Issue #46: Carbon sequestration / Green buildings incentives / Solar without the roof / Watertech
Featuring Legends Solar, TAU Carbon, IncentiFind, Aquaai
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Featured Companies
*Featured companies are actively raising.
Legends Solar
#️⃣ Solar, SaaS
Legends Solar is rooftop solar, without the roof! Legends Solar is an investing platform for users to purchase operating panels on commercial solar farms, and earn cash as they generate and sell electricity.
Legends Solar has a founding team of four — with experts in finance, design, engineering, and sales. With their pre-seed round, they are prototyping the platform with a small number of investors. Thousands of retail investors have signed up to use Legends.
Co-Founder & CEO: Lassor Feasley
Co-Founder & COO: Nera Lerner
HQ: Brooklyn, NY
Current funding stage: Pre-Seed
Crunchbase link
Company Asks: They are seeking to build relationships with strategic investors that have solar finance expertise.
TAU Carbon
#️⃣ Carbon sequestration, Carbon markets
Tau Carbon sequesters CO2 and sells carbon removal credits by durably preserving dried wood waste in aboveground modular containers that also minimize impacts of wood-based CO2 sequestration to ecosystems. Tau Carbon completed the AirMiners Launchpad accelerator and Booster programs in Q4 2022. Wood preservation as a method of CO2 removal gained major traction in 2022 with Stripe/Frontier’s recent R&D grant to Kodama Systems and the Yale Carbon Containment Lab, which are studying wood burial as a preservation method.
Tau Carbon's approach of preserving wood by drying the wood and storing it aboveground in rugged containers avoids the issues of methane generation, caused by the presence of water and anaerobic conditions in the storage environment, and termite infestation. Since Tau's technology avoids methane formation and insect attack , it is more agnostic to location, local environmental factors and weather, and thus has advantages for scaling.
Co-Founder & CEO: John Lin
Co-Founder & CTO: Amber Janda
Co-Founder & COO: Justin Kreindler
HQ: San Francisco, CA
Current funding stage: Pre-Seed
Company Asks: Introductions to potential buyers, as well as potential employees with engineering and microbiology backgrounds.
IncentiFind
#️⃣Buildings, SaaS
IncentiFind is the go-to database of green building incentives. Each year, $70 billion in green building incentives is offered by government entities and utility companies, but over $35 billion goes unclaimed. These incentives are not easy to find and capture, so property owners are missing out on major savings. IncentiFind helps property owners find and capture incentives for every commercial construction and home improvement project. They have integrated their data into design, construction, and real estate software to be involved in every stage of property development. Thanks to the IncentiFind database, 97 billion square feet of properties and 95 million homes can now connect to eligible green building incentives.
Co-Founder & CEO: Natalie Campos Goodman
HQ: Houston, Texas
Current funding stage: Seed
Crunchbase link
Company Asks: IncentiFind is looking to connect to PropTech companies whose software finances, designs, constructs, and maintains real estate. End users of PropTech companies need to find and capture green building incentives.
Aquaai
#️⃣Watertech
Aquaai merges biomimicry and risk-management to provide affordable, quality data from waterways that is easily accessed on a web dashboard using 3D printed, bio-inspired, autonomous fishlike platforms. Businesses, governments and scientists increasingly need reliable environmental data to adapt to accelerating devastation brought on by over population and the climate crisis, yet it's extremely costly to harness information from waterways, which cover 71% of the planet. Whether in freshwater or marine, Aquaai end-to-end solution is the reliable tool for those working in waterways.
Aquaai has worked with the European Space Agency climate, who paid trials to detect debris and ocean temperature shifts sending information to their satellites. The company has a $1.4m value signed orders from industry leading commercial Kvarøy (supplies salmon to Whole Foods, Fulton Street and Michelin chefs) & and research customers Nofima (Norway).
Co-Founder & CEO: Liane Thompson
HQ: Altasea- Port of LA in San Pedro, CA / EU headquarters in Kvarøy Indre, Norway
Current funding stage: Seed
Spotted on Twitter
Another woman-led company working on real problems. Thanks, @mai_swims of @collabfund for sending this our way, and congrats to the Wasted* team for the raise!
Founder Resources
Brown Girl Green
Brown Girl Green is a Filipina American environmentalist who interviews environmental leaders and advocates about workplace and member diversity and inclusion.
Her podcast and media series is dedicated toward changing the image of what it means to be an "environmentalist" in the 21st century, or connect with her on her Instagram to chat or to be interviewed on the show.
Two award opportunities for female-identifying, non-binary, and/or people of color entrepreneur…
… from the Chicago-based nonprofit Evergreen Climate Innovations. The Nicor Gas Multicultural Innovator Award and the U.S. Bank Foundation Cleantech Inclusion Award support diverse entrepreneurs driving innovative solutions within the climate tech space.
Both award recipients will receive:
a non-recourse grant of $25,000,
12-months of business mentorship from Evergreen Climate Innovations
and heightened exposure to both investors and potential customers
The award application window is open now but closes on February 27, 2023.
Applications opened for Third Derivative Cohorts
The first cohort focuses on general climate tech, including hard tech, hard science, software, and business model innovations addressing all GHG emissions sectors. The second cohort, the Carbon Dioxide Removal cohort, focuses on direct air capture, bio-energy with CCS, carbon mineralization, enhanced weathering, ocean-based CDR etc.. Deadline for both is March 21, apply here!
Applications opened for the RESPOND Accelerator at the BMW Foundation
RESPOND is an international startup accelerator program and the first one pushing for the transformation towards a regenerative economy and promoting responsible leadership. The program is free of charge and doesn't take any equity while supporting startups with coaching & mentoring, leadership development, global network and visibility. Applications for Cohort #4 are now open until February 6. More info here. Apply here.
ClimateRaise resources
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~Charlotte