sustainability
The climate crisis is here. As the stakes rise with the temperature, a wide range of startups are striving to help humanity slash emissions and adapt to extreme weather. If…
Meet the Extreme Tech Challenge 2022 Global Finals category finalists and special award winners
Extreme Tech Challenge (XTC), the world’s largest startup competition focused on purpose-driven innovation, and sponsor of TechCrunch Sessions: Climate, has chosen 10 category finalists and three Special Award winners to…
Generation Investment Management, a sustainability-focused public and private equity firm co-founded by Al Gore, is upping its bet on growth-stage companies via a new $1.7 billion fund. With $36 billion…
Microsoft joins Salesforce, Google and IBM in offering sustainability tracking products
As environmental issues take center stage with increasingly severe weather incidents, wildfires, droughts and floods across the globe, companies that generate pollution up and down the supply chain are looking…
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IBM’s CEO wants to chart quantum-fueled, AI-powered path to the future
When Arvind Krishna took over as CEO at IBM in April 2020, the world was immersed in the initial throes of the COVID pandemic and his company was struggling. It had spent the better part of a decade reporting declining revenue and it desperately needed a change in direction. Whatever IBM had been doing, it…
Google Cloud survey finds most execs support sustainability efforts, but few follow the data
A new survey by Google Cloud found that a majority of executives see sustainability as a key goal for their business. It also found that a majority are not actually…
Subspace Labs raises funding for a more scalable, sustainable blockchain
As the crypto space has grown in popularity, some of the most popular blockchains have struggled to meet user demand. New projects are aiming to tackle issues like notoriously high…
Singapore-based Reebelo raises $20M to save pre-owned devices from landfills
Based in Singapore with offices throughout Asia and Australia, Reebelo wants to make buying pre-owned tech as desirable as a brand new device. “What we have seen is that many…
Samsung gets more fine-tuna to sustainability with phones made from fishing nets
South Korean electronics giant Samsung has been banging its sustainability drum loudly over the past couple of years, with impacts that echo around its ecosystem. With slogans like “corporate citizenship”…
Twig, a London-based fintech targeting Gen Z and younger millennial consumers with an e-money account that gives them instant cash-outs on fashion and electronics they want to sell, has closed…
IBM looks to sustainability with acquisition of emissions data company Envizi
IBM announced this morning that it has acquired Australian startup Envizi to add to its package of ESG (environmental, social and governance) offerings to help measure environmental impact up and…
Orbit Fab’s on-orbit fuel shuttle will top up Astroscale’s servicing satellites
In a new partnership that should break new ground for sustainable orbital operations, “gas stations in space” startup Orbit Fab has teamed with Astroscale to provide on-orbit refueling services to…
Effa’s tiny but tip-top team tools up for a tiff with trivial toothbrushes on their own turf
Travel, conferences, hotels, they all have something in common: Everything is designed to be used once, and then discarded. Of course, it would be delightful if everyone was able to…
With $36 million Series C, Brazil’s Ambar hopes to make civil construction more efficient
Brazilian construction tech startup Ambar announced it has raised a large Series C round of R$204 million, approximately $36 million, to boost the digitization arm of its business.
Coatue, Robert Downey Jr. fund cove.tool’s design tools for sustainable building
While there is plenty of technology out there to help make a building more sustainable, the ability to incorporate features into its design can be easier said than done. Enter…
Full Harvest targets food waste by finding homes for imperfect, surplus produce
Within the past two years, Full Harvest’s impact on keeping food out of landfills grew five times, prompting the company to seek out additional capital to keep the momentum going.
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The Polestar Precept is a cypher for the EV automaker’s future
Polestar will spend the next three years executing a lofty electric vehicle launch schedule that will culminate with the Precept concept, a “Rosetta stone” of sorts that provides a physical representation of the company’s future. Polestar, the former Volvo company that spun out to become its own brand, refers to the concept as its “manifesto.”…
Fairphone hits software support longevity akin to Apple’s iPhone
Fairphone, the Dutch social enterprise dedicated to making consumer electronics (more) sustainable and ethical, including by supporting repairability so that users can hold onto their hardware for longer, has announced…
As companies increasingly move to take advantage of machine learning to run their business more efficiently, the fact is that it takes an abundance of energy to build, test and…
Sustain.Life launches to measure company carbon output, raises $7M pre-seed funding
The number of companies launching that claim to be able to help organizations measure and reduce their carbon output continues apace. There is already Normative, Plan A and any number…
As Allbirds goes public, sustainability is the mantra of the future
Allbirds started with a humble, natural wool shoe, but it is not merely an apparel company today. It has become a materials innovation company disrupting how clothes are made.
Climate accounting platform Persefoni raises $101M Series B led by Prelude and TPG
There’s nothing like an increasing level of regulations to create spaces for new startups to appear, especially in SaaS. Asset managers, banks and other financial institutions need to calculate their…
Kebony raises $34M to make sustainable softwood behave like hardwood, using food waste
It’s fairly simply: Softwood grows a lot faster — in “sustainable” forests — than hardwood. The latter is often found in bio-diverse old-growth forests like, um, the Amazon. So if…
Wavemaker Impact launches to help entrepreneurs build climate tech startups
Wavemaker Partners doesn’t just want to invest in climate tech and sustainability startups. It also wants to help build them. Today, the Singapore-based firm announced the launch of Wavemaker Impact,…
Fifty Years, a deep tech investor, has raised $90 million from tens of ‘unicorn’ founders
Fifty Years, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based outfit with a portfolio that’s already rife with mostly deep tech companies — many with a good story to tell about how they can…
Portuguese VC Faber to launch Faber Blue, a €30M fund for ocean sustainability
Portuguese VC Faber is launching a new fund, Faber Blue Pioneers I, to invest in early-stage startups — primarily from Portugal and Southern Europe — developing innovative “deep tech solutions”…
Shipping platform Ankeri, which also calculates carbon emissions, closes €2M round
Over 90% of global shipped goods are transported by some 50,000 marine transport vessels. Even though shipping by sea is reasonably environmentally friendly, marine transportation still represents 3% of total…
Agreena, a regenerative farming carbon market, raises $4.7M seed from Giant Ventures
Farming accounts for 24% of Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions, and this is largely due to the intensive, “industrial” farming methods employed in the last few decades, together with the rise…
Atlantic Labs spins-out FoodLabs, a €100M food tech fund addressing climate and health
In the latest sign that the tech industry is pivoting toward climate and sustainability, Atlantic Food Labs — an offshoot of the Berlin fund Atlantic Labs headed by long-time tech…
Five Seasons Ventures pulls in €180M fund to tackle human health and climate via food tech
Food tech is booming in Europe and is growing exponentially. In 2020, €3 billion went into European food tech companies (State of European Tech Report, March 2021), and the pandemic…
