Issue #41: Vertical farms / Digital real estate decarb / Floating solar plants
Featuring Carbon13 backed Motar IO, ultra efficient near-shore floating solar company HelioRec, and vertical farming company Raiz
ClimateRaise is a newsletter for our network that showcases early-stage climate startups led by women, non-binary and gender non-conforming founders, and connects them with climate ecosystem partners. Featured startups are actively raising.
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Featured Companies
Raiz
#️⃣ Food, Agriculture, and Land Use
Raiz is building a network of distributed farms catering to urban consumers. To grow their produce and herbs, the company is using clean energy and recirculated water along with sunlight, LEDs and software to improve their growing conditions.
Raiz’ Lisbon Farm experienced a 6x growth from 2021 to 2022. They are backed by NEAR Protocol and were part of the Build Up Labs and EWA EIT FOOD accelerators. Some of their advisors include Robert Schmidt of Toucan Protocol and BrainGrid founder Michael Kadonoff.
Co-Founder & CEO: Emiliano Gutiérrez
Co-Founder & COO: Lucía Salas de la Pisa
HQ: Lisbon, Portugal
Stage: Pre-Seed
Company Asks: They are looking for support on geographic expansion & protein crop development.
HelioRec
#️⃣ Energy, Solar
HelioRec builds floating solar power plants for near-shore locations, where half of the global population lives. HelioRec’s floating system is unique and cost-effective. Their patented "hydro-lock" feature and flexible connectors make the system suitable for sea application. HelioRec shows 3 times lower levelized cost of electricity in comparison with offshore floating solar technology developers, and a lower electricity price than on the national grid. They leverage a passive cooling system, machine learning algorithms and the natural cooling effect of water to increase their energy efficiency. The company currently has a 6M sales pipeline and multiple LOIs.
Founder & CEO: Polina Vasilenko
HQ: Nantes, France
Stage: Seed
Company Asks: They would love support with hiring and customer development.
Mortar IO
#️⃣ Buildings, Saas
Mortar IO’s vision is to become the data infrastructure for decarbonizing real estate. They are building a one-click platform for property professionals to understand how to decarbonize portfolios in minutes. Mortar IO is backed by Carbon13 and received their initial pre-seed funding in August 2022. They were able to kick off three pilot customers, co-create their MVP and validate their technology.
Co-Founder & CEO: Ranjeet Bhalerao
Co-Founder & COO: Josephine Bromley
Co-Founder & CTO: Ruggiero Guida
HQ: London, UK
Pre-Seed
Company’s Ask: They would love to connect with building owners and anyone interested in decarbonizing buildings.
Community Highlights
We are very happy to have supported Limelight Steel (feature #23) and Bluemethane (feature #29) raise funds. In addition to quality introductions to like-minded investors, we have helped featured companies raise short of $1 million so far. 🎊
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