Request for Startups: Climate Adaptation & Resilience

We’re looking for startups to help individuals, communities and businesses adapt to increasing physical risks from climate change.

How We Evaluate Investments

While the outlier returns we seek in each investment requires exceptional team, product, and market, we also look at the potential to drive meaningful improvements across one or more of the following dimensions:

• Anti-Fragility: Solutions must, at a minimum, avoid harm such as loss of property or life. Ideally, they should create pathways to improve life on Earth, especially as the world faces increasing weather volatility and rising temperatures.
• Better, Faster, Cheaper: Show us how your solution can rapidly outperform existing options by leveraging declining cost curves in hardware, software, or other technologies.
• People Impact: Solutions that address widespread challenges (e.g., floods, fires, storms) have a greater potential for scale.
• Economic Impact: Solutions that help businesses maintain continuity, protect critical assets, and minimize economic loss caused by climate risks.
• Biodiversity Preservation: Unlocking economic impact and stopping the destruction of ecosystems and promoting the flourishing of other life forms—we need biodiversity more than we fully understand or have properly priced into the economy.
• Time to Impact: Speed matters. We prioritize solutions with a clear and rapid path to deployment. Obviously, working with the current energy and transportation infrastructure should be prioritized over wholesale replacement at the cost of trillions.
• Stage: we prefer working with teams from the earliest stages. That usually means a bad logo, a sketchy demo and a fantastic team.?

To further clarify what’s possible and what we look for, we’ll unpack some specific ideas below and include examples from our portfolio.?

Why you should Apply

We’ve been investing in resilience and adaptation for more than a decade now. Some of the most notable investments in resilience and adaptation include leaders in their categories like Near Space Labs in remote sensing, Mark43 for computer aided dispatch of first responders, Toggle for construction automation, Urbint helping utilities reduce risks and One Concern for natural hazard risk modeling.

Additionally, it takes a village to build in this space and our fund is sized to encourage collaboration - we actively build syndicates with some of the best known climate and generalist VCs.?

We’re committing to getting feedback back to everyone who pitches.?

We make roughly 1 investment for every 200 pitches we see. What’s especially hard about this ratio is we mostly don’t have the capacity to provide more than a brief explanation when we do pass.? So we’re going to try to remedy this with some help from LLMs. We’ve piloted this internally and the results seem better than what we’ve managed to do so far.?We hope that when we can't invest, this is still helpful.

So onto the current, non-exhaustive list of interest areas. Thanks to Nick Deraney for helping with research and Anthony Townsend Tim De Chant for review and feedback.

1. Long-Term Risk Modeling & Planning

We need tools and systems to help individuals, organizations and communities to plan for the climate risks. This includes:

• Industry Scenario Analysis: Tools that project long-term climate impacts on industries like agriculture, urban development, and energy.
• Community Climate Models: High-resolution forecasting for temperature, precipitation, and sea levels to enable communities to determine how best to allocate resources.
• Infrastructure Risk Projections: Assessing vulnerabilities, hazard and exposure in critical sectors like transportation, telecommunications, energy, and urban development.

Example: One Concern built the leading digital twin to help re-insurers understand systemic “beyond the fence” risks.?

2. Short-Term Warnings and Alerts

As climate events grow more severe and frequent, early warning systems are critical to enable communities to take actions to reduce impacts from. We’re interested in:

• Extreme Weather Forecasting: accurately predicting hurricanes, heatwaves, air quality, hail and floods days or weeks in advance.
• IoT Sensor Networks: Real-time data to monitor river levels, soil moisture, or wildfire conditions.
• Systemic Predictions & Guidance: Connecting forecasts to specific outcomes such as likelihood of power loss or road closures can make alerts more actionable.?

Example: Reynko’s ability to accurately model turbulence means better, faster and cheaper weather models.?

3. Climate-Resilient Hard Infrastructure

Reinforcing and reimagining our infrastructure is essential for a resilient future. We’re seeking startups that:

• Evaluate Current Infrastructure: better, faster and cheaper inspection and interventions to ensure current infrastructure works as expected.?
• Strengthen Existing Infrastructure: Innovations to improve fire resilience, flood protection or rail or roads, wind resistance for solar, and cooling options.
• Construction Productivity Improvements: Are essential to enable us to build faster, cheaper and better hard infrastructure.
• Improve Current Infrastructure: Solve the pollution problems of the current, resilient petroleum based infrastructure: reduce refinery emissions through chemistry, create fuels that convert 100% to energy (no emissions), replace off-gassing with fuel-making, clean up fracking waste pools with resilient filters.

Examples: Roadbotics (acquired by Michelin) automates road inspection, while Pallon automates subsurface inspection of sewers and stormwater systems.?

From a sector perspective, this includes?

Energy:

• Grid Resilience: Technologies to reinforce electrical grids against extreme weather events like storms, heatwaves, or wildfires.
• Microgrids: Deploy decentralized energy systems to improve reliability and enable communities to withstand disruptions.
• Renewable Energy Integration: Infrastructure that supports solar, wind, and other renewable sources, including storage solutions like batteries or hydrogen.

Example: Urbint uses AI to automate storm response and damage prevention.?

Telecommunications:

Example: Gisual automated outage diagnosis by understanding the complex interaction to telecommunications and power systems.?

Water:

• Flood Protection: Innovative barriers, upgraded stormwater systems, drainage systems, and hydrological modeling to reduce vulnerability to floods.
• Infrastructure Hardening: Solutions to protect reservoirs, treatment plants, and pipelines from climate-induced stresses.
• Long Lasting Filters that Tackle Hard Problems: fracking waste water, oils, soaps, wax, waste pharmaceuticals, softening without salt, desalinization.

Transportation:

• Road and Bridge Reinforcement: Materials and techniques to make highways, bridges, and tunnels more durable against flooding, high winds, and extreme heat.
• Smart Monitoring Systems: IoT-enabled tools for real-time maintenance tracking and hazard detection on transportation networks.
• Disaster-Response Logistics: Develop systems to ensure rapid and efficient evacuation or delivery of essential goods during emergencies.

Example Haas Alert and Pi Lit are adding layers of monitoring and intelligence for first responders and temporary changes to infrastructure like road closures or construction.?

Housing and Buildings:

• Fire-Resilient Materials: Advanced materials and coatings to reduce fire spread and improve building safety.
• Flood-Resilient Design: Raised structures, permeable surfaces, and retrofitted basements to mitigate flood damage.
• Heat Adaptation: Reflective coatings, natural ventilation systems, and urban greening to reduce heat island effects.

Construction Productivity:

• Next-Gen Construction Methods: Robotics, 3D printing, and prefabrication techniques to accelerate build times and reduce costs.
• Data-Driven Project Management: AI tools to optimize resources, timelines, and risk assessments in construction projects.
• Sustainable Processes: Innovations to reduce material waste, energy use, and carbon emissions during construction.

Example Toggle uses robots to create large module concrete structures.

4. Community Coordination & Organizing

From planning to evacuations, there is a lot of community in climate resilience.?

• First responders: Are being asked to do more each year, so there are lots of opportunities to help them do more with less.?
• Local governments: beyond first responders, there are agencies focused on transportation, housing etc. How do we help these organizations better allocate resources to support their communities to plan and keep services online during climate disruptions??
• Community coordination:? From school PTAs to building superintendents, there are multiple people and organizations who step up when there are disruptions - how can we give them superpowers??

Example One Roof has been helping neighbors connect for all kinds of reasons, so they're connected when emergencies happen

5. Nature-Based Solutions

Leverage the power of natural ecosystems to address climate risks. Areas of interest include:

• Urban Green Infrastructure: Reduce heat and absorb water. How can we design and deploy this type of infrastructure more quickly and cheaply??
• Mangrove and Wetland Restoration: Natural defenses against storm surges and flooding.
• Coral Reef Protection: Artificial reef structures and regeneration programs,
• Reforestation: Restoring damaged or destroyed forests and woodlands.?
• Biodiversity: beyond the inherent worth of each organism, there are practical benefits from humans too, even if we’re still quite slow to understand all of them.?

Example Earth Force helps to scale fuel treatments for forestry management using robots.

6. Place-Based Economic Resilience?

Think about all the work that cannot be done remotely. How do we minimize impact for these industries?

Agriculture

• Drought-Resistant Crops: Develop strains that thrive in arid climates.
• Controlled Environment Agriculture: Controlled-environment agriculture to reduce reliance on unstable climates.
• Climate-Smart Irrigation: Efficient water-use technologies like drip irrigation.
• Precision Agriculture: Use of automation and AI for efficient water and fertilizer use.

For example Dutch Lion help greenhouses get to parity with traditional ag.

Healthcare

• Heatwave Response Programs: Cooling shelters and heat stress tracking.
• Telemedicine: Remote healthcare solutions for disaster-hit areas.
• Disease Monitoring Systems: Tools to track the spread of vector-borne diseases.
• Supply Chain Resilience: Secure medical supply chains for emergencies.
• Climate-Resilient Hospitals: Facilities with renewable energy backups.

Manufacturing

• Heat-Resistant Facilities: Retrofit factories with cooling technologies and heat-resistant materials to maintain operations during extreme heat.
• Energy Resilience: Integrate renewable energy solutions, on-site storage, and microgrids to reduce reliance on vulnerable energy grids.
• Supply Chain Adaptation: Build flexible and localized supply chains to mitigate the impact of climate-related disruptions.
• Predictive Maintenance Systems: Use IoT and AI to monitor equipment health and minimize downtime caused by extreme weather.

7. Innovative Financing Mechanisms

Unlock capital for climate adaptation with forward-thinking financial models:

• Climate Bonds: Investments in resilience projects.
• Parametric Insurance: Solutions to share and mitigate climate risks.
• Carbon Pricing Mechanisms: Enable market-driven incentives for reducing emissions.

For example Forward Platform helps communities to quickly distribute resources to accelerate recovery. And Dorothy helps navigate the insurance claims process.

8. Distributed architectures

The internet was architected to be resilient in the face of attacks. And from this work came some great insights into the benefits of distributed architectures.?

For example, we often frame solar in cost per kwh making utility scale solar 2x cheaper than rooftop solar. But utility scale electrons have zero value if there are grid disruptions. There are other benefits to distributed architecture? in areas like finance, where small modular devices can be more readily financed and insured than larger centralized construction projects.?

We’re interested in distributed architectures that can compete on price and offer new benefits like more updates or faster recovery.?

Examples Plentify cheaply and simply maximizes rooftop solar utilization. Firedome provides automated wildfire detection and suppression for specific assets like buildings, farms or critical infrastructure.

9. Community & individual health

Beyond perils like flood and fire, there are new challenges like

• Cooling the human body - how to best cool individuals and communities during extreme heat??
• Tropical diseases - as more places become more like the tropics, diseases are spreading into new and unprepared regions
• Air quality - how to improve air quality in the face of more events like wildfires, for which we’re just grokking the extremely negative respiratory health issues
• Treatments - to aid recovery from heat, disease and respiratory illnesses

Example: Metalmark’s innovations in indoor air filtration.?

10. Currently controversial interventions

At a minimum, we’ll need to explore these, if we’re not close on ramping up deployment. We’d love to hear from you if you’re working on:?

1. Genetic modification for climate resilience - from more rapid growth for reforestation to higher tolerance for heat, how can we give superpowers to living organisms??
2. Weather modification - cloud seeding to hail cannons, we’ve already deployed these types of technologies. What else might we do??
3. Solar radiation management - we’ve benefitted from this already because of dirtier fuels, but we might want to deploy this to buy more time for mitigation and reduce losses from already locked in warming
4. Large or small scale coastal engineering - maybe not that controversial since it’s been successful in the Netherlands, but can we make it better/faster/cheaper??
5. Managed retreat/relocation -?sounds like giving up, but maybe time to rethink what this looks like. Maybe we only live in some places part of the year...that used to be the norm.

We prefer to start from great lab results and focus on engineering and business models, but that is just a preference, not a rule.?

Join Us in Building a Resilient Future

If you’re building solutions in any of these areas—or tackling climate challenges we haven’t thought of yet—apply now.?

We’ll review your applications and get you feedback. And when we think there’s a fit, we’ll invest and/or offer you introductions to our co-investors who include some of the best and brightest in early stage climate, deep tech, robotics, AI.?

We’re excited to learn about your team and what you’re building to enable climate adaptation and resilience.?