GreenTech

“That doesn’t look safe.” The statement would follow me for days. Every time I mentioned I was test driving Arcimoto’s Fun Utility Vehicle — an open air, all-electric three-wheeler — a friend or co-worker would pipe up to state, what to them, seemed like the obvious. After all, most cars have four wheels, not three.

Canadian vertical farming startup Adapt AgTech is partnering with Reef Technology to bring its mushroom-growing shipping containers to major cities across the United States, starting with Austin. Reef transforms urban real estate like parking lots into mobility and logistical hubs and currently operates over 8,000 locations across hundreds of cities. The partnership will help Adapt

After sparking California’s second-largest wildfire ever, and dozens more in recent years, it’s no secret that Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) — one of the nation’s largest utilities — is interested in alternatives to aboveground transmission lines. One option touted by PG&E  is to bury thousands of miles of power lines in “high fire-threat areas.”

Highlighting the plastic industry’s infamous track record on recycling, London-based Recycleye says it raised $17 million in new funding led by “deep tech” investor DCVC. The startup claims its recycling-picking robots can identify materials “at an unrivaled 60 frames per second” and sort them more accurately than humans can. Ultimately, the startup says its tech

TL;DR: Weave sustainability into the product design as early as you can Haje Jan Kamps 14 hours Nobody starts a hardware company with the express goal of destroying as much of the planet as they possibly can. Walking around the startup hall at CES, however, I noticed that — with a few notable exceptions —

Rebellyous, a startup that’s striving to build “a better chicken,” has raised at least $20 million in fresh funding, TechCrunch has learned. Based in Seattle, the venture-backed company calls its production tech the “most advanced plant-based meat manufacturing system on the planet.” Rebellyous aims to raise as much as $30.7 million in total, according to

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week Natasha Mascarenhas and Becca Szkutak took to their mics to sing a duet about this week’s startup news. Just kidding! But we did highlight some fun companies raising capital and talked

SunFi, the Nigerian clean tech startup that connects people and businesses who want solar energy access to payment plans that match their needs, has raised $2.325 million in seed funding. The self-described energy financial tech platform received backing from lead investors Nairobi-based Factor[e] and SCM Capital Asset Management and participating investors such as Voltron Capital,

Buy an electric car. Invest in a heat pump. Install an induction stove. They’re all measures that people can take to reduce their daily carbon emissions, and they’re all pretty significant cash outlays. Over the next three decades, as the world lurches toward net zero emissions, expenditures like these will be unavoidable. For many people,

Risilience, a SaaS-based analytics platform that helps companies assess their climate risk and plan their transition toward net-zero carbon emissions, has raised $26 million in a Series B round of funding. Spun out of the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Risk Studies (CCRS) back in 2021, Risilience says it has already amassed a number of high-profile

Battery startup Our Next Energy announced this morning that it closed a massive $300 million Series B in an effort to get its $1.6 billion gigafactory up and running. The new round values the company at $1.2 billion post-money, marking a stunning rise for the two-and-a-half-year-old company, which closed a $25 million Series A in

Countries worldwide have pledged to reduce their energy usage and reach net-zero energy targets by 2050. To get there, they will need to find clever ways to decarbonize especially dirty businesses, including the buildings sector. The push to clean up the built environment has spawned a lot of policy, as well as overlapping acronyms, including

Dutch social enterprise Fairphone, which makes modular and — the claim is — more sustainable and ethical consumer electronics, has nabbed a chunk of funding to continue scaling a circular-economy-aligned smartphone business. The €49 million (~$53 million) “growth capital” investment — from an international consortium of impact investors, led by new shareholders Invest-NL, the ABN

Toyota’s president, Akio Toyoda, surprised the automotive world this week by announcing he would resign his position and hand the reins over to Koji Sato, who currently helms the company’s Lexus and Gazoo Racing divisions. But Toyoda isn’t going far. The 66-year-old isn’t retiring outright, but instead retiring to the boardroom, where he’ll take over

Brendan Wallace’s ambition is beginning to seem almost limitless. The L.A.-based venture firm that Wallace and cofounder Brad Greiwe launched less than seven years ago already has $3.2 billion in assets under management. But that firm, Fifth Wall, which argues there are massive financial returns at the intersection of real estate and tech, isn’t worried

Here comes the hockey stick. After years of bumbling along, investment in the energy transition appears to be taking off. Businesses, financial institutions, governments and end users around the world sunk $1.11 trillion into low-carbon technologies, according to a new report from BloombergNEF. It was just over 30% more than 2021 and the second year

Smart home energy startup Tado has raised €43 million ($46.9 million) in a round of funding led by Trill Impact Ventures, as the company pursues plans to become profitable in 2023. The raise comes a year after the German company announced plans to go public (“deSPAC”) via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), plans that

What is automation good for? Harvesting more broccoli than human laborers can, according to Upp, a Shropshire, U.K.-based agtech startup that’s using computer vision AI plus farm-sized proprietary machinery to expand crop yields. Its pitch is not only that its specialist, AI-driven harvester will make it more efficient to pick a familiar crop but also

The growth keeps coming for Tesla’s energy storage business. On Wednesday, the automaker said its home and utility-scale battery deployments reached 6.5 gigawatt hours (GWh) during its fiscal 2022, calling it “by far the highest level of deployments we have achieved.” That’s up from about 4 GWh in 2021. For context, the average American home

Chances are you used a toilet at some point today, and you didn’t think much of it. But if you used a port-a-potty, you probably did think about it. Maybe a lot. And it probably wasn’t pleasant. “No one likes the port-a-potty,” said Brophy Tyree, co-founder and CEO of Wasted. “It’s embedded into a really

Karthee Madasamy Contributor Karthee Madasamy is the managing partner at MFV Partners, a deep tech-focused venture firm. Like nearly every other sector, deep tech faced significant headwinds in 2022. As interest rates skyrocketed, deep tech deals, which inherently take more capital than other kinds of software businesses, became less attractive to many VCs and their

Welcome back, climate tech readers! Like last week, we’ve got a full slate once more, from food waste to wastewater and more. Let’s dive in. Image Credits: Mill Industries After selling Nest to Google for $3.2 billion, Matt Rogers is no stranger to scaling fast. But unlike last time, Rogers isn’t interested in selling so

Though investment in food technology has slowed in line with the rest of the venture capital world, the industry recently achieved some milestones that suggest the sector and the government are moving into alignment. In fact, some investors feel that 2023 will be the year when alternative seafood companies and products make notable strides. More

In an industry obsessed with making everything huge (at least here in the U.S.), you may not’ve expected GM to show interest in an electric baby pickup, but here we are. GM is considering a pickup design that’s “smaller than the Ford Maverick and the Hyundai Santa Cruz,” with a “low roofline” and a 4

Britishvolt, a battery manufacturer startup, announced Tuesday that it was declaring bankruptcy, dealing a punishing blow to the United Kingdom’s automotive sector. The company had been championed by U.K. leaders, who had hoped it would provide a laundry list of benefits: good paying jobs, advanced manufacturing know-how and homegrown battery packs to support the domestic

The clock is ticking for Uber to electrify its fleet, and the rideshare company wants automakers to help by designing cheaper electric vehicles for its drivers. Lawmakers are setting deadlines for rideshare companies to ditch fossil fuels (California‘s Air Resources Board among them), and Uber has its own electrification deadlines, which range from 2025 to

Understanding the biodiversity of forests is crucial to their conservation or restoration. Collecting “external DNA” left behind by animals is a good way to find out what lives there without having to spot them or even be there at the same time — and this drone from Swiss researchers makes taking samples from tree limbs

PureTerra, a venture firm that aims to fund “disruptive water technologies,” is pumping millions into Membrion so the Seattle startup can mass-produce its wastewater treatment tech. Membrion claims its ceramic membranes can filter out problematic heavy metals (not the genre, but toxic stuff like lead, arsenic and lithium) for around a twelfth of the cost of

The starry-eyed founder story usually goes something like this: Start an earthbound company, make lots of money, launch a rocket company to go to Mars. If that’s the stereotypical narrative, then Chris Graves has it all backward. Graves started with the Red Planet, helping to develop a key instrument for NASA’s Perseverance rover that’s currently

“This is the next 20 years of my life. This is not like, build the company in four or five years and sell to Google. This is a big, long journey.” Matt Rogers, who co-founded Nest with Tony Fadell back in 2010, was talking about his new startup, and he thinks it’ll be big. He’s