Issue #48: Supply Chain And Manufacturing Decarb, Safe Climate Financing for Emerging Markets, Ocean Free Seafood
Featuring Mantaray Climate, DREx, Climastry & Pearlita Foods + Join our first event!
Welcome back!
ClimateRaise showcases early-stage climate startups led by all women and non-binary founders, and connects them with investors and climate ecosystem partners through warm introductions.
How it works:
🔎 We find vetted, actively raising women-led climate startups.
📝 Our biweekly newsletter then highlights a diverse selection of those startups.
🔗 We introduce investors, ecosystem partners and fellow founders to the featured founders.
📩 Submit companies, opportunities and resources (or say hi!) for the newsletter here.
ICYMI - They are still raising!
Request an introduction to the companies below by filling this form:
Industry
Metafold 3D: 3D printing SaaS
Urban Tech & Built Environment
Cadence OneFive: SaaS for climate-responsive construction
IncentiFind: green building incentives platform
Water Tech
OpenHydro: hydropower installations emission mitigation platform
Aquaai: unmanned underwater data collection and analytics
Food, Ag, Land Use
Aquanzo: Ocean free marine zooplankton products
Tau Carbon: wood based CO2 sequestration
Life After Life: Turning brownfields into sustainable cemeteries for cities
Carbon Yield: Regenerative agriculture platform for farmers
Retail/SaaS
TO THE MARKET: Supply chain decarbonization platform for the fashion industry
Legends Solar: Solar investing platform
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Featured companies
*Featured companies are actively raising.
Mantaray Climate
#️⃣Industry, SaaS
Mantaray is a sustainable procurement platform that helps companies easily find sustainability data on their existing suppliers, as well as a curated selection of climate-friendly alternatives, so that they have the information they need to consider sustainability early in the supplier selection process.
The team won the Next Big Thing start-up prize at the Vic Cleantech Expo in November 2022, developed the first version of the product based on customer discovery with 12+ sustainability managers. They have on board two seasoned advisors with experience in building start-ups.
Founder & CEO: Rujuta Natu
HQ: Sydney, Australia
Current funding stage: Pre-Seed
Company Asks: Looking to bring on a data architect who is passionate about sustainability
DREx
#️⃣Climate Risks, Smart Grid
DREx is building a data-driven platform for safe climate financing in emerging markets, enabling institutions to deploy new capital with total transparency while reducing ESG greenwashing practices. They use IoT+ Blockchain to bring efficiency and scale impact investment, while de-risking investments by means of RECs.
They won the sustainable blockchain challenge hosted by the IDB LAB, were winners at Polkadot Hackathon Latam, and were the unique LatAm project from over 40 taking part at the top blockchain-based Outliers Ventures accelerator. Recently, they delivered their proof of concept demonstrating tech capabilities tokenizing energy in a real 300kWp solar plant.
Co-Founder & CEO: Joselyne Rosario
Co-Founder & COO: Tomas Cordero
HQ: Guayaquil, Ecuador
Current funding stage: Pre-Seed
Company Asks: They would love to connect with other stakeholders working in the clean energy sector, to help them channel capital for their projects.
Climastry
#️⃣Climate Risks, Research & Development, Manufacturing
Climastry invented the piece-rate emission factors™, to date the only statistically significant method of estimating emissions from manufacturing processes. Decarbonization efforts in the manufacturing sector require significant investments, and financing such efforts can be challenging, particularly for marginalized industry actors.Sustainability-linked is typically structured such that the interest rate is tied to the company's sustainability performance. The effectiveness of sustainability-linked debt, however, is contingent on the ability to measure and verify a company's sustainability performance indicators, including its carbon emissions.
Climastry introduces asset-backed carbon credits as a means of incentivizing companies to reduce their carbon emissions. They enable the financing of decarbonization efforts by securing net-zero manufacturing projects' underlying assets with sustainability-linked financing that offers a variable interest rate dependent on the projects' impact. Their pilot cohort of 60 partners & users is ready to be deployed in March 2023. Climastry was accepted in Newlab Founder Fellowship Program in the spring of 2023 and in the NSF CORE Fellowship in Summer 2023.
Co-Founder & CEO: Jake Stevens
Co-Founder & CTO: Sabrina Karas
HQ: Chicago, IL & Cambridge, UK
Current funding stage: Pre-Seed
Company Asks: Networking, Customer Development, Partnerships.
Pearlita Foods
#️⃣Food & Ag
Pearlita Foods is on a mission to provide sustainable, healthy and delicious alternatives to traditional seafood to the market. They have a portfolio of 5 plant-based and gluten-free products that are ready to scale up. These include clam chowder, shellfish ceviche, crab, oysters, and fried oysters.
Since the launch of Pearlita 12 months ago, they have set up a fully functioning cell lab, and have pivoted from strictly oysters & cell based to a hybrid (cell & plant based) shellfish company to become revenue generating sooner and become more self reliant. They have secured a spot in a commercial kitchen to increase production, have a 400+ waitlist of chefs, restaurants, consumers and raised an additional $400,000 from VCs including Sustainable Food Ventures, Big Idea Ventures, Cult Food Science, & Angels.
Founder & CEO: Nikita Michelsen
HQ: Raleigh, NC
Current funding stage: Pre-Seed
Company Asks: They would love connections to interested restaurants, chefs, & caterers.
Resources for founders
Founders, join ClimateRaise first event!
ClimateRaise teamed up with Alder & Co. for an inclusive webinar & and AMA on marketing for early-stage climate tech startups
How to leverage growth marketing to overcome climate tech's valleys of death.
Why attend: get insights on where to focus your marketing efforts, and how growth marketing can help early stage startups in climate tech.
Who should attend: Early stage founders in climate tech.
About: Alder is a woman- and minority-owned growth marketing agency focused on climate tech. Bettina Grab is a partner and president at Alder, and brings 15+ years of experience in marketing.
When: March 16th, 9am PT / 12pm ET
Sign up here: https://lu.ma/e51scnoa
UK-based founders, check out SWN
The Sustainable Women's Network is a UK based community of ClimateTech innovators and investors creating more opportunities for women-led businesses to be funded and celebrated. Sign up to their newsletter where we profile UK and European women-led climate startups, highlight relevant news and share insights for founders and funders of early stage climate tech ventures.
Join SWN for their first event of 2023 on the 21st of March at LocalGlobe: Perspectives From Women STEM Entrepreneurs In Energy where we will hear from a panel of inspiring women entrepreneurs from the energy and ClimateTech ecosystem, followed by networking to meet other founders, investors and allies in the sector. Their panelist session will be led by:
Molly Allington, CEO & Co-Founder of Albotherm
Alice Tyler, Co-Founder & CEO of Piclo Energy
Samia Qader, Senior Principal at Climate VC
Scarlette Lesma, Program Manager at Energy Systems Catapult
Orange Silicon Valley Green-IT Challenge
Orange Silicon Valley, a subsidiary of one Europe’s biggest telco groups, launches Green-IT Challenge 2023 to identify and partner with North American startups that can help Orange and other corporations speed up their decarbonization journeys. The Finalists will have opportunities to conduct paid projects with Orange or subsidiaries, meet Orange leaders and showcase their solutions at VivaTech. Apply here by March 20th.
ClimateRaise resources
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