Luz | Climate Tech Podcast

In this episode, you are going to learn about a company building a marketplace to help building owners get to net zero by helping them measure their energy footprint, and fund certified energy efficiency projects through a marketplace.

WattCarbon is a San Francisco based company that focuses on building a clean energy platform that connects organization to carbon free distributed energy resources. On their marketplace, you can access a wide range of procurement options, including renewable energy demand response and electrification projects.

As a building owner or really as an organization, you can fund those projects and they can contribute to your net zero strategy. In a way, it's like planting a tree, but instead of planting a tree, you're actually funding the deployment of a heat pump or of a battery that can help provide the grid with clean energy at the time that is actually needed.

WattCarbon recently raised $4.5M in Seed funding, in a round led by True Ventures, with participation from Village Global, Jetstream, Not Boring Capital, Keiki Capital, Rick Stratton, Chris Vargas, Greensoil PropTech Ventures, Nexus Labs, and Andrew Karsh.

WattCarbon is going after the building sector emissions, which represent up to 40% of total emissions, when you look at the consumption of buildings and CO2 emission associated with them. So this is a very exciting discussion.

We go deep into the architecture of these markets with McGee, who has multiple climate tech startup experiences under his belt.

If you enjoy this episode, please share it with your friends and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify podcasts.

In this episode, you are going to learn about a company applying Artificial Intelligence to some of the most polluting industries in the planet, cement, stell and glass manufacturing. Thanks to AI, they help reduce fuel consumption and Co2 emissions of cement manufacturers.

My guest today is Sherif Elsayed-Ali. Sherif is a civil engineer by background and was previously working for a large AI company where he set up an AI for climate practice focusing on monitoring climate signals from space.

Energy-intensive industries, such as cement, steel and glass, account for over 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions and are one of the hardest sectors of the economy to decarbonize. The current plan for these industries relies heavily on Carbon Capture and Storage, a technology that will take decades to scale and increases the cost of these fundamental materials by as much as 60%. Carbon Re’s platform, in contrast, is already reducing emissions today, cuts the cost of production, and requires no new equipment.

CarbonRe recently raised a £4.2M seed round from Planet A Ventures, Clean Growth Fund, UCL Technology Fund and Cambridge Enterprise.

I hope you enjoy my discussion with Sherif Elsayed-Ali.

In this episode, you are going to learn about a company reinventing our roofs, and turning them into a source of energy by installing solar-powered roofs and innovative façades that generate electricity without having to install traditional photovoltaic modules.

My guest today is Lech Kaniuk. Lech is a repeat entrepreneur who first founded OnlinePizza in Poland. This became part of Delivery Hero who IPO’ed in 2017.

After the IPO, Lech was on a trip to the Canary Islands with his brother and they saw the potential for turning roofs into a source of energy and providing homeowners with a clean energy source directly embedded in their house - instead of mounting unattractive looking solar panels on top of the tiles.

Their solution has been successful in places you might not immediately connect with sunlight - Sweden, Norway, Germany and Poland. It’s been proven to provide enough power for people to support their entire energy consumption, and even generate a surplus.

The company went from 10 employees in early 2020 to 130 employees at the end of 2022 and just raised €15M in a new round of funding. By the way, last time I checked, they’re looking for a COO to strengthen the top management team as they expand to new markets.

Listen to this episode to figure out how the team at Sunroof is rewriting the rules of an industry that has not been reinvented for a long time. And stay until the end to hear the learnings Lech draws from this experience and the previous one in online delivery startups, which can help you as a founder, investor or business operator in the Climate Tech space.

If you enjoy this podcast, please follow us and leave a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, and share the episode with your friends and colleagues. It would massively help!

I hope you enjoy my discussion with Lech Kaniuk.

My guest today is Mark De Santis.

Nicolas is the CEO of Bloomfield Robotics. Bloomfield is a company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that develops a technology enabling specialty crop growers - like wine - to monitor the health of their plants on a plant by plant basis - something that is not possible when monitoring with drones. Building a digital image of the crops enables growers to make more precise decisions when it comes to irrigation, fertilizer application, and other plant management decisions.

In this episode, we're going to talk about how precision technology is changing agriculture, how artificial intelligence plays a key role in enabling farmers to improve the efficiency of how they use resources, and the partnerships Bloomfield has in place to accelerate their growth.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Mark De Santis.

My guest today is Nicolas Höning.

Nicolas is the co-founder of Seita. Seita is a company based in the Netherlands, Seita aims to help companies bring more energy flexibility to their energy systems by developing an open source software that takes data feeds from weather patterns, from energy prices, and from energy consuming assets to produce a schedule saying what is best to consume electricity in the following day to minimize your CO2 footprints and your costs.

In this episode, we're going to talk about the data infrastructure in which Seita are bringing their solutions and the challenges that cities are encountering and addressing to roll out their solutions, as well as the ecosystem of partners that they team up with to bring their solution to market. It's a fascinating discussion at a very detailed level on a space that is critical to make our energy systems more flexible and reduce their CO2 consumption and therefore facilitate the energy transition.

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Nicolas Höning.

My guest today is Beeri Amiel. Beeri is the co-founder and CEO of Continue AI. Set up between New York and Tel Aviv, Continue AI is provider of a sustainability intelligence platform that enables Fortune 500 organisations to build roadmaps and provide recommended actions to empower them to make data-driven decisions to achieve their goals.

The use of ESG frameworks has rapidly gained momentum helping companies manage sustainability issues. However, there is too much data to process, and companies lack the technology to make sense of internal and external data, and make informed decisions. There is also a gap in knowledge and corporations end up relying on consultants who provide advice on how to change effectively, in a way that is not very scalable.

Continue AI aims to change this by analyzing millions of public data points, to deliver concrete insights that provide real action plans that leaders can implement across their organizations to achieve sustainability goals.

We dive into this today. We’ll also talk about what sustainability and ESG mean, and get Beeri’s first-hand experience on whether ESG frameworks can be effective at bringing the change that’s needed, to fix our relationship with the planet.

Continue AI recently raised $5.7M in Seed funding. The round was led by Grove Ventures and Maple Capital, with participation from Ride Ventures, Liquid2, and Kindergarten Ventures.

With multiple previous experiences at hypergrowth startups, Beeri and his co-founders Alon and Yonatan started Makersite in 2021.

I hope you enjoy my discussion with Beeri Amiel.

My guest today is Martin Baart. Martin is the CEO and co-founder of Ecoligo. Ecoligo is a company based out of Berlin, Germany that delivers solar energy solutions to companies in emerging markets, financed by retails investors in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Their solution helps accelerate solar adoption in countries such as Kenya, Nigeria, Chile or the Philippines. They have deployed about €30M in solar projects to date, raising capital from more than 4,000 retails investors, and saving more than 1 million tons of Co2 by replacing traditional energy sources.

We meet with Martin to talk about the drivers of solar adoption by companies in emerging countries, what leads people like you and I to fund solar projects, and how Ecoligo makes money in all of this.

An electrical engineer by training with a passion for tackling climate change, Martin started Ecoligo seven years ago.

The company recently raised a $10M Series A round.

I hope you enjoy my discussion with Martin.

My guest today is Peter Bardenfleth-Hansen. 

Peter is the CEO of Zaptec. Zaptec is a company based out of Stavanger, Norway that build electric vehicles charging systems. As electric cars become more and more widely adopted, the infrastructure to support charging of these cars and to manage the demands this places on the electricity will have to ramp up significantly compared to where it is today.

We dive into this today. We’ll also talk about the different types of EV chargers, the key decision-makers in adopting one EV charging system instead of another, and the learnings Peter took from Tesla to help shape Zaptec into one of the leading companies in this space in Norway, and soon in other European countries.

Zaptec as a company was founded in 2012 and went public in 2020.

With 10 years of experience in e-mobility, first at Tesla and more recently as board memeber or advisor to multiple e-mobility companies in the Nordics, Peter brings unique insights to this fast-changing ecosystem so critical to the energy transition.

I hope you enjoy my discussion with Peter.

What would you guess if I asked you what percentage of all textiles gets recycled and fed back into making new clothes, today? If you guessed 1%, you are right. I think that is a shockingly low number.

Today we showcase a company working on solving this problem.

My guest today is Erik Koep. Erik is the CEO of Worn Again Technologies. Based in Nottingham in the United Kingdom, Worn Again Technologies has developed a technology that recaptures raw materials from non-reusable products such as textiles and polyester bottles and packaging, to produce dual PET and cellulose outputs, thereby putting sustainable resources back into production supply chains.

We dive into this today. We’ll also talk about the size of the textile recycling problem (or rather lack of) and the different stakeholders in this little known but important value chain.

Worn Again recently raised $30M in funding to scale from R&D to operations and build their first demo plant in Switzerland.

Why Switzerland, you ask? Well, listen to find out.

A founder and entrepreneur with a unique ability to blend technology and industrial insights into successful commercial ventures, Erik brings a mix of academic and real-world experience with a track record of leading teams through research phases to high-volume manufacturing.

I hope you enjoy my discussion with Erik Koep.

My guest today is Katharina Unger. 

Katharina is the Founder and CEO of Livin Farms. A Vienna, Austria-based developer of technologies for alternative insect protein production, Livin Farms has developed an offering that enables food producers to convert the waste from their food production process into insect-based proteins, that can then be fed to animals, reducing the footprint of animal feed by 90%.

Livin Farms recently raised a €6M Series A from angel investor Peter Luerssen.

A industrial designer by background, raised in a family of farmers, Katharina started Livin Farms ten years ago, motivated by the desire to have an impact on the agricultural footprint on the world. That is the focus of our discussion.

In this episode, you will learn about:

• how much impact animal feed has on the overall footprint from agriculture on our planet
• how larva can radically reduce the footprint from animal feed, while reducing waste from other food production processes
• what is technologically complex about using insects to turn waste into a valuable product, and how Livin Farms is tackling the problem today

I hope you enjoy my discussion with Katharina Unger.

My guest today is Scott Graybeal. Scott is the CEO of Caelux. A Pasadena, California-based developer of perovskite-based solar technology, Caelux has developed a technology that improves the performance of any solar module by more than 30% , by applying to them an additional layer of nano-materials. This additional layer absorbs sunlight better and enables manufacturers to make solar panels that convert more sunlight into electricity. This ultimately drives down the cost per unit of energy produced.

Caelux recently completed a $12M Series A from Reliance New Energy Limited, the climate tech focused subsidiary of Reliance Industries, one of the largest companies in India by revenue and market capitalisation.

A veteran executive with more than two decades of experience in the solar industry, Scott joined Caelux to drive scale and commercialisation of Caelux’s promising, perovskite-based technology. That is the focus of our discussion.

In this episode, you will learn about:

• what perovskites are and how they are fundamental to help reach solar adoption goals
• what are the outstanding challenges in this space and how Caelux is addressing them today
• why they’re partnering with Reliance New Energy to accelerate their speed to market

I hope you enjoy my discussion with Scott Graybeal.

My guest today is Tim Hysell. Tim is the CEO and co-founder of ZincFive. A Tualatin, Oregon-based manufacturer of nickel-zinc batteries, ZincFive offers powerful battery solutions for mission-critical applications that need to be on all the time - such as data centers. ZincFive offers an alternative to other battery technologies such as a lead acid or lithium that is safer, more sustainable and more reliable.

ZincFive recently completed a $75M Series D from OGCI Investments.

A repeat entrepreneur with more than three decades of experience, Tim started ZincFive after perceiving the lack of a good solution in the fast discharge battery space for critical applications. That is the focus of our discussion.

In this episode, you will learn about:

• the relative merits and environmental footprint of the different battery technologies and
• the latest innovation in this space so critical to support our energy transition
• what is driving the very fast adoption of new battery technologies in the data center industry

I hope you enjoy my discussion with Tim Hysell.

My guest today is Anders Korsgaard. 

Anders is the CEO and co-founder of Blue World Technologies. A Denmark-based manufacturing startup, Blue World is a developer and manufacturer of methanol fuel cells components and systems. Fuel cells enable the conversion of liquid fuel, such as methanol, into electricity. As such, they play a critical role in the shift away from carbon emitting combustion engines and diesel generators. They are particularly promising candidates in sectors such as on-site industrial power generation, maritime shipping, and heavy-duty transportation. Blue World recently announced a €37M Series B investment where Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures entered as a new investor, alongside the Danish Sovereign Investment Fund and Deutz AG, a large German combustion engine manufacturer.

A repeat founder, Anders and his co-founders started Blue World after another successful startup in the fuel cell space. That is the focus of our discussion.

In this episode, you will learn about:

• what green fuels exist today and compared the relative merits of e-methanol compared to ammonia and hydrogen
• what the green premium is, and why it is set to significantly come down by 2030
• what fuel cells are, and the role they can play in drastically improving the efficiency of running of green fuels
• which sectors are set to benefit the most from these innovations and get some insights into the path those sectors will take to make their green transition
• the industrial and commercial challenges and opportunities of pushing this new technology to market

I hope you enjoy my discussion with Anders Korsgaard.

My guest today is Philip Winter. Philip is the co-founder and CMO of Nebia. 

A San Francisco-based hardware startup, Nebia is reinventing the way people shower, based on a better experience, beautiful design, and unprecedented water savings. Nebia is backed by some of Silicon Valley’s leading investors, including Y-Combinator and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple.

Passionate about economic development and entrepreneurship, Philip stumbled upon the idea of Nebia and met his co-founder Carlos whilst working at Endeavor in Mexico City, and became an entrepreneur by calling. That is the focus of our discussion.

In this episode, you will learn about:

• how much our bathroom activities contribute to overall water consumption
• the technology enabling drastic efficiency and experience improvement in the space
• the opportunities, challenges and innovations in building hardware startups
• some of the boldest angel investor product demo stories in the Silicon Valley

I hope you enjoy my discussion with Philip Winter.