GreenTech

All cars suffer when the mercury drops, but electric vehicles suffer more than most as heaters draw more power and batteries charge more slowly as the liquid electrolyte inside thickens. Drivers in Chicago found this out the hard way last January after many Teslas failed to charge during a deep freeze. One startup, South 8

Where Aytac Yilmaz lives in the Netherlands, the sun might not appear for days on end, which can really crimp the output of the country’s solar panels. Wind turbines might make up some of the shortfall, but what if the wind disappears at the same time? Enter long-duration energy storage, or massive batteries tailored to

Young geothermal energy wells can be like budding prodigies, each brimming with potential to outshine their peers. But like people, most decline with age. In California, for example, the amount of electricity generated by geothermal power plants declined by 15% between 2001 and 2018, partly because existing wells degraded. “The history of geothermal has been

It started with a drawing on a napkin. Now AirLoom Energy is raising $12.7 million in fresh funding, TechCrunch has learned. The funding came from 21 investors, according to a regulatory filing that does not list the names of the backers. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Wyoming-based startup

While many climate investors focus their efforts on breakthrough, deep-tech solutions, Patrick Sheehan at ETF Partners has other ideas. “I’ve actually got nothing against carbon capture and storage, apart from the fact it’s probably going to be commercialized too late,” he told TechCrunch. Instead, Sheehan and his colleagues are diving into more software-centric companies that

Carbon credits (and the trading thereof) is big business, but it can be needlessly complicated to get those resolved. Goodcarbon just raised a €5.25 million (around $5.5 million) round to put a dent in that market. Let’s take a look at the deck the company used to bring home that sack of cash. We’re looking

Spencer Gore has a battery startup. But he doesn’t want his batteries to end up in electric vehicles, at least not yet.  “There are a lot of interesting downmarket segments of automotive that are underserved today that are faster to get into than, say, the traction battery in EVs,” he told TechCrunch. Take the traditional

Wind is the largest source of renewable energy in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but wind farms come with an environmental cost as wind turbines can wreak havoc on bird populations. Meet Spoor, the startup using AI to help wind farms mitigate that risk. Spoor is a software that uses machine

The brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 took businesses that depended on oil and gas energy by surprise. Suddenly, renewable energy became crucial to survival. But how best to buy it? That was the germination of the idea behind trawa, a Berlin-based renewable energy supplier that recently raised €10 million in a seed

Heating and air conditioning is usually pretty boring stuff, performed by appliance-like boxes with uninspired designs, from sheet metal outdoor units to cheap plastic indoor mini-splits. Not Quilt. The heat pump startup unveiled its first products on Wednesday, and they sport the sort of sleek and intuitive designs you’d expect from veterans of Apple, Nest,

Nicholas Johnson founded a company because he lost a bet. Johnson was having dinner with some investors in Lyt, a road congestion management company he had co-founded. As the dinner conversation meandered, it settled on EV charging and how best to bring it to multi-family housing. Apartment dwellers who own EVs are often left with

Blisce has become the latest VC firm to launch a fund dedicated to climate tech, for which it plans to raise as much as €150 million (about $162 million). The firm is hiring investor Pierre-Edouard Berion to lead the fund, and Lucie Basch, the co-founder of Too Good To Go, is going to support the

Fast consumption and waste generation run rampant in all industries, but it’s particularly true around baby equipment. Tiny humans get big fast, and parents might be nervous to buy used items (“Is that high chair really sanitized?”) and are often too stressed out to think about what to do with the equipment the little tyke

At the start of the year, Tesla’s Supercharger team was tasked with the impossible. “We were on an exponential path,” a former team member told TechCrunch, adding that the new targets were “super-duper crazy.” Despite the bottlenecks that such expectations can create, “every time they upped the metric, we met it.” Then, one day in

Platform is a word that gets tossed around a lot in technology circles, so much so that it’s often misused. But here’s the basic business school definition: A platform is a company or business model that creates more value for participants than it captures for itself. Consider that some of the most successful companies in

Productive Use of Renewable Energy (PURE) technologies, especially those in the solar irrigation and cold chain segment, saw increased investor interest last year, despite a 43% funding slump recorded in the global off-grid solar sector. The global association for the off-grid solar energy industry, GOGLA, says PURE technologies raised $65 million in 2023, double the

Jonathan Strimling faced a dilemma. His company had spent nine years working on chemical processes that could turn old cardboard boxes into high-quality building insulation. The good news was the team had finally cracked it: CleanFiber’s technology pumped out insulation — really good insulation. It had fewer contaminants and produced less dust than other cellulose

S2G Ventures is graduating today, so to speak. The climate tech investment firm has been living under Builders Vision, an umbrella organization for Walmart heir Lukas Walton’s philanthropic and investment activities, for the past three years. Walton was S2G’s sole limited partner. Now the organization is bringing others on board. Walton started S2G in 2014

Plenty of founders have a difficult decision to make early in their journey: where to set up shop. For deep tech founders, the decision is complicated by the fact that they typically need more from their space. Some might need lab benches, others might require massive amounts of electricity, and still others might need room

Climate tech startups raised $8.1 billion in the first quarter, near record amounts of money that suggest 2023’s quiet close might have been more of a blip than the sign of a protracted downturn. The figure, contained in a new report from PitchBook, shows that climate tech hasn’t succumbed to the same slowdown that has

Thomas Li was working at Point72, the hedge fund founded by notorious investor Steve Cohen, when he realized that the financial industry relies heavily on manual data entry processes that could be prone to errors. “As a buy-side analyst, I felt the pain of manually sourcing and entering data to build and update financial models,”

If you’re an electricity nerd, chances are you’ve already spent quite a few hours looking at Electricity Maps and its mesmerizing export flow animations. This open-source data visualization project has been around since 2016. But companies like Google and Samsung are increasingly relying on this rich data set to hit their sustainability goals and empower

Usually, when something starts to rot, it gets pitched in the trash. But Joanne Rodriguez wants to turn the concept of rot on its head by growing fungus on trash to turn it into something better. “We train mushrooms to eat trash and create renewable, bio-based raw materials,” she told TechCrunch. Rodriguez is the founder

Lipids are fatty, waxy or oily compounds that, for instance, typically come in the form of fats and oils. As a result they are heavily used in the production of beauty products, as well as in fashion, and food industries. Right now, most lipids come from environmentally problematic petrochemicals. But new processes mean it’s possible

Last year, Americans bought more heat pumps than gas furnaces, a striking split that’s likely to widen in the coming years as consumer awareness and climate regulations foster their uptake. Heat pumps are already widely used to cool homes across the Southeast, and they’re making inroads in the Northeast and Midwest, where consumers are warming

Historically, the Black community in the U.S. has been disproportionately affected by the effects of climate change. Relegated for decades to a vulnerable economic and social class, the community is nearly always at risk of facing the brunt of natural disasters, no matter where they occur. This issue has inspired many Black founders and investors

The real estate industry is a bit of a greenhouse gas powerhouse, responsible for 40% of all global emissions. A quarter of that comes from building materials, and Tangible has had enough. The company is building a tool for finding, managing and reporting on lower-carbon, more sustainable, building materials, and just closed a $3 million seed

The venture community has realized several things in recent years: Climate change isn’t going away, and there is a huge opportunity to invest in companies that promise to define entire segments of the future economy. With a few hiccups along the way, venture dollars have begun to flow with increasing volume and regularity to climate

Sweden-based VC fund Pale Blue Dot bounced onto the scene in 2020 with a €53 million fund to help climate-focused startups. This fund grew again by €34 million in April 2021, and after deploying investments into 28 climate-forward companies, the investor this week announced it has officially closed its second fund. This one is valued

Dutch e-bike maker VanMoof is refreshing its entry level lineup with a pair of new bikes available in some very springy colors. The X4 and S4, out this month, retain the frame and philosophy of VanMoof’s previous X3 and S3 e-bikes while trimming some of the complexities that made those models notably high-tech but less