The Impact Innovator | Issue 269
In this week's The Impact Innovator edition:
The EU has narrowly passed a key law to protect nature – a core pillar of the Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s European Green Deal – after months of fiery debate and an opposition campaign scientists criticised as misleading.?The nature restoration law will place recovery measures on 20% of the EU’s land and sea by 2030, rising to cover all degraded ecosystems by 2050.
Lawmakers decided against “killing the bill” by only a dozen votes in Strasbourg on Wednesday but watered it down on several points. They will send the proposal back to an environment committee before thrashing out details with member states.Nature is dying faster than humans have ever known, a landmark scientific assessment found in 2019, driven by climate change, pollution and the way people exploit the land and sea. The restoration law aims to reverse this trend and help the bloc hit biodiversity targets it has previously failed to meet.
A $239 million?climate tech?investment fund brings an atypical structure —?and ambitious goals — to the startup arena.?Azolla Ventures, launched out of the nonprofit Prime Coalition, focuses on early-stage hardware startups with outsized impact if their tech scales.?It's designed to back firms that can "significantly alter the trajectory of climate change, but are overlooked by traditional capital sources," they said.?Thursday brings the first details about Azolla's size and structure.?It?blends "catalytic, charitable capital" — think grant-making arms of philanthropies and corporations, to name two — with traditional sources like endowments and family offices.?It's focused on "impact-first" investing, which has more risk tolerance and a longer time horizon for commercial success.
Prime works with Azolla to assess potential investments' emissions-cutting potential and the (low) likelihood of attracting support from conventional investors. Then, it helps bring in philanthropic capital. Capital amounts will vary, but Azolla co-founder Johanna Wolfson says initial investments will average in the $1 million to $2 million range. Azolla is thinking big as it stakes very small players. Investment criteria include solutions that can ultimately cut or remove emissions at the gigaton scale. Plus, attracting finance can be tough for hardware firms.?The first six investments include?Heaten, which is developing high-temperature heat pumps to drive industrial processes without fossil fuels; and?Funga, which is "optimizing the forest microbiome for improved carbon storage."
Orennia, a Calgary, Canada-based commercial analytics platform for the energy transition with insights across the renewables, storage, clean fuels and decarbonization sectors, raised US$25M in Series B funding.?The round was led by Wellington Management with participation from existing investors Quantum Innovation Fund, NGP, Veriten and Tupper Lake Partners. Orennia added Michael DeLucia, sector lead for private climate investing with Wellington Management, and Jeffrey Harris, partner with Quantum Energy Partners, to its board of directors. The company intends to use the funds to expand the team further, while executing on its product roadmap and continuously building accurate insights for clients.
CarbonCure Technologies, a carbon removal company in the concrete industry, announced it has raised $80 million in investments in its latest funding round.?CarbonCure plans to use the funding to accelerate its product roadmap. The company uses captured carbon dioxide to produce low-carbon concrete mixes that can be used in construction. CarbonCure inked an important deal in 2020 with Compass Datacenters to?build data centers?using its concrete.?The company has supplied roughly five million truckloads of lower-carbon concrete to a variety of sustainable construction projects, accounting for about 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. According to CarbonCure, that’s equivalent to taking 64,000 gas-powered cars off the road for a year.?The funding round was led by Blue Earth Capital, a global investment firm based in Switzerland, and also includes support from existing shareholders, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Taronga Ventures, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, and 2150.
Avnos says that it’s building technology that’s a “twofer” when it comes to environmental crises: it sucks carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere and produces water as a byproduct of the process. On Thursday, the company emerged from stealth and announced that it has financial commitments from big oil companies ConocoPhillips and Shell Ventures and JetBlue Ventures worth at least $80 million. Based in Los Angeles, Avnos expects to begin commercial operations by 2025, using a proprietary system it calls hybrid direct air capture (HDAC). The system is built around modules about the size of a 20-foot shipping container that pull in ambient air and run it through a series of filters. Water condensation, similar to what occurs in a dehumidifier, is collected, pumped out and stored, and the CO2 flows into tanks, CEO Will Kain told?Forbes. He said there’s a 5-to-1 ratio of water produced for every ton of captured CO2. A pilot version of the system will open later this year in Bakersfield, California.
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Nexus PMG?has raised a $50 million growth equity round to expand its infrastructure advisory business to investors and developers creating projects that convert waste into everything from fuel to animal feed. The round was led by an affiliate of?Greenbacker Capital Management?with participation from the?Ontario Power Generation Pension Fund?and?Liberty Mutual Insurance. The capital injection—the company’s first major raise of outside money—will expand its core service offerings including financial modeling, site selection, and project management. Some of the new capital will also flow into Nexus W2V, which focuses on converting organic waste streams into renewable natural gas, compost products and biochar; and Pathway Energy, which focuses on producing more sustainable aviation fuel by leveraging carbon sequestration.
Sustainability-focused asset manager LeapFrog Investments said it plans to invest $500 million in companies addressing climate change in Asia and Africa, with projects it hopes will reach up to 50 million low-income people.?The commitment was announced at the Climate Finance Mobilisation Forum in Britain on Monday, attended by finance leaders, companies and philanthropic bodies with the aim of bolstering private capital flows to emerging economies.?LeapFrog said in a statement that the money would target investments to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy in the built environment, energy, mobility and food sectors.
Rich in vitamins and minerals,?spirulina?is a type of blue-green algae commonly used as a dietary supplement that you may have mixed into a drink as a powder or taken in a tablet when you were on a health kick. Now, researchers have used it to create a bioplastic that will degrade in your compost bin in the same amount of time it takes for a banana peel to break down.?Now, a team of researchers led by the University of Washington has developed a bioplastic that will degrade in your backyard compost bin. It’s made entirely from powdered spirulina, a biomass of?cyanobacteria?that can be consumed by humans and animals. Using heat and pressure – the same process used to create conventional plastics – the researchers formed the spirulina powder into a variety of shapes.?Spirulina was chosen because it can be cultivated on a large scale, and its cells sequester carbon dioxide as they grow, making it carbon-neutral and potentially carbon-negative. And, as a kind of added bonus, it’s fire-resistant.
Currently, the researchers’ spirulina bioplastics are not ready for industrial usage because, even though they may be strong, they’re brittle, and they don’t respond well to water. “You wouldn’t want these materials to get rained on,” Iyer said. The researchers are addressing these issues and exploring designing bioplastics for different situations while continuing to focus on recyclability.?“Biodegradation is not our preferred end-of-life scenario,” said Roumeli. “People don’t often recycle plastics, however, so it’s an added bonus that our bioplastics do degrade quickly in the environment.”
Cultivated cotton produced by US startup?GALY?is set to be used commercially for the first time, after the company signed a deal with Japan’s Suzuran Medical Inc.?Suzuran will use the cotton — which is grown from cells in a bioreactor — to produce medical products such as gauze and absorbent cotton, along with sheets and cosmetic cotton. According to?Forbes, thousands of tons of the cultivated fibers will be used each year.?The partnership is worth $50 million and will run for ten years, beginning when GALY launches its first commercial facility; however, this likely won’t be for a few years. The agreement follows the success of a proof of concept completed by the two companies in 2021.?
Conventional cotton production is extremely resource-intensive, with around 2,700 liters of water required to produce one t-shirt and cotton plantations occupying 35 million hectares of land worldwide. There are also issues with unethical practices in the industry, such as slavery and child labor. Cultivated cotton provides a solution, with a transparent supply chain, no pesticides or insecticides required, and production of any variety of cotton possible all year round. It is also far less vulnerable to the effects of climate change than conventional cotton. Following the success of its innovation, GALY is planning to develop sustainable alternatives to other materials. The company says it has already completed two further proofs of concept, which are currently still secret.?“I’m extremely excited to announce our $50M+ deal as part of our long-term relationship with Suzuran, the world’s leader in medical cotton applications,” said Luciano Bueno, founder and CEO at GALY"
The last time humans witnessed supersonic travel was the?legendary Concorde, which operated from 1973 to 2003. Equipped with four powerful engines, the super-speedy plane could journey from New York tLondon in less than four hours — a tremendous feat for the era.?However, some ambitious engineers are hoping to fly even faster, including?European startup Destinus, Georgia-based Hermeus, and Texas-born Venus Aerospace — all of which are?developing hypersonic planes.?According to Venus, the jet is being developed to fly at Mach 9, or nine times the speed of sound. That equates to about 5,000 miles per hour. By comparison, the Concorde flew at about Mach 2, Overture is being built for Mach 1.7, and Hermus and Destinus are designing their hypersonic planes for Mach 5.
He explained Stargazer would take off using traditional jet engines. Once it is away from city centers, it would switch to rocket engines to climb to 170,000 feet and reach hypersonic speeds.?Most passenger airlines fly around 40,000 feet, meaning Stargazer's planned cruising altitude is about 130,000 feet higher — though still not high enough to touch space.?Andrew explained that today's rocket engines burn subsonically, which would not be enough power for Stargazer. But, supersonic combustion would produce enough thrust for hypersonic flight. This led Venus to build the RDRE.?According to Andrew, the RDRE generates more temperature and pressure compared to traditional rocket engines because the RDRE burns faster, effectively producing more thrust while using less fuel.?Andrew told Insider that Stargazer would carry a "sort of liquid air" to power the rocket engines.