Climate Automation: Dirty Jobs and a Warming Planet

In the summer of 2023, Vijay Chattha and I reflected on the anniversary of President Biden’s landmark signing of the Inflation Reduction Act and thought… now what?

Don’t get me wrong. Climate change is undoubtedly the greatest challenge for our generation and species; by all accounts, it will remain so for the decades ahead. Hundreds of billions of incentive dollars to reduce emissions, decarbonize heavy industry, and boost domestic manufacturing should be celebrated. None of these incentives will matter if we lack a workforce capable of actualizing these changes.

Climate adaptation won’t happen without first undertaking Climate Automation.

To date, the hard-to-decarbonize sectors have historically been the slowest to adopt automation despite nationwide skilled labor shortages:

• Electric power and utility sectors account for 25% of US emissions, yet, like many skilled trades, the US is short over 100,000 electricians. The average age of a telephone pole technician is 59 years old. Imagine your dad in his 60s climbing 80ft up in the air to service a transformer box. Scary thought…
• Manufacturing accounts for over 20% of carbon emissions, yet the sector projects over 2.1M unfilled jobs in 2030 due to a lack of skilled labor. Shortages in manufacturing is already causing reduced output, longer lead times, and manufacturers straining to meet production demand — which only leads to further turnover. How can an entire sector decarbonize when it doesn’t even have enough labor to staff current processes?
• Nearly 1 in 4 construction workers is older than 55, with nearly 500,000 current job openings (and growing!) for skilled trades to meet American demand for new development for anything from chip manufacturing plants to clean energy facilities to critical commercial infrastructure. Over 85% of single-family home builders reported a shortage of subcontractors in nearly every major trade. It’s no surprise that single-family home supply trails well below demand.

I could go on, but the story above is similar in trucking and logistics, shipping, warehousing, and industrial sectors like concrete, steel, and chemicals. These sectors simultaneously face dual existential threats: Worsening Climate shocks disrupting their operations and the lack of a skilled workforce to adapt in the face of new challenges.

Immigration (legal… and otherwise) was once a solution to the lack of home-grown skilled labor, but it can no longer be counted on as it has become a major political football. Beyond the red-blue of it all, the share of immigrants choosing white-collar jobs over trade work is also rising. Since 1995, the share of immigrants with degrees across all four major immigrant groups is up by 7% to 15%. It turns out that the longer you spend in America, the less you care to do physical labor or pursue trade work.

It’s increasingly clear to decision-makers in these sectors that Robotics, Automation, and AI are our primary tools for overcoming the critical shortages. Therein lies the opportunity for ambitious founders, building both in hardware and software, some of whom we’ve already backed at VSC Ventures:

• Glacier ( Rebecca Hu-Thrams & Areeb Malik ) are taking on the $58B US recycling services market with an innovative robotic pick-and-sort solution that (critically) slots in exactly where a human would stand on a conveyor line, allowing facilities to process more recyclable waste faster and with higher accuracy/purity.
• Presso? ( Nishant Jain & Thibault Corens ) have created the first-of-its-kind 5-min dry cleaning robot. Post-COVID labor shortages in the laundry industry remain a concern as meager pay incentives haven't kept up with inflation. Using Presso means you don’t need to wait for a laundry service to get your clothes dry cleaned, and you get them back in minutes… not days, using a process using 3x less energy and 7x less water.
• PaintJet ( Nick Hegeman , Steve Wasilowski ) are tackling major labor shortages in the construction industry, starting with industrial painting, where they’ve already secured major customers like Prologis, Clayco, Layton Construction, and Brinkmann Constructors. Not only do Paintjet robots paint over 5x faster than human teams, they also apply proprietary paints and coatings designed to withstand worsening climate disasters. Paintjet recently announced a $10M Series A raise from Outsiders Fund on TechCrunch .
• concrete.ai (Alex Hall, Gaurav N. Sant ) knows that cementitious material accounts for up to 45% of the cost and over 90% of carbon emissions in every cubic meter of concrete. They are leveraging over 7 million data points of historical concrete mix performance to provide ready-mix plants with better mixes, all optimized and customized with generative AI.
• Homemade ( Lincoln Edwards , Lauren Ahrens , Claire Burke ) addresses critical challenges in single-family home renovation by building a trusted general contractor-in-a-box — built on their many years of success with Austin Flipsters. That very trust will allow them to one day provide homeowners with quality installation services for greener building materials, solar panels, heat pumps, green appliances, and more.

Climate Automation will be one of our key areas of focus in 2024 and beyond because it is the driving challenge of our economy.

To meet our decarbonization targets, we must first solve the demand for skilled labor with automation. Our economy, our country, and our world depends on it.

We’ve been fortunate to discover and invest in these founders and more alongside some truly visionary co-investors, company builders, and operator partners thinking about climate and automation with a similar lens:

• Peter Relan & Kunal S. Doshi at DK Foundation
• Ryan Gembala at Pathbreaker Ventures
• Santosh Sankar & Jon Bradford at Dynamo Ventures
• Lior Susan & Kaitlyn Glancy at Eclipse
• Raj Kapoor & Josh Felser at Climactic
• Ian Rountree at Cantos
• Abe Murray at AlleyCorp
• Leonardo Banchik now at Voyager Ventures
• Sundeep A. at Climate Capital
• Teddy Himler at Antler
• Fady Saad at Cybernetix Ventures
• Brian Yormak at Story Ventures

We're so grateful for our community of founders, co-investors and LPs for their support in 2023 and excited for even more Climate Automation investments in 2024!