falck used to work at a Russian trucking factory by day, and by night, he built a nightclub guest list startup. He also collects old books, and once guessed that Chinese author Gao Xingjian would win the Nobel Prize in literature. He grew up on a farm, but has degrees in finance, economics and

As companies increasingly move to take advantage of machine learning to run their business more efficiently, the fact is that it takes an abundance of energy to build, test and run models in production. Neu.ro, an early stage full-stack MLOps solution is building a greener approach. Today, the company announced a zero emissions AI cloud

The dollar is mostly green, but in the hands of Kompas, so are kroner, euros and shekels. The firm has an Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Tel Aviv presence, and now has a $160 million sack of funds to deploy across its focus areas: sustainability and technological innovation in the construction, real estate and manufacturing industries. The

One of the most noticeable — and noted — effects of climate change has been its impact on how other events in the environment — be they natural or man-made occurrences — play out: forest fires burn more violently and for longer; floods happen more often and are more severe when they do; and so

For most of the world’s industries, sustainability is an exercise in correcting the mistakes of the past — from changing mindsets to the very machinery used. But for the fledgling cannabis industry, there is still hope. A slew of startups and industry bodies are trying to make sure that for once, an industry starts off

The idea for Sono Motors, the company that wants to power every electric vehicle using solar power, started nine years ago in a Munich basement when two entrepreneurial 18-year-olds starting spitballing solutions to society’s dependence on fossil fuels. Jona Christians and Laurin Hahn, Sono Motors’ co-founders, weren’t that into cars, but they recognized how much

If you had “my shower head needs a small turbine, a Bluetooth connection, an app and a fine-spray mist” on your 2021 bingo card, congratulations, you win the prize. The prize is knowing that Hai exists — and this fine news story, which will tell you all about how the company raised $6 million to

Noissue, a New Zealand-based global packaging platform, wants to make sustainable packaging accessible to businesses of all sizes. Everything the company offers, from custom tissue paper and cards to totes, stickers and tape, is 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable, and with low order minimums, it’s not just the big players who can afford to buy

Hydrogen is at the center of many industrial processes and potentially part of major future energy ecosystems, but the process of isolating and storing it is wasteful and expensive. DiviGas, armed with a $3.6M seed round, hopes to clean up the hydrogen production industry with a new tech that leapfrogs existing methods, potentially supercharging this

Plastics are bad, m’kay, and a lot of the world is pretty god-awful at reducing, re-using and recycling. Single-use plastics are among the worst environmental evils out there, and Zume is leaping to the rescue. The company is working to create a sustainable, viable and economic alternative to a lot of the plastics we currently

People subscribe to music, so why wouldn’t they subscribe to carbon offsetting to alleviate their conscience about the climate crisis? That’s partly the thinking behind U.K. startup Ecologi, which uses the funds to plant 1 million trees every 10 days in places like Africa and Latin America, as well as doing things like protecting peatlands

Two weeks ago, 50 iconic founders and investors shared their insights on how the world can tackle the planetary “Code Red” with over 2,000 participants at the inaugural SOSV Climate Tech Summit. Here are key takeaways from over 16 hours of programming. It’s not clean tech 2.0 Is it another clean tech bubble? While the

Helion Energy, a clean energy company committed to creating a new era of plentiful, zero-carbon electricity from fusion, today announced the close of its $0.5 billion Series E, with an additional $1.7 billion of commitments tied to specific milestones. The round was led by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and former president of Y Combinator.

Last week, TechCrunch ran my TC-1 about Bowery Farming. What began as a piece about a heartily financed New York startup ballooned into an exploration about an emerging field with a rich and fascinating history. I sought to answer some big questions about the efficacy, profitability and sustainability of vertical farming. I would be lying

Fresh water is one of the many resources increasingly being affected by climate change, which in turn affects businesses that rely on this abundant but still limited natural resource. Waterplan, armed with a $2.6 million seed round, is looking to analyze and track not just how a company’s water use affects the local environment, but

Ed Cowan Contributor Ed Cowan is an investment team member at TDM Growth Partners, a global investment firm with offices currently in Sydney and New York. Allbirds rings the bell on the Nasdaq  today and has chosen an apt ticker to do it: BIRD. It started with a humble, natural wool (and extremely comfortable) shoe,

The ocean is vast and mysterious … but rather less so when you have thousands of little autonomous buoys reporting back interesting info to you every day. That’s just what Sofar Ocean has, and it just raised $39 million to scale up its vision of real-time understanding of the seven seas. The company operates what

Electric vehicle startup BasiGo has today announced the launch of its operations in Nairobi, bringing clean energy options to Kenya’s public transport industry, currently dominated by fossil-fuel buses.  The startup plans to sell locally assembled electric buses using parts from China’s EV maker BYD Automotive, the company said while announcing it had raised $1 million

Protein biochemist Dr. Jasmin Hume was working in the alternative food space when she saw an opportunity to evolve technology so that our global food industry can reduce its reliance on animals. She started Shiru in 2019, and the company uses a “precision fermentation” process to create plant-based ingredients for food companies. The result has

There are several plastic clamshells sitting in front of me on a conference room table — around 20 or so boxes, labels facing forward, with a plate of turnips and a tub of those R&D strawberries we saw back in part two. It’s a nice photo opportunity, backdropped by Bowery Farming’s impressive grow system and

Jonathan Greechan Contributor Jonathan Greechan is CEO and co-founder of the world’s largest pre-seed accelerator, Founder Institute. More posts by this contributor Do you fit the mold for the next generation of values-driven VCs? These best practices maximize the value of your online events Earlier this year, a report from the EU showed that 42%

Agriculture has a 10,000-year history, and it’s predominantly a history of technology. Developments from the plow and wheel to enclosures and the modern mechanical miracles of gas-powered tractors and sorters have consistently improved crop yields, allowing humanity to expand from tens of millions of people to a global population projected to top 10 billion this

“The first thing you notice is just the smell,” chief science officer of Bowery Farming Henry Sztul says excitedly. “It’s got that smell, right?” There’s a kind of visceral sense memory that hits you as you enter Farm Zero, a Proustian moment that overtakes the senses after years of living in a major city. It

Food is the very nourishment of life, but it’s also becoming increasingly challenging to grow at scale. A combination of explosive and unsustainable population growth, human-made climate change and depleted sources of clean water is contributing to overcultivation across the world. For its many advocates, vertical farming is a critical piece to solving that puzzle,

Marc and Lynne Benioff announced a $200 million donation this morning to combat climate change and encourage others to take action. Marc Benioff’s company, Salesforce, threw in $100 million more for a total donation of $300 million. The Benioffs’ portion is divided into two tranches, with $100 million going to the Benioff Time Tree Fund