Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we'll distill a company making a feed additive that cuts cow methane and increases milk yield at the same time, so farmers actually want to use it: Triple Bio 🇳🇱

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What Problem Does Triple Bio Tackle❓

Cattle burp out a lot of methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases on the planet.

1. Huge Volume: Methane from livestock digestion is responsible for over 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and methane traps roughly 80x more heat than CO₂ over a 20-year window. There are ~1.5 billion cattle globally and growing.

2. Wasted Hydrogen: Microbes in the rumen break down plant material into hydrogen and CO₂. A second set of microbes, methanogens, then convert those into methane that gets belched out. All that hydrogen is energy the cow never gets to turn into milk or muscle.

3. Bovaer's Ceiling: Bovaer (the leading methane inhibitor) cuts emissions by 30% in dairy cows and 45% in beef cattle, and is now fed to 500,000+ cows worldwide. But it costs the farmer extra without lifting productivity, so adoption depends on dairy processors or carbon markets paying a sustainability premium.

4. Farmer Math: Farmers are more likely to adopt products that directly impact the bottom line through increased productivity than ones that only generate sustainability premiums or carbon credits.

5. Seaweed Route Bottlenecks: Asparagopsis-based additives (algae) deliver bigger methane cuts on paper, but degrade quickly in the rumen and raise safety and residue questions at higher doses, slowing regulatory approval and limiting which feeding regimens can use it.

Product / Service 📦

Triple Bio is building RumeNRG, a feed additive that nudges the cow's gut chemistry so less energy escapes as methane and more goes into milk. It's pretty awesome:

Same Trick, Two Uses: RumeNRG is a family of tiny fat-based capsules ("lipids") that mimic the outer shell of methanogens, the gut microbes that produce methane. Triple Bio uses this in two ways.

RumeNRG-PL: Wraps existing methane-cutting drugs (like bromoform) inside lipid shells so they survive longer in the cow's stomach. Result: the same methane cut with 500x less drug. Cheaper, safer, easier to dose.

RumeNRG-Mx1: A standalone version that soaks up the hydrogen methanogens would otherwise turn into methane, and redirects that energy to the good bacteria that help the cow produce more milk. In lab tests it boosted nutrient output by 28%, which models suggest means 5-10% more milk on the same feed.

Plugs Into Existing Feed: Built to survive the heat, pressure, and acidity of normal feed mill production, so it goes into standard feed pellets without farmers or mills changing anything.

Boring Supply Chain: The lipids already exist at industrial scale, used in vitamins and cosmetics. The innovation is in how they're formulated, not in inventing new raw materials. Less scale-up risk.

The Endgame: Combine both effects into one product that cuts methane by up to 50% and lifts milk yield at the same time, with no need for added drugs.

Market 🌐

The market for feed additives designed specifically to cut enteric methane is forecast to grow at a 16.92% CAGR, reaching $230 million by 2030.

The deeper opportunity is productivity. Any additive that lifts feed efficiency by even a few percentage points compounds into a category much bigger than the methane premium alone. That's the wedge: sell the milk uplift, get the methane cut as a bonus.

Other Key Players

Bovaer 🇳🇱: A synthetic feed additive that blocks the enzyme cows use to make methane. Cuts emissions 30% in dairy and 45% in beef, used in 500,000+ cows across 25+ countries. The market leader.

CH4 Global 🇦🇺: Grows a red seaweed (Asparagopsis) in saltwater ponds and turns it into Methane Tamer, a feed supplement that cuts cattle methane by up to 90%.

Rumin8 🇦🇺: Recreates the active compound in Asparagopsis seaweed in the lab instead of farming it, then delivers it as a feed or water additive. Backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy.

Triple Bio is the only player pairing methane reduction with a productivity gain the farmer keeps on the milk bill.

Founding Story 🦄

Triple Bio was co-founded in 2025 by Tracy Nevitt (CSO), Bart Tas (CTO) and Peter Rowe (CEO), with Marble, a Paris-based climate tech venture studio.

Nevitt and Tas, a microbiologist and an animal scientist, had already spent years working on enteric methane at a previous startup and knew the field's biggest gap: methane cuts don't pay farmers back.

Rowe, who founded gas fermentation startup Deep Branch, brought the platform-thinking and scale-up playbook. They later added Tom Stevens (CCO), a 14-year veteran of a dairy giant who knows how to sell into milk supply chains.

The team is split between the UK and Netherlands. They've raised €1.5 million, filed their core patent, and validated the science in vitro. Just emerged from stealth in May 2026, and are moving into their first live-animal trials later this year ahead of a larger funding round in 2027.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. 500x dose reduction of a known methane inhibitor when encapsulated in RumeNRG-PL.

2. 28% jump in volatile fatty acids in vitro, modeled to translate into 5-10% more milk per cow on the same feed ration.

3. Target: 50% methane reduction, zero extra cost to the farmer.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your business: Automation and AI implementation (Claude expertise) for companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we'll distill a company growing spider silk, one of nature's most extraordinary materials (stronger than steel, lighter than carbon fiber), from a field of alfalfa: Spidey Tek 🇺🇸

Want to sponsor Climate Tech Distillery? Here’s all the info.

What Problem Does Spidey Tek Tackle❓

The climate transition isn't only about energy. Chemicals and materials emit ~935 million tonnes of CO₂ annually, one of the hardest sectors to clean up.

1. Petroleum materials everywhere: Adhesives, composites, textiles, automotive and aerospace parts all depend on petroleum-derived inputs. Sustainable alternatives usually fail on at least one of these: performance, cost, or scale.

2. Spiders can't scale: Spider silk is stronger than steel by weight, tougher than Kevlar and fully biodegradable. But spiders are territorial and cannibalistic, you can't farm them at industrial scale.

3. Fermentation is expensive: The standard workaround is growing silk proteins in bioreactors using engineered bacteria or yeast. It works in small batches. But bioreactors are capital-heavy, energy-intensive, and hard to scale affordably.

4. Switching costs kill adoption: Even when buyers want sustainable materials, they can't adopt alternatives that require retooling factories. Industries like automotive, aerospace and adhesives need a drop-in replacement. Existing bio-based options rarely qualify.

Product / Service 📦

Spidey Tek uses genetically engineered alfalfa to grow real spider silk proteins. Fields instead of fermentation tanks.

Why alfalfa: Fast-growing, nitrogen-fixing, and already farmed at scale across the western US. Modeling shows it’s the cheapest production host for spider silk proteins. They were the first to successfully insert spider silk genes into alfalfa leaves, back in 2015.

Drop-in compatible: Works with existing manufacturing lines. No retooling, no new equipment. This is exactly what kills adoption of most sustainable alternatives.

Multiple formats: Fibers, films, hydrogels, and adhesives. The same platform serves structural adhesives, aerospace composites, automotive parts, and textiles.

Real silk: Most competitors produce materials that approximate spider silk behavior using fermented bacteria. Spidey Tek produces the actual proteins.

Circular by design: After protein extraction, leftover biomass becomes hay (~$0.14/lb) and alfalfa protein feed (~$2.00/lb). The crop also sequesters CO₂.

Market 🌐

The synthetic spider silk market sits at $1B in 2025 and is projected to reach $4.2B by 2036. But the real opportunity is much bigger, any industry needing high-performance, sustainable materials is a potential customer.

Their near-term focus covers structural adhesives ($20.7B) and performance textiles ($62B). Longer term, the platform can expand into aerospace composites ($30.3B), automotive composites ($10.1B), and medical materials ($542B).

Other Key Players

Spiber 🇯🇵: Fermentation-based Brewed Protein™ fibers. $72M revenue in 2024, 500 ton commercial plant in Thailand. Strong in fashion and textiles.

AMSilk 🇩🇪: Fermentation-based, focused on medical coatings and industrial applications. Raised €25M in 2023. Partnership with Airbus for aerospace composites.

Kraig Biocraft 🇺🇸: Transgenic silkworms for military ballistic fabrics. Receives US Army funding.

All three rely on fermentation or silkworms, capital-heavy and hard to scale. Spidey Tek’s plant-based model scales by planting more fields.

Founding Story 🦄

Spidey Tek was founded in 2019 by Roberto Velozzi, Dr. Randy Lewis, and Enzo Jerez.

Lewis is the world’s foremost spider silk scientist. First to clone a spider silk protein, in 1990. Over 100 peer-reviewed publications. He knew everything about spider silk except how to make it affordable at scale.

Velozzi, born in El Salvador, spent 30 years building lightweight materials, including one of the world's first lightweight concept cars. He found Lewis at Utah State University and saw the answer. They secured an exclusive license from USU to commercialize the alfalfa-based platform. To stress-test the material early on, they hung from a rope made of spider silk off a canyon.

Jerez, Velozzi's son and COO, helped build the world's first drone made from spider silk, and later won 1st Place and the Sustainability Award at IE's Venture Day.

The company now has partnerships, agreements and LOIs signed with Nvidia, Siemens, Covestro and many others. They’re actively fundraising to accelerate commercialization and scale production.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. 10X tougher than carbon fiber, 5X stronger than steel and biodegradable.

2. Alfalfa sequesters ~0.7 tonnes of CO₂ per acre per year. Every 1000 production acres are equivalent to taking 150 cars off the road.

3. No chemicals used during the process, just water, electricity and heat.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your business: Automation and AI implementation (Claude expertise) for companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we'll distill a company that uses AI, robots, and timber to build homes faster and with significantly less carbon emissions: All3 🇬🇧

Want to sponsor Climate Tech Distillery? Here’s all the info.

What Problem Does All3 Tackle❓

Construction is the world's largest industry, and one of the most polluting.

1. Hidden carbon: Buildings and construction account for 37% of global CO₂ emissions. Embodied carbon (the CO₂ locked into materials and construction processes before a building is even occupied) represents 50% of total lifecycle emissions for new buildings.

2. Concrete everywhere, timber nowhere: Timber stores CO₂ rather than emitting it. It's renewable, structurally proven, and certified for multi-storey construction since the 1990s. But building with it at scale is expensive and complex with traditional methods. The industry defaults to concrete, which is responsible for 7–8% of global CO₂ emissions.

3. A housing crisis: The EU is short 9.6 million homes. Germany needs 320,000 new apartments per year and in 2024, only 215,900 permits were issued, the lowest since 2010. Traditional construction can't close that gap.

4. Frozen productivity: Construction labour productivity has barely moved since 1970, while manufacturing has roughly tripled. The industry spends less than 1% of revenue on R&D. A building project in 2026 looks almost identical to one from 1976.

Product / Service 📦

All3 has rebuilt the entire construction workflow into three connected layers. The magic is that none of them works well without the others.

AI-driven design: All3’s platform generates fully custom buildings optimized for a specific plot, including the constrained urban brownfield sites where housing is most needed. It runs structural engineering, compliance, and lifecycle CO₂ analysis simultaneously.

Robotic timber factories: Components are fabricated off-site using certified structural timber composites. Timber stores CO₂ in every structure and cuts embodied carbon by up to 25% versus concrete. Factories are modular and can be set up in six months at single-digit million euros CAPEX cost.

Mantis: All3’s autonomous legged robot handles installation, fastening, finishing, and inspection on-site. It carries 100kg+, reaches 4 metres, and navigates stairs and tight urban plots. Components snap into place in under a minute, no skilled carpentry needed.

Why timber. Europe grows 1 billion m³ of wood annually but only harvests 600M m³, enough surplus to build over 80M m² of floor area per year. The supply exists. The missing piece was making it affordable to build with at scale.

The result: 100% custom buildings at the cost of standardised mass production. Up to 30% lower costs, up to 50% faster delivery, and up to 25% less embodied carbon than traditional concrete construction. Making eco-friendly construction scalable for the first time.

Market 🌐

Building construction is a $6.7 trillion global industry. EU sustainability regulations, certification requirements, and tightening embodied carbon limits are pushing developers toward certified timber construction.

Germany is the first market: acute housing shortage, strong timber culture (76% of Germans associate wood with comfort), and strict sustainability mandates. The longer-term model is to deploy compact, fast-to-build factories across Europe.

Other Key Players

ICON 🇺🇸: Builds residential structures using concrete 3D printing. Strong traction in the US. Focused on low-rise buildings.

011h 🇪🇸: Engineered wood and prefab components with a digital platform. Software-first, no on-site robotics.

Mighty Buildings 🇺🇸: 3D-printed, robotically assembled homes targeting carbon neutrality by 2028. Low-rise residential in the US.

All3's the only one combining AI design, off-site robotic fabrication, and on-site autonomous assembly into one fully integrated stack, at multi-story, multi-family scale, in timber.

Founding Story 🦄

Rodion Shishkov and Slava Bocharov co-founded Samokat, which became Russia's largest rapid grocery delivery platform and sold for $1.5 billion in 2020. The playbook: total vertical integration, industrial automation, scale fast.

In 2023 they turned that same logic toward construction. Shishkov brought a background in industrial robotics and he also founded TRA Robotics, later acquired by Arrival. Bocharov brought operational scaling experience from building Samokat's infrastructure across hundreds of dark stores. Both saw a $6.7 trillion sector that had resisted the same transformation that had already hit logistics and retail.

They seeded All3 with $30M of their own capital, built a pilot factory in Belgrade (Serbia), and spent two years in stealth. The company emerged publicly in mid-2025 with around 100 people and offices in London, Berlin, Milan, and Zug.

They just raised a $25M seed round in April 2026 and their first commercial deployments are scheduled for 2026 in Germany. They will then expand into other European markets. They’ve raised $55M in total to date.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. Projects cost up to 30% less and are delivered up to 50% faster, compressing a typical three-year cycle to under one year.

2. 95% automated factories. Hybrid timber structures cut substructure costs by 21% and composite slabs reduce material consumption by 50% versus standard equivalents.

3. Their AI design platform has already processed over 100,000 sqm of residential projects.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your business: Automation and AI implementation (Claude expertise) for companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we’ll distill a company that’s turning solar panels into a source of high-purity materials for the industries of tomorrow at scale: ROSI 🇫🇷

Want to sponsor Climate Tech Distillery? Here’s all the info.

What Problem Does ROSI Tackle❓

Solar panels generate clean energy for 25–30 years. Then 90% of them go to landfill. That's the dirty secret of the energy transition.

1. Incoming Waste Wave: Global PV (photovoltaic) panel waste could total 78 million tonnes by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. The first large wave of panels from the 2000s solar boom is already reaching end of life.

2. Inefficient Recycling: Traditional shredding recovers aluminum frames and glass, the low-value stuff. Conventional methods recover only 35% of a panel's economic value. Silicon and silver, which represent the bulk of what a panel is worth, get lost in the process.

3. Broken Economics: Sending a panel to landfill costs $1–5. Recycling it costs around $18. Without a way to recover high-value materials efficiently, there's no business case for doing it right.

4. Silicon Importance: It’s a strategic raw material. Over 80% of global solar-grade silicon is produced in China. Every panel that goes to landfill destroys a local source of a material that governments everywhere are scrambling to secure.

5. Silver Scarcity. Silver represents less than 0.1% of a solar module by mass, but accounts for a significant share of its value. Solar is already one of the largest consumers of silver globally. Recycling it back into the supply chain is necessary.

Product / Service 📦

ROSI (stands for Return of Silicon) developed the world's first industrial process to recover high-purity silicon, silver, copper, aluminium, and glass from end-of-life solar panels:

Pyrolysis Separation: ROSI uses a low-intensity thermal and chemical treatment (pyrolysis) to gently break apart the layers of a panel without damaging the crystal structure of the silicon cells. The process achieves 99.9% pure silicon and silver at industrial scale.

Manufacturing Waste Too: ROSI also processes kerf, the silicon dust and slurry generated when wafers are cut during panel manufacturing. Two input streams instead of one: they have material to work with today, without waiting for the 2030s wave of retired panels.

Valuable Recovery: ROSI’s process increases economic value recovery from 35% (traditional shredding) to up to 95%.

Two Revenue Streams: ROSI earns fees for recycling panels (recycling-as-a-service) and for selling the recovered materials to industrial buyers. The combination is what makes the unit economics work at scale.

Top Quality Materials: The recovered materials meet or exceed virgin quality. Silicon purer than metallurgical-grade and glass more transparent than standard recycled glass. They feed directly into solar manufacturing, semiconductors, and electronics.

Market 🌐

The global solar panel recycling market is projected to grow from $0.46 billion in 2025 to $1.12 billion by 2030. But that undersells the opportunity. The materials ROSI recovers (silicon, silver, copper) feed into semiconductors, batteries, and electronics. Those are trillion-dollar industries.

Two forces are accelerating demand. Governments worldwide are racing to secure domestic supplies of silicon and silver, currently dominated by Chinese production. Recycled panels are a local source. And regulation is tightening fast: the EU already mandates 85% recovery rates by weight, and the rest of the world is catching up. Solar panel recycling is becoming mandatory, not optional.

Other Key Players

Reiling GmbH 🇩🇪: Europe's largest conventional recycler. Recovers glass and aluminium at scale. Doesn't touch silicon or silver.

SOLARCYCLE 🇺🇸: Recovers high-value materials including silicon and silver. US-focused, no European footprint.

Veolia 🇫🇷: Operates the first dedicated PV recycling plant in Europe since 2018. Recovers bulk materials including low-grade silicon. Doesn't achieve the purity levels needed for semiconductors or solar reuse.

ROSI is the only company with an industrial line recovering all five high-value materials from crystalline silicon panels.

Founding Story 🦄

ROSI was founded in 2017 in Grenoble by physicist Yun Luo, silicon specialist Guy Chichignoud, and industrial veteran Daniel Bajolet.

Yun grew up with a physics professor father who told her girls could do just as well as boys in science. She took that seriously. After years working in PV technology, she kept running into the same blind spot: nobody was dealing with solar waste.

She found her co-founders through her network. Guy had spent his entire career researching silicon purification and Daniel had led M&A deals across the silicon industry. Together they decided to tackle the problem.

The first breakthrough came when a scientist at Evonik confirmed that ROSI's recycled silicon could re-enter the silicon value chain. That unlocked everything. Backed by French government grants and early investors, they built their first industrial site. In June 2023 they inaugurated ROSI Alpes, the first industrial recycling line worldwide capable of recovering high-purity silicon, silver, and copper from end-of-life panels.

In September 2024 they signed a partnership with AGC Glass Europe (one of the world's largest flat glass manufacturers) to supply them with recycled solar glass and in April 2026 they closed a Series B of over €20M to open a second plant in Teruel, Spain (10,000 tonnes/year). Total raised to date: ~$50M.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. ROSI's recovered silicon has 75% lower CO₂ emissions than conventionally produced metallurgical-grade silicon.

2. Their process recovers up to 95% of a panel's economic value and outputs industrial-scale 99.9% pure silicon and silver.

3. By replacing conventionally produced raw materials they save 1.2 tonnes of CO₂ per tonne of panels recycled.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your business: Automation and AI implementation (Claude expertise) for companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we’ll distill a company that’s blending AI and geological science to discover the critical metals the energy transition depends on: Lithosquare 🇫🇷

If you’re working in or interested in climate tech, check out Climate Coffee ☕️.

Free monthly in-person events in 35+ cities worldwide, with a community of 6,000+ people already showing up. Find your city and join for free.

Want to sponsor Climate Tech Distillery? Here’s all the info.

What Problem Does Lithosquare Tackle❓

The energy transition runs on metals. Copper wires every EV and grid. Lithium goes into every battery. The problem? We're not finding enough of them.

1. Huge Supply Gap: By 2040, the critical metals supply gap could hit $350 billion per year. Lithium demand alone is expected to surge by over 400%. More than 1,000 new deposits must be discovered before 2040.

2. Low Discovery Rates: The easy-to-find deposits are mostly depleted, and discovery rates have plummeted by ~75% in the last decade. Greenfield projects face a 1 in 5,000 chance of commercial success. More money in, fewer finds out.

3. Wasted Geologists: Geologists spend roughly 80% of their time processing and organizing data rather than doing the interpretive work that actually leads to discoveries.

4. Inefficient AI Tools: Traditional exploration AI just pattern-matches to known deposits. You end up only looking for what’s already been found. The next generation of deposits is deeper, in places that have never been mapped.

5. Dangerously Concentrated Supply: China produces 95% of rare earth metals. Western governments are legislating to diversify, but they can't diversify without finding new deposits first.

Product / Service 📦

Lithosquare builds what they call Geology AI: a foundational AI platform that doesn't pattern-match, but models how mineral deposits physically form.

First Principles Approach: Their AI models the physical and chemical reality of how deposits form from first principles, not data pattern matching or statistical anomalies. This lets them search frontier terrain where legacy tools go blind.

Super Fast: The company reports up to a 10x improvement in exploration efficiency, with analysis timelines reduced from months to days. Teams stop drowning in data processing and start spending more time on actual geology.

Full Exploration Workflow: The platform fuses fragmented data (geological maps, geophysical surveys, textual reports, satellite imagery) into a unified framework. It generates targets, sequences field programs, and updates 3D geological scenarios in real time as new drill data arrives.

Geologists in the Loop: Seasoned geoscientists drive the final reasoning. Every target and drill sequence is interrogated by industry experts before capital is deployed. Explainable outputs, not black boxes.

Outcome-Based Model: Lithosquare works alongside exploration and mining companies rather than selling a pure software license, with revenue-sharing agreements tied to exploration success. Skin in the game on both sides.

Market 🌐

The critical minerals market reached $328 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $587 billion by 2032. The bottleneck isn't refining or processing, it's finding the deposits in the first place.

The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act requires 10% of annual mineral consumption to be extracted domestically by 2030. The US has matching policies. All of this creates real budget pressure on mining companies to find more, faster.

Other Key Players

KoBold Metals 🇺🇸: Same thesis, much bigger. $537M raised at a $3B valuation, with partnerships with BHP and Rio Tinto. US-focused, pattern-recognition AI, deep pockets.

Earth AI 🇦🇺: Greenfield-focused, AI-driven prospect detection in underexplored terrain. Earlier stage, narrower geography.

VerAI Discoveries 🇺🇸: Asset-driven model like Lithosquare, they take positions in the deposits they find. Pattern-matching AI, US-based.

Lithosquare's edge: A geological first principles approach instead of pattern matching and being European based.

Founding Story 🦄

Lithosquare was founded in Paris in 2024 by mining engineer Aymeric Préveral-Etcheverry, with Simon Leclair joining as founding COO shortly after. Both had spent years inside exploration companies watching the same bottleneck on every project.

Aymeric became obsessed with the critical minerals supply chain as battery gigafactories grabbed headlines: "The energy transition, digital transition, we won't be able to make them happen if we don't have the metals."

The technical bet: don’t build a pattern recognition tool, build a geological reasoning engine. One finds what’s been found; the other can find what hasn’t.

December 2025: first public partnership. A joint venture with UK mining company Aterian across eight exploration projects covering 2,898 km² in Morocco and Botswana, targeting copper and critical minerals. May 2026: $25M seed round.

The platform currently focuses on copper, rare earths, and lithium, with mining company clients across the US, Europe, Africa, and Latin America.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. Lithosquare's platform could enable ~140 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent avoided emissions per year by 2040.

2. Up to 10x improvement in exploration efficiency, with analysis timelines reduced from months to days.

3. In just 2 years they have an impressive field program live, $25M in the bank, a US office opening soon, and they’re doubling headcount to 40.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your business: Automation and AI implementation (Claude expertise) for companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we’ll distill a company turning ocean waves into clean energy — and using it to power AI computing at sea: Panthalassa 🇺🇸

If you’re working in or interested in climate tech, check out Climate Coffee ☕️.

Free monthly in-person events in 35+ cities worldwide, with a community of 6,000+ people already showing up. Find your city and join for free.

Want to sponsor Climate Tech Distillery? Here’s all the info.

What Problem Does Panthalassa Tackle❓

AI is eating the world’s energy supply. And the grid can’t keep up.

1. Untapped Wave Energy: The open ocean holds tens of terawatts of energy in the form of waves, comparable in scale to solar and nuclear. It could power entire industries: synthetic fuels, desalination, offshore heavy industry, and more. But no previous project has cracked the economics: transmitting power to shore via undersea cables wipes out the margins.

2. Exploding Electricity Demand: Data centers already consume 1–2% of global electricity. AI inference is causing demand to spike faster than utilities can build new capacity. In the US alone, grid operators are warning of shortfalls within years.

3. Land-Based Data Centers Issues: New data centers face many constraints: grid interconnection queues that stretch years, cooling water shortages, permitting battles, and community opposition. The bottleneck isn’t just power, it’s getting power to the right place fast enough.

4. The Cooling Problem: Cooling accounts for a significant chunk of data center operating costs. AI chips run hot. Land-based cooling systems are expensive, water-intensive, and increasingly constrained by local regulations.

Product / Service 📦

Panthalassa’s nodes are autonomous, floating power plants that generate clean electricity from ocean waves and run AI computing right there onboard.

Mass-Producible: Made from plate steel in coastal factories, the same industrial logic as shipbuilding. No exotic materials, no bespoke supply chains.

The Node: Each unit is an 85-meter-long solid steel structure, shaped like a lollipop, that sits mostly below the surface. As waves move it up and down, water is forced through internal channels and a turbine, generating electricity continuously. One moving part. No undersea cables.

Capacity Factor: Up to 90%, versus 30–40% for offshore wind and ~25% for solar. The open ocean moves 24/7 and the system is designed to cost around $1,500/kW, roughly equivalent to a natural gas plant, minus the fuel.

AI Compute at Sea: Instead of transmitting power back to shore, Panthalassa can run AI inference chips directly onboard. Results are sent back to land via low-Earth-orbit satellites. The surrounding ocean provides free supercooling.

Fully Autonomous: Nodes self-propel to the best wave regions in the northern Pacific, far from shore and far from community opposition. A fleet of them functions together as a distributed offshore data center.

Versatility: AI compute is the biggest use case now but the platform is designed to power anything that benefits from cheap, abundant offshore energy: synthetic fuel production, desalination, heavy industry.

Market 🌐

Wave energy is still early, the market sits at roughly $350M today, growing at ~17% annually. But Panthalassa is going after AI compute infrastructure, a market that will require hundreds of gigawatts of new clean power over the next decade with almost nowhere to put it.

The broader opportunity is energy + compute: two multi-trillion-dollar industries colliding at exactly the moment both are facing structural bottlenecks on land.

Other Key Players

CorPower Ocean 🇸🇪: Wave energy converter focused on grid-tied offshore power. Raised $100M+, completed first commercial-scale ocean deployment in Portugal in 2024.

C-Power 🇺🇸: Oregon State University spinout building wave energy nodes for remote offshore applications including sensors and defense payloads.

Panthalassa's differentiation is the integrated compute layer: competitors generate power and try to send it to shore.

Founding Story 🦄

Panthalassa was founded in 2016 by Garth Sheldon-Coulson and Brian Moffat as a public benefit corporation in Portland, Oregon. It’s named after the ancient ocean that surrounded the supercontinent Pangaea.

Brian spent a decade in ocean energy research, previously developing a wave energy system at Spindrift Energy. Garth came from a background in finance and has a law degree from Harvard and an engineering master's from MIT. The question they started with: what's the only energy source at terawatt scale that no one else is racing to build?

The answer was the open ocean. They spent years in wave tanks at Oregon State University, deploying Ocean-1 in 2021 and Ocean-2 in 2024 to prove the platform at sea. In 2018 they filed a patent for wave-powered computing grids, the system they're building now.

In May 2026 Panthalassa closed a $140M Series B led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, with participation from many other top tier climate investors and tech titans. Total funding raised: $218M.

The company now has 120 employees drawn from SpaceX, Google, NASA, etc. and Ocean-3 pilot nodes are scheduled to be deployed in the northern Pacific in 2026, with commercial systems targeted for 2027.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. Targeting $0.02/kWh, which would undercut even the cheapest utility-scale renewables today.

2. Up to 90% capacity factor (how much of the time a power source is actually generating electricity at full capacity), more than 2x offshore wind, and nearly 4x solar.

3. Goal: $1B factory producing 1 GW of node capacity per year with no permitting, no grid, no land acquisition. The traditional way requires several billions, paperwork and years.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your business: Automation and AI implementation (Claude expertise) for companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we’ll distill a company that’s building autonomous underwater drones to restore ocean ecosystems and do all sorts of operations at sea: Ulysses 🇺🇸

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What Problem Does Ulysses Tackle❓

Seagrass meadows are one of the ocean's most powerful climate tools. And they're vanishing.

1. A disappearing carbon sink: Seagrass covers just 0.1% of the ocean floor but captures CO₂ up to 35x faster than tropical rainforests and stores up to 18% of the ocean's total carbon. It's also declining at 7% per year globally.

2. Restoration can't keep pace: Traditional hand-planting by volunteers restores ~5 hectares per year when conditions cooperate. The Great Barrier Reef alone has 35,000 km² of seagrass at risk. The numbers are tough.

3. The loss releases stored carbon: When a meadow dies, it doesn’t just stop absorbing CO₂, it releases centuries of accumulated carbon from the sediment. At-risk seagrass stocks could emit the equivalent of 1,154 megatonnes of CO₂ if left unaddressed.

4. Existing underwater robots weren't built for this: Legacy subsea vehicles come from the oil and gas industry. They’re expensive, large, and designed to sense environments rather than interact with them. There was no cheap, modular robot specifically for habitat restoration.

Product / Service 📦

Ulysses built a full autonomous marine robotics platform. 3 vehicles, 0 humans required from launch to recovery. A game-changer for marine ecosystem restoration:

Mako (the AUV): Collects seeds from healthy donor meadows, plants them with robotic drills at the correct depth, and monitors growth. 72-hour endurance, ~200 lb payload capacity, operates to 5,000 ft depth, and 40X more compute than any small or medium vehicle on the market.

Leviathan (the surface vessel): An autonomous surface vehicle that deploys and recovers Mako. No crew needed on deck.

Kraken (launch & recovery): The shore-side system that launches, recovers, and recharges the whole fleet. Start to finish, with zero human intervention. SpaceX reusability logic, applied to ocean robots.

VERY fast: Traditional methods restore 5 hectares per year. Mako is designed to do 5 hectares per day. Restoration can finally outpace loss.

Way cheaper: Ulysses cut restoration costs 10x by borrowing from consumer tech (EV batteries, smartphone chips, FPV drone components). Up to 50x cheaper than legacy subsea systems. Vehicles talk to each other, enabling swarm coordination across large areas.

Modular by design: Attachments swap like Lego. Harvesting, planting, monitoring, etc.. That same modularity already has Ulysses expanding into offshore wind surveys, coastal management, and other habitat types. Seagrass is just the entry point.

The long-term play is a general-purpose autonomous marine platform for anything requiring persistent, affordable ocean access.

Market 🌐

The ocean-based blue carbon credit market reached $1.42 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $8.67 billion by 2033. Seagrass is its fastest-growing segment. The EU’s Nature Restoration Law mandates restoration with binding 2030 and 2050 deadlines. Government demand is real and growing.

The broader autonomous underwater vehicle market is even bigger ($8.72 billion by 2030). Defense, offshore energy inspection, and subsea infrastructure are all moving away from expensive crewed vessels toward persistent autonomous systems.

Other Key Players

ReefGen 🇺🇸: Building Grasshopper, a semi-autonomous seagrass-planting robot that can plant up to 60 seeds per minute. Also makes Cora, a coral restoration robot.

Eelume 🇳🇴: Snake-like underwater robot for subsea infrastructure inspection and maintenance. Targets offshore oil & gas. No restoration focus.

Terradepth 🇺🇸: Raised $30M+ to map the ocean floor for commercial and government use. Pure sensing, no habitat interaction.

Ulysses is the only one combining full end-to-end autonomy and a platform broad enough to serve the whole ocean economy.

Founding Story 🦄

In early 2023, Jamie Wedderburn was surfing on the west coast of Scotland when a friend described a miserable volunteering day: 40+ people planting seagrass for hours in rain and wind, only for the whole meadow to wash away. Jamie had never heard of seagrass. That night he fell down a rabbit hole and came out convinced there was an engineering problem to solve.

He pitched it to Akhil Voorakkara, a colleague from drone delivery, who immediately agreed. They recruited brothers Will and Colm O’Brien. Between the four of them: F1, autonomous vehicles, satellites, deep-sea robotics. Within weeks they quit their jobs, built a first prototype in a weekend, and iterated through five hardware generations in a year.

By early 2024 they had a working robot in the water, government partnerships in Florida and Australia, a Great Barrier Reef restoration trial underway, and nearly $1M in revenue.

November 2024: $2M pre-seed. The team relocated to San Francisco and kept building. April 2026: $46M Series A led by a16z and they’re in talks with the US Navy. Seagrass is one of many use cases now.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. Up to 50x cheaper than legacy subsea systems.

2. 72-hour endurance with zero human intervention start to finish.

3. Mako restores seagrass 100x faster than hand-planting and at 10x lower cost.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your business: Automation and AI implementation (Claude expertise) for companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we’ll distill a company that uses AI agents to cut data center energy consumption by up to 30%: Phaidra 🇺🇸

Shoutout to my friend Hugo Rauch at New Wave, the only podcast you need to keep up with Europe’s climate-tech VC world.

Available on Substack, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

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What Problem Does Phaidra Tackle❓

The AI boom is creating the fastest-growing new source of electricity demand on the planet, and most of that energy is being wasted.

1. Data Center Demand: Global data center electricity consumption hit 415 TWh in 2024, about 1.5% of all electricity on Earth. The IEA projects it will double to ~945 TWh by 2030. AI is the main driver: AI-optimized servers consume up to 6x more power per rack than conventional ones.

2. Cooling: Up to 70% of a data center’s non-IT energy load goes to cooling. Most facilities run cooling at full blast 24/7 regardless of actual workload, because nobody knows in advance when a massive training job will spike the heat load.

3. Static Controls: Data center cooling systems run on hard-coded logic written once and updated every 5–10 years. They were designed for steady-state operation, not for the wild heat spikes that happen when an AI cluster fires up. The result: chronic over-cooling, GPU throttling, and wasted electricity.

4. Crazy Scale: The 5 largest tech companies spent over $400 billion on data center capex in 2025. Virginia gets 26% of its electricity consumed by data centers. At gigawatt scale, a 20% inefficiency is a power plant’s worth of electricity doing nothing.

5. Water Issue: On top of electricity, a single 40MW data center can consume over 1 million tonnes of water annually for cooling. As AI clusters scale to hundreds of megawatts, water stress is becoming a hard constraint in many regions, and another reason the industry can’t just keep building bigger cooling systems.

Product / Service 📦

Phaidra builds AI agents that autonomously control the cooling and power systems of data centers, replacing static controls with self-learning intelligence.

Alfred, the Virtual Plant Operator: Their core AI agent plugs into a data center’s existing building management system as a supervisory layer. It ingests thousands of sensor readings in real time (temperatures, pressures, flow rates, power loads) and issues control instructions back to the physical systems. No hardware swap required.

Self-Learning, Proactive Control: Alfred uses reinforcement learning to evaluate billions of possible actions and pick the one that minimizes energy while keeping temperatures safe. Crucially, it acts before heat spikes happen: it monitors incoming power loads as an early-warning signal and prepares cooling in advance. In tests with Nvidia’s Blackwell clusters, this reduced thermal spikes by ~80%.

More Tokens Per Watt: By eliminating over-cooling and GPU throttling, Phaidra lets chips run closer to their thermal limits safely, extracting more compute from the same hardware. For AI cloud providers, that means more revenue per megawatt without adding a single server.

Real Cost Impact: Energy is the largest operating cost for any data center. A 15–30% reduction in cooling energy at a 100MW facility translates to tens of millions of dollars in annual savings. Phaidra charges for outcomes, not licenses, aligning their incentives directly with their customers’.

Works Anywhere With Complex Cooling: The same tech applies beyond data centers. Phaidra’s first major customer was Merck, across a 500-acre vaccine plant, and they’re now running a pilot with the UAE Ministry of Energy for district cooling operations.

Market 🌐

The AI infrastructure buildout is the largest capex wave in tech history, and energy efficiency is its biggest bottleneck. Any software that cuts a data center's energy bill by 15–30% is attacking a very large number.

Being baked into Nvidia's Vera Rubin DSX reference architecture is a massive distribution advantage. It means Phaidra's agents are the default recommendation for every new gigawatt-scale AI factory built on Nvidia hardware, which is most of them.

Other Key Players

Vigilent 🇺🇸:AI-driven HVAC and cooling optimization for data centers and commercial buildings. Probably the closest direct competitor to Phaidra's core product.

75F 🇺🇸: AI building controls for HVAC, focused on commercial real estate but increasingly data centers. Similar reinforcement learning approach.

And of course the big players like Siemens, Johnson Controls and even Nvidia are in the field of optimizing data center cooling.

Founding Story 🦄

In 2014, Google data center engineer Jim Gao cold-emailed DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman with one question: what if AlphaGo-style AI could run a data center's cooling system? Suleyman flew to Mountain View two weeks later. The result was one of the most-cited applied AI results of the decade: 40% reduction in cooling energy at Google's already heavily optimized data centers.

Then DeepMind quietly shut the project down in 2020 after failing to commercialize it externally. Gao left in 2019, and Veda Panneershelvam, one of AlphaGo's key engineers, followed in 2020. Together with Katie Hoffman, an industrial controls veteran, they founded Phaidra in Seattle to bring what they'd built at Google to every data center in the world.

They've raised over $92.5M in total from top tech companies and VCs and they’re already a team of around 100 people across 4 continents. Customers now include Governments and several Fortune 100 companies. Plus, they are constantly entering new sectors where cooling could use some optimization.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. 40% cooling energy reduction at Google's data centers and 15–30% cooling energy reduction in commercial deployments.

2. GPU throttling from heat spikes can cut AI compute output by 20–30%.

3. Cooling accounts for ~40% of a data center's total electricity bill.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your climate business: Automation and AI systems for climate companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues and their climate impact.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we'll distill a company that seals invisible cracks in buildings with a fog of tiny particles, cutting energy waste by 30% per building. All without touching a single wall: Aeroseal 🇺🇸

Shoutout to my friend Hugo Rauch at New Wave, the only podcast you need to keep up with Europe’s climate-tech VC world.

Available on Substack, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Want to sponsor Climate Tech Distillery? Here’s all the info.

What Problem Does Aeroseal Tackle❓

Buildings are the planet's biggest energy sinkhole, and most of the waste is literally leaking through the cracks.

1. Building Operations: They account for 30% of global final energy consumption and 26% of global energy-related emissions. By pretty much any measure, buildings are one of the biggest climate problems on the planet.

2. HVAC (Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning): Roughly half of the energy associated with buildings goes to heating and cooling. And 20–30% of it is wasted through air duct leaks, disconnections, and poor insulation. That's not a rounding error. That's a structural failure happening in nearly every building on earth.

3. Manual Sealing Doesn't Work: Traditional duct sealing means crawling through attics with mastic paste and tape. It's messy, labor-intensive, and imprecise. Even brand-new homes with tape-sealed ducts show 25%+ leakage rates right out of the gate.

4. Buildings Need Fixing: The U.S. alone hosts over 140 million housing units, many aging and requiring retrofitting. 95%+ of older homes have leaky ducts. It's basically every building. Worldwide that number is in the billions.

Product / Service 📦

Aeroseal's technology is deceptively simple. They call it "fix-a-flat for buildings." Here's why it’s so awesome:

Aerosol Sealing: They introduce a fog of non-toxic polymers into a building's pressurized air ducts and envelopes, creating a sealant that plugs ducts without requiring physical access to the locations. The sealant particles are 3–15 microns, small enough to travel through the system, large enough to stick to the edges of leaks and build up into a seal. No demolition. No crawling.

Two Products, One Platform: The company runs two core technologies. HomeSeal Connect seals HVAC ductwork in existing and new homes. AeroBarrier Connect seals the entire building envelope (walls, roof, foundation). Both work the same way: pressurize, spray, seal, measure.

Software-Verified Results: Every seal comes with a before-and-after certificate. Their software measures leakage before sealing and compares with leakage after sealing, so their technologies can meet code requirements for new construction.

Safe Substance: The sealant is water-based, non-toxic, and is certified for ultra-low VOC content. The building can be occupied 30 minutes after sealing. The CEO calls it "as safe as bubblegum."

Dealer Network Model: Aeroseal doesn't go door-to-door. They sell machines to HVAC contractors and insulation contractors, who then provide the service. They now have a growing 1,500+ dealer network operating in 90+ countries.

Market 🌐

The broader weatherization (making buildings weather-resistant and energy-efficient) services market was valued at $35.5 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $52.3 billion by 2033 (3.7% CAGR). Aerosol-based air sealing is still a fraction of that, just $115 million in 2024, but growing at 8.2% CAGR as building codes tighten.

The real math is simpler: 140 million U.S. homes × ~$2,500 per seal = a $350 billion total addressable market in the U.S. alone. Most of those homes haven't been touched yet.

Other Key Players

Kingspan 🇮🇪: Global insulation giant specializing in high-performance insulated panels with some of the lowest embodied carbon in the industry. Focused on the thermal side of building efficiency, not air sealing.

Henry Company 🇺🇸: Major provider of building envelope systems including air barriers and waterproofing membranes. Traditional construction materials approach, not aerosol-based.

Aeroseal is the only company that seals ducts and envelopes from the inside using aerosol particles. No competitor has replicated the physics-driven approach or the software-verified measurement at this scale.

Founding Story 🦄

In 1993, Dr. Mark Modera invented a breakthrough aerosol-based sealing technology in his California garage while working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. For the first time, it was possible to seal air duct leaks from the inside out. The DOE gave it the "Energy Top 100" award.

Modera created a company around it in 1997. It was acquired by Carrier (the HVAC giant), but that relationship didn't last. Ultimately it was bought back by Modera in 2010.

That same year, Amit Gupta, a mechanical engineer with stints at Tata Motors and Carrier saw Modera’s technology and believed it could be the key to decarbonizing buildings. He quit his job, emptied his 401K, and put $75,000 to become CEO.

For a decade they bootstrapped. Then in 2021, Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Bill Gates) led a $22M Series A. In 2023 came a Series B and as of 2026 they’ve raised ~$119M in total funding. They've now sealed 300,000+ buildings, improved 500M+ square feet of commercial space across 90+ countries, and made the 2025 Global CleanTech 100.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. 30% average energy reduction per building. At ~$2,500 per home, the investment pays for itself in 4 years. For commercial buildings, ROI hits 5 years.

2. Seals 80% of available leaks in under 2 hours, versus days of manual labor with uncertain results.

3. Their stated mission is to eliminate 1 gigaton of CO₂ annually. That’s roughly equivalent to Japan’s total emissions.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your climate business: Automation and AI systems for climate companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues and their climate impact.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we'll distill a company that invented the world's first jet engine efficient from takeoff to Mach 3+. Cheaper to run, lower in emissions, and built to make supersonic flight as common as flying economy today: Astro Mechanica 🇺🇸

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What Problem Does Astro Mechanica Tackle❓

Commercial aviation is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize and the engines are one of the main problems.

1. All Commercial Planes Run on Turbofans: The A320, A380, Boeing 737, etc. all use turbofan engines, a technology optimized for subsonic cruise that hasn't fundamentally changed since the 1970s. We've hit the ceiling on incremental improvements.

2. Turbofans vs. Turbojets: Turbofans are efficient at subsonic speeds but drag-heavy going faster. Turbojets handle supersonic but waste huge amounts of fuel at low speeds. No single engine has ever been efficient across the full speed range.

3. The Concorde Problem: The only commercial supersonic aircraft ever operated was so fuel-inefficient it used 2 tons of fuel just taxiing to the runway. Supersonic travel died because the economics never worked.

4. Aviation Emissions Keep Climbing: Aviation accounts for ~2% of global CO₂ and ~4% of total warming impact when contrails (the white lines in the sky left by planes) and NOx are included. Emissions are projected to double by 2050 without a step-change in propulsion.

5. No Easy Fix on Fuel Either: Unlike cars, there's no battery solution for long-haul flight. Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is only 0.2% of global supply today and costs 2–5x more than conventional jet fuel.

Product / Service 📦

Astro Mechanica invented Duality™, the world's first jet engine efficient from takeoff to Mach 3+. Here's what makes it awesome:

Three Modes, One Engine: Acts like a turbofan at low speeds, switches to turbojet approaching supersonic, and operates like a ramjet at very high speeds. No other engine does all three.

Electric Motors Drive the Compressor: Instead of relying on exhaust gases, Duality uses EV-grade electric motors to spin the compressor independently, letting the engine adapt to any speed or altitude. This burns less fuel at every phase of flight, not just cruise.

Runs on LNG: Liquid natural gas costs roughly 1/10th of jet fuel and burns 30% less CO₂. It can also run on synthetic methane made from CO₂ and green hydrogen. Fully carbon-neutral supersonic flight is technically possible for the first time.

Simpler, Lower Footprint: Fewer moving parts than the CFM LEAP (the $14M engine powering lots of commercial planes) means lower manufacturing emissions, cheaper building and maintenance, and a smaller lifecycle carbon footprint.

Market 🌐

The supersonic jet market was valued at $27.1 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $45.5 billion by 2033 (5.7% CAGR). Major airlines like United and American have already placed pre-orders for next-gen supersonic aircraft.

The deeper opportunity is propulsion. Every commercial aircraft in the sky will need a new engine within 20–30 years, and a system efficient at all speeds on cheap fuel would be a platform-level disruption.

Other Key Players

Boom Supersonic 🇺🇸: Building Overture, a 65-passenger Mach 1.7 airliner with their own purpose-built turbofan engine, designed to run on 100% SAF. 130 pre-orders from United, American, and Japan Airlines.

Hermeus 🇺🇸: Developing Chimera, a turbojet-to-ramjet hybrid engine targeting Mach 5+, initially for US defense with eventual commercial ambitions.

Duality is the only engine designed to power all sorts of planes (unlike competitors locked into a single aircraft) while running on cheap, clean fuel and targeting speed, cost, and emissions at once.

Founding Story 🦄

Astro Mechanica was founded in 2021 by Ian Brooke, a lifelong pilot and self-described "full-stack mechanical engineer" with degrees in Physics and Mechanical Engineering. Before this, he founded Daedalus Design, an advanced composites manufacturer.

Ian’s obsession with aviation led him to one question: why hasn’t anyone built a jet engine efficient at every speed? He built his first proof-of-concept in just 2 months. After raising from Lowercarbon Capital in 2022, he joined YC W24 and closed a $3M seed from a16z. By April 2025, total funding reached $27.1M, with United Airlines Ventures, Pioneer Fund, and Dolby Family Ventures joining the cap table.

Their Gen3 engine hot-fired in October 2024, with high-altitude testing planned for 2026 and first flight in 2027. The US Air Force also tapped them to build engines for its Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, using defense contracts to de-risk the technology before going commercial.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. Air-launching a rocket with their engine at 800 m/s delivers 3.5x more payload at 3.5x lower cost per kg to orbit.

2. Duality runs on LNG, roughly 1/10th the cost of jet fuel and 30% less CO₂ per flight, and could use synthetic methane made from CO₂ and green hydrogen.

3. Duality reaches Mach 3+ 3x faster than any commercial aircraft today, and is designed to cost significantly less to build and maintain than current engines.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your climate business: Automation and AI systems for climate companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues and their climate impact.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we’ll distill a company that's building autonomous, solar-powered robots to eliminate herbicide-resistant weeds and help farming go chemical-free: Aigen 🇺🇸

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What Problem Does Aigen Tackle❓

Modern agriculture is stuck in a chemical dependency loop, and it’s breaking down on multiple fronts:

1. The Superweed Crisis: Decades of herbicide overuse have bred resistance. The USDA estimates herbicide-resistant “superweeds” destroy ~30% of crops in the US annually. Resistance is growing at 4–8% per year.

2. Chemical Overload in Food: The US uses over a billion pounds of herbicides per year. These chemicals contaminate groundwater, degrade soil health, and end up as residues in food. Agriculture accounts for 10–12% of global GHG emissions, and chemical production is a big part of that.

3. A Labor Crisis: Weeding by hand is slow, expensive, and reliant on a workforce that’s rapidly shrinking. US farms face chronic labor shortages, and the work itself is grueling “just spend two hours in the field weeding,” says Aigen’s CEO.

4. Farmers Flying Blind: Most farms have little real-time visibility into what’s happening at the crop level: which weeds are spreading, where yield losses are happening. Without data, precision management is nearly impossible.

5. Sustainable Herbicides: Biological and organic herbicides exist, but they're 3–5x more expensive than conventional ones, less effective at scale, and still don't solve the resistance cycle. Resistant weed populations evolve faster than herbicide solutions can reach market.

Product / Service 📦

They make the world’s first truly solar-powered, AI-driven robotic fleet for regenerative agriculture.

Their robot, the “Element”, patrols crop fields autonomously. No diesel, no chemicals, no farmer needed to operate it.

100% Solar-Powered: The Element runs entirely on solar with onboard battery storage, no grid connection required. In 2024 they increased custom panel surface area by 20%, and their AI accelerator chip uses 2–3x less power than an iPhone.

AI Weed Detection: Multiple onboard cameras feed a real-time vision system that identifies weeds vs. crops down to plant anatomy, then strikes precisely at the root with steel blades. No herbicides involved.

Network Fleet Intelligence: Robots talk to each other. An onboard device lets the fleet coordinate, routing crews to problem areas automatically without human input.

Robotics-as-a-Service: Aigen charges a per-acre fee instead of selling hardware. Farmers rent the robots for the season and the data collected (weed density, crop health, soil conditions) and insights are easily accessible to them in an app.

Market 🌐

The precision weeding segment alone is growing at 13.7% CAGR. The broader agricultural robotics market sits at $10.43 billion in 2024, heading toward $38 billion by 2033.

Labor shortages, tightening chemical regulations, and rising consumer demand for clean food are all pushing the same direction. Aigen sits at the intersection of all three.

Other Key Players

Carbon Robotics 🇺🇸: Builds large laser-guided robots that zap weeds with high-powered lasers rather than blades, targeting broad row-crop deployments.

Ecorobotix 🇨🇭: Uses AI-guided micro-dosing to apply 95% less herbicide with precision targeting. Reduces chemicals but doesn’t eliminate them.

Naïo Technologies 🇫🇷: Europe’s most established agri-robotics player, with electric robots for vineyards, vegetable fields, and orchards.

Aigen’s differentiator is the full stack: 100% solar, zero chemicals, and a networked fleet that gets smarter over time. None of its competitors combine all three.

Founding Story 🦄

Aigen was founded in 2020 by Kenny Lee and Rich Wurden, two engineers who met in a Slack group for tech workers pivoting their careers to climate.

Kenny had a software and cybersecurity background. He previously co-founded Weblife.io, acquired in 2017. Rich was a former mechanical engineer at Tesla and senior engineer at Pure Watercraft, a Seattle electric boat company. Rich’s relatives are farmers in Minnesota, and years of conversations with them made the problem impossible to ignore.

They raised a $4M seed round in early 2022 and they’ve since raised $24 million in total funding.

In 2024 they debuted on 20,000+ U.S. acres, reached 50 units operational units across all sorts of crops in 2025 and their 2026 season is already sold out, with 2–3 years of pre-orders.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. Eliminates chemical herbicide use entirely.

2. The fleet currently covers 20–40 acres per robot per growing season.

3. Mechanical weeding can actually reverse herbicide resistance over time by letting nature recover.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your climate business: Automation and AI systems for climate companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues and their climate impact.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we'll distill a company that's using AI-powered cameras to detect textile defects in real time, stopping waste before it happens: Smartex 🇵🇹

Do you use Google Drive and love color coding to stay organized? 🎨

If so, check out this extension I built that lets you customize any folder with UNLIMITED colors. 👀

Want to sponsor Climate Tech Distillery? Here’s all the info.

What Problem Does Smartex Tackle❓

They tackle inefficiencies and defects in textile manufacturing, leading to high waste and economic losses.

1. Massive Defect Waste: Over 5% of global textile production is lost every year due to irreversible fabric faults. A $33 billion annual loss. A single machine problem can ruin thousands of meters of fabric before anyone notices.

2. Stone-Age Inspection: In a $3 trillion industry, quality control is still done by human eyes. Manual inspection only catches about 70% of defects, meaning nearly a third slip through.

3. Environmental Impact: The fashion industry produces 10% of global carbon emissions and 20% of global water waste. When defective rolls go undetected, they get discarded or burned, wasting all the resources that went into making them. 92 million tonnes of textile waste are generated every year.

4. Zero Digitalization: Most factories still run on paper production orders with no real-time data, no traceability, and no way to share quality info with brands. It's probably the largest industry still untouched by the internet.

5. Insane Scale: 150 billion garments are produced annually. Even a tiny defect percentage at that scale means staggering waste, and fast fashion is only accelerating the problem.

The industry desperately needs digital eyes inside its factories.

Product / Service 📦

Smartex has built the AI-powered eyes textile factories need. They install cameras and computer vision systems directly inside knitting machines to detect defects the instant they appear. They’re awesome:

Real-Time Defect Detection (Smartex CORE): Cameras monitor fabric quality within 10 centimeters of where it's being made. The AI analyzes images in real time and can spot defects that are even invisible to the human eye. When a problem is found, production is immediately paused so technicians can fix the issue before more material is wasted.

100% Automated Inspection: Smartex inspects 100% of the fabric in real time. No breaks, no fatigue, no human error. This brings defect-related waste down to nearly zero.

Factory Digitalization (Smartex FACT): Beyond defect detection, Smartex digitizes entire factory operations. Managers can monitor and control production from anywhere, replacing paper-based workflows with real-time dashboards, reports, and alerts.

Full Traceability (Smartex LOOP): Every fabric roll gets a digital record capturing how it was produced, quality data, and full supply chain traceability. This is huge for brands that need transparency in their supply chains.

Proven ROI: 100% of Smartex's pilot projects with manufacturers have converted into sales. Everyone who sees the system in action wants it. Factory owners in Bangladesh and Vietnam demand proof of ROI within a year, and Smartex delivers.

Market 🌐

The global AI in textile market was valued at $2.6 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $43.8 billion by 2034 (that’s a crazy CAGR of 32.4%).

This makes total sense. With labor costs in Asia's textile hubs rising 12-15% annually, tightening environmental regulations, and fashion brands demanding zero-defect supply chains, the business case for automated inspection has become irresistible.

Other Key Players

Uster Technologies 🇨🇭: A well-established Swiss company providing quality monitoring instruments for the entire textile value chain. Traditional testing equipment rather than real-time AI-powered defect prevention.

Jidoka 🇮🇳: Indian startup using computer vision for fabric defect detection, primarily focused on post-production inspection rather than real-time, in-machine monitoring.

Smartex stands out because it detects fabric defects directly inside the production machine, allowing issues to be prevented immediately rather than discovered after manufacturing.

Founding Story 🦄

Smartex was founded in 2018 by Gilberto Loureiro, Antonio Rocha, and Paulo Ribeiro in Portugal. They launched the company with just €5,000.

Loureiro grew up around textile factories. His family worked in the industry, and he was operating knitting machines and inspecting fabric as a teenager. He had a complicated relationship with it: he loved the problem-solving, but hated the inefficiency and the manual, error-prone inspection work. After earning a master's in physics, he saw a clear opportunity: the largest industry still untouched by technology was also one of the world's biggest polluters.

He brought in Rocha as CTO and Ribeiro as VP of Engineering, and the three set out to fix it. They showed their first prototype to Calvin Klein and raised their first funding round in 2019.

They have since raised over $30 million in total from the some of the world’s top VCs and fashion brands. Their tech is working in factories all around the world and they are recognized by the European Commission as foundational to Industry 4.0 in textiles.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. Already prevented 792,000 kg of fabric from going to waste, saved 94 million liters of water, 17 million kWh of energy, and avoided 4.6 million kg of CO₂ emissions.

2. Their tech enables production of 0.37% more garments per kilogram of finished fabric. Sounds small, but applied to an industry giant like Inditex (678,596 tonnes of raw materials in 2024), translates into enormous savings.

3. 100% of pilot projects have converted into paying customers. In the 23-year history of Lightspeed Venture Partners, they said they rarely see companies like this.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your climate business: Automation and AI systems for climate companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues and their climate impact.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we’ll distill a company that deploys robots to precisely combust fuels, slashing wildfire risks at scale: BurnBot 🇺🇸

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What Problem Does BurnBot Tackle❓

They address the escalating wildfire crisis, where traditional prescribed burn methods cannot keep pace with the urgent need to reduce dangerous fuel loads across millions of acres at risk.

1. Huge Treatment Gap: The U.S. Forest Service has identified 237 million acres needing annual fuel treatment nationwide. Current operations only treat around 2.5 million acres annually (1% of what's needed). Wildfires keep getting bigger.

2. Narrow Weather Windows: Prescribed burns can only happen when conditions are precisely right. These safety constraints have shrunk as fire seasons expand, with December-May wildfire activity doubling since 2000.

3. Labor-Intensive Operations: Traditional prescribed burns require large crews of 10+ firefighters using hand-held drip torches. This slow process is limited by workforce availability. Big mismatch between treatment capacity and acreage needing attention.

4. Smoke and Safety Constraints: Traditional prescribed burns create massive smoke plumes that prevent treatment near homes, power lines, and critical infrastructure. PG&E spends over $1 billion annually on vegetation management but typically avoids prescribed burns near its 18,500 miles of transmission lines because smoke creates safety risks.

Product / Service 📦

BurnBot's remote-controlled RX2 machine revolutionizes prescribed burns. Here's why it's so awesome:

Contained Combustion Chamber: Propane torches create flames up to 1700°F inside a sealed chamber. Dual intake fans trap flames and embers while high-oxygen combustion burns off smoke before it exits → virtually 0 visible smoke.

Remote Operation: Operators control the machine from up to 500 feet away, typically former firefighters. This removes crews from direct fire exposure while maintaining precision control over temperature and flame intensity.

All-Weather Capability: Operates in rain, humidity, and winds up to 20 mph, conditions that halt traditional burns. Works on 30° slopes, burns fuels up to 9 feet tall, and operates safely within 5 feet of structures and power lines.

Reduced Crew Requirements: Completes burns with just 3-6 personnel instead of 10+ firefighters, covering areas 3-4x faster. Automatically logs GPS, weather, and performance data for complete digital burn reports.

Ecological Benefits: Preserves soil structure unlike bulldozers. Burns mimic natural fire cycles, promoting fire-resilient native species while destroying invasive grass seeds and protecting root systems.

Service Model: Agencies and utilities book machines on-demand starting around $1,000/acre. BurnBot provides trained operators to run the equipment, handling all logistics. Eventually operations will be fully autonomous.

Market 🌐

The global wildfire protection system market was valued at $9.68 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $25.3 billion by 2033.

Rising wildfire frequency due to climate change and government mandates for fuel treatment are driving demand. The Inflation Reduction Act allocated $2 billion for wildfire mitigation, accelerating adoption of these technologies.

Other Key Players

Drone Amplified 🇺🇸: Drone-based aerial ignition (IGNIS system drops spheres for prescribed fires).

Ecofire 🇪🇸: By putting their biodegradable substance on trees or anywhere really, you can keep them from burning and thus prevent the start and spread of wildfires.

Most companies focus on early detection (satellites, sensors, cameras) or extinction. Not many focus on prevention like BurnBot but the ones above are some.

Founding Story 🦄

BurnBot was founded in 2022 by Dr. Anukool Lakhina and Dr. Waleed "Lee" Haddad, who were introduced by a mutual acquaintance after the devastating 2020 California and Oregon wildfires.

Lakhina holds a PhD in Computer Science from Boston University and previously founded Guavus, a pioneer in real-time big data analytics. He also co-founded Wonder Labs, a social enterprise focused on climate innovations, and is a Partner at Convective Capital, an early-stage wildfire crisis investor.

Haddad has a PhD in Physics and brings deep hardware expertise from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Vermeer Corporation, where he designed industrial and agricultural equipment. He holds over 40 patents and built the first BurnBot prototype in Lakhina's San Francisco kitchen to prove the concept to fire scientists and investors (testing it first on Lakhina's backyard).

They have since raised $25M, they now employ 51-100 people (with nearly half being former firefighters), and they also hired experts like Simon Weibel (ex-Drone Amplified). They have signed multiple partnerships and launched actual projects with governments, companies and fire departments.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. 60X lower cost than traditional hand-crew prescribed burns.

2. Safer, more precise and 3-4x faster than traditional methods.

3. Their data analytics also quantify exact risk reduction, unlocking savings on insurance premiums.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your climate business: Automation and AI systems for climate companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues and their climate impact.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we’ll distill a company that’s revolutionizing sustainable cold chain logistics with battery-powered coolers: Artyc 🇺🇸

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What Problem Does Artyc Tackle❓

They address the environmental impact of traditional cold chain logistics, responsible for transporting temperature-sensitive goods like medical supplies, biologics, and specialty foods.

1. Massive Refrigerant Emissions: Traditional refrigeration relies on hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) as coolants, super-pollutants with global warming potential hundreds to thousands of times greater than CO2.These gases leak throughout a system's lifetime, with rates as high as 25% annually in food retail.

2. Food Spoilage: Cold chain spoilage accounts for $30B in lost goods each year, medicines and vaccines that never reach a patient. 14% of food is lost between harvest and retail due largely to poor temperature control. Wasted money, resources and unnecessary extra emissions.

3. Zero Visibility: Traditional cold chain provides shippers with little data on temperature or location of goods during transport. Without real-time monitoring, companies cannot detect temperature issues until it’s too late, leading to unnecessary spoilage and making it impossible to identify and fix system failures.

4. Energy-Intensive Operations: In developed economies, the cold chain can account for up to 3.5% of CO₂e emissions through its massive energy consumption. Traditional systems rely on continuous power from the grid or diesel generators to run compressors and maintain temperatures.

Product / Service 📦

Artyc's smart and reusable battery-powered coolers eliminate refrigerants entirely while making cold chain transportation more reliable and trackable. They rock:

Refrigerant-Free Cooling: No HFCs at all. Artyc uses battery-powered compressor technology that dynamically adjusts to ambient conditions. This eliminates super-pollutant leaks while maintaining precise temperature control for days rather than hours.

Real-Time Monitoring: Onboard sensors track GPS, temperature, battery, lid openings, and shock events. Artyc's portal provides complete info showing where samples are, how cold they are, and who accessed them without opening the lid.

Reusable Design: Replaces single-use styrofoam, gel packs, and dry ice with rechargeable units. Medstow Micro achieves carbon breakeven after just 2 shipments and reduces CO2 emissions by 60% after 10 shipments compared to traditional passive coolers.

Precision Control: Maintains 2°C to 8°C for over 56 hours, even when ambient temperatures reach 37°C or drop to -5°C. Artyc maintains cold chain compliance for 72+ hours while passive solutions fail after 35 hours.

Scalable Product Line: Medstow Micro for medical microsampling, Medstow 5L for hospital transport and clinical trials, with larger formats planned for temperature-sensitive foods like herbs, chocolate, and wine.

Cost Effective: Lowers cost per shipment after a few uses by replacing packaging, tracking, and operational costs with one reusable system. Eliminates dry ice procurement and hazardous material disposal expenses. Drastically improves reliability and reduces spoilage losses.

Market 🌐

The global cold chain logistics market was valued at $325 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $860 billion by 2032.

E-commerce keeps expanding and demand for temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals, biologics, and perishable foods keeps rising. On top that, HFCs are the fastest-growing climate pollutant worldwide, and refrigerant management ranks as one of the top solutions to reverse climate change.

Plus…stricter regulations requiring energy-neutral operations are strongly driving demand for sustainable cold chain solutions.

Other Key Players

Swiss Airtainer 🇨🇭: Produces lightweight temperature-controlled air cargo containers with solar panels and IoT monitoring for pharmaceutical air freight. 40% lighter than competitors, reducing CO2 emissions by 48% per flight.

Tan90 🇮🇳: Uses proprietary Phase Change Materials (PCM) for passive temperature control in insulated boxes. Maintains ±1°C stability for 96+ hours without active power, targeting food, pharma, and last-mile delivery in India and Southeast Asia.

Most companies focus on monitoring or passive cooling or not as efficient active cooling. Artyc brings it all together: Active, super efficient and advanced monitoring.

Founding Story 🦄

Artyc was founded in 2021 by Hannah Sieber and Mark Langer, who met at Stanford.

Sieber previously co-founded EcoFlow, a portable power station company (now valued at $1B+) and was recognized on Forbes 30 Under 30. While pursuing her MBA at Stanford, she became obsessed with the cold chain problem after learning that refrigerants and inefficient logistics were responsible for 4% of global emissions.

Langer brought technical expertise from building electric autonomous cargo drones at Amelia and software engineering at NASA. The two realized batteries could revolutionize cold chain transportation the same way they transformed energy access.

They spent months interviewing cold chain operators and their breakthrough came when they realized they could eliminate the need for refrigerated infrastructure entirely with battery-powered active cooling.

They launched Medstow Micro for medical samples in 2023 and raised $14 million. In 2024, Artyc was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and launched Medstow 5L for hospital transport and clinical trials. They continue expanding their product portfolio.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. 7x more energy efficient than refrigerated shipping containers.

2. Carbon breakeven after just 2 shipments with Medstow Micro.

3. 100% reusable containers and 0 refrigerants.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your climate business: Automation and AI systems for climate companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues and their climate impact.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we’ll distill a company that’s making bean-free coffee and cocoa-free cocoa to minimize the climate impact and supply chain issues of these products: Compound 🇺🇸

Shoutout to my friend Hugo Rauch at New Wave, the only podcast you need to keep up with Europe’s climate-tech VC world.

Available on Substack, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

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What Problem Does Compound Tackle❓

They specifically deal with the vulnerability of coffee and cocoa supply chains that are collapsing under climate change. It’s a big deal:

1. Coffee Supply Crisis: By 2050, climate change could make 50% of current coffee-growing land unsuitable for cultivation. Coffee prices hit 50-year highs in 2024 with Arabica up 60% year-over-year. Brazil, producing 38% of global coffee, saw its worst drought in 70 years, slashing 2025 yields by 12%.

2. Cocoa in Free Fall: Cocoa prices quadrupled between 2023 and 2024, spiking from $3,000 to $12,000 per metric ton, the highest in 50 years. Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, which produce 70% of global cocoa, saw devastating harvest losses from extreme weather and disease outbreaks.

3. Impossible to Replace Quickly: Coffee trees take 3-4 years to produce their first harvest, and cocoa trees even longer. Both crops require extremely specific temperature ranges and rainfall patterns that climate change is rapidly disrupting, and farmers can't simply relocate when growing regions become unsuitable.

4. Farmers Abandoning Crops: Millions of smallholder farmers who produce 90% of the world's cocoa and 70% of coffee earn below living wages and can't invest in climate adaptation. Many are abandoning these crops entirely for more profitable alternatives, accelerating supply shortages.

Product / Service 📦

They create beanless coffee and cocoa ingredients using fermentation and upcycled materials. They rock:

Revolutionary Molecular Mapping: They mapped over 800 flavor compounds in coffee to recreate exact profiles using fermentation and upcycled ingredients like date seeds, sunflower seeds, and grape seeds. Matches taste, aroma, and caffeine without any coffee beans.

Proven Taste Performance: In blind taste tests with Purdue University, 60% of tasters preferred Compound's coffee over premium brands like Blue Bottle. Their fermentation technology can dial caffeine levels up or down for different use cases.

Price Protection & Supply Stability: Their ingredients shield food brands from wild commodity price swings. By using diversified, domestically-sourced inputs instead of equatorial monocrops, Compound offers predictable pricing and reliable supply that doesn't depend on weather in Brazil or Ghana.

B2B Platform for Scale: They offer instant coffee, coffee concentrate, cold brew, cocoa powder, and chocolate compound to food manufacturers. Their ingredients integrate into existing pipelines without costly reformulation, making adoption seamless for brands facing supply disruptions.

Platform for Future Crops: Their tech can grow so much more. Like their CEO said “In the future, we will look into other crops that are either at risk because of climate change, or that are big contributors to climate change.“

Market 🌐

The global coffee and chocolate markets are both valued at $100B+ annually. Climate change threatens to eliminate 50% of suitable growing land by 2050, while coffee and cocoa production emit 79 kg CO2 per kg.

Record-high prices (both hit 50-year highs) and chronic supply volatility are driving urgent adoption of beanless alternatives.

Other Key Players

There are many companies creating more sustainable alternatives to these mega famous crops, here are some:

Voyage Foods 🇺🇸: Making nut-free spreads, cocoa-free chocolate and beanless coffee from roasted chickpeas. Sells to food service and manufacturing channels.

Atomo Coffee 🇺🇸: Produces beanless coffee from upcycled date seeds, chicory, and other ingredients, mimicking traditional coffee’s taste and effects.

Planet A Foods 🇩🇪: Uses fermented oats and sunflower seeds to make different types of chocolate. Available across 7 European markets. Most scaled fermentation-based alternative.

Compound’s tech seems to be the easiest to scale across other products and their deep molecular mapping makes them more flexible and resilient thanks to custom formulations for B2B clients and easy ingredient swaps.

Founding Story 🦄

Compound was founded in 2020 by Maricel Saenz, a Costa Rican entrepreneur passionate about sustainability and coffee. After co-founding Nextbiotics (a synthetic biology startup tackling antibiotic resistance), she saw an opportunity to apply similar technology to food systems.

Witnessing the ecological devastation of traditional coffee farming in her home country (exacerbated by climate change, where coffee ranks as the fifth-most polluting crop) she sought to recreate coffee's flavors, aromas, and effects without beans using precision fermentation and synthetic biology.

They launched their first consumer product, Minus Coffee cold brew, in 2022. When cocoa prices quadrupled in 2024, they leveraged their platform to fast-track a cocoa-free chocolate solution in record time, proving the versatility of their technology.

They've since raised over $10 million and pivoted from D2C to B2B, offering ingredient platforms to food manufacturers and are in discussions with partners to scale production to hundreds of metric tons for both coffee and cocoa applications.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. 86% less greenhouse gas emissions and 94% less water use compared to regular coffee. No verified data about their cocoa but probably similar.

2. 92% less land required and 41% upcycled ingredients compared to regular coffee. No verified data about their cocoa but probably similar.

3. Significant reduction in geopolitical and logistics risks, ensuring more stable prices and supply.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your climate business: Automation and AI systems for climate companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues and their climate impact.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we’ll distill a company that’s turning trains and semi-trucks into moving carbon-capturing powerhouses to then monetize those emissions: Remora 🇺🇸

Shoutout to my friend Hugo Rauch at New Wave, the only podcast you need to keep up with Europe’s climate-tech VC world.

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What Problem Does Remora Tackle❓

They tackle the problem of carbon emissions from semi-trucks and heavy-duty transportation, which can be broken down into several issues:

1. Massive Emissions from Heavy-Duty Vehicles: In the US alone 2 million semi-trucks and thousands of diesel locomotives account for 338+ million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually (around 7% of total), with fuel representing 30-40% of operating costs.

2. Decarbonization Limitations: Battery technology cannot efficiently power long-haul trucks or locomotives for 300+ miles. Rail electrification is extremely expensive and takes very long to build out.

3. Retrofitting Challenges: These 2 million trucks and thousands of locomotives operate 15-40+ year lifespans. Waiting for new zero-emission vehicles means decades of emissions. Existing assets need immediate retrofitting solutions.

4. Lack of Viable Decarbonization Solutions: Traditional carbon capture is energy-intensive and expensive. New vehicle purchases are capital-prohibitive for operators, and incremental improvements don’t meaningfully reduce emissions at scale.

5. Limited Visibility & Data: Fleet operators lack regular data on emissions performance and emissions reductions. Without this data, optimizing operations and verifying emissions progress is nearly impossible.

Product / Service 📦

Remora retrofits semi-trucks and locomotives with carbon capture devices that extract CO2 directly from exhaust pipes. They make the unusable, recyclable. They're awesome:

Revolutionary Capture Tech: Their patented system captures up to 90% of CO2 from vehicle exhaust using specialized adsorbent pellets with microscopic pores. It doesn't affect engine performance while simultaneously reducing soot, particulate matter, and NOx to meet regulatory standards.

Mobile Carbon Monetization: Drivers offload captured CO2 in under 5 minutes at truck stops or distribution centers. Remora then purifies the CO₂, sells it to other industries, and shares the revenue with the railroad or trucking company. The device doesn’t just pay for itself, it ends up generating a positive ROI for fleets.

Trains: For locomotives, they're building tender cars that scrub emissions before they enter the atmosphere, with captured CO2 stored as liquid and easily offloaded when refueling.

Data: Their devices collect verifiable emissions data for sustainability reporting. This also helps fleet operators and drivers improve their efficiency and lower fuel costs.

Future Versality: They target the heavy-duty, long-haul segment where battery and hydrogen solutions face huge near-term challenges. First trucks and now trains. Eventually it could also apply to mining equipment, ships and others!

Market 🌐

The global carbon capture market for heavy-duty transportation was valued at $5.8 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $10.2 billion by 2030. The US trucking and rail sector alone emits ~375 million metric tons of CO2 annually.

Stricter emissions regulations, corporate decarbonization commitments from major logistics operators, and the high cost of fuel (30-40% of operating expenses) are strongly driving adoption of carbon capture solutions for existing fleet retrofitting.

Other Key Players

Most carbon capture happens in fixed locations. Besides big oil companies like Aramco that are running some tests, not many are focusing on the mobile carbon capture sector. But here are some:

Qaptis 🇨🇭: Developing mobile CO₂ capture kits designed to retrofit heavy vehicles (trucks and ships) with limited energy penalty by capturing waste heat from exhausts.

Ionada 🇺🇸: They make carbon capture systems for the marine (all sorts of huge ships) and power generation industries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Remora seems to be the only one currently implementing mobile solutions for trucks and trains.

Founding Story 🦄

Remora was founded in 2020 by Paul Gross (CEO), Christina Reynolds, and Eric Harding, who met at the University of Michigan. The idea emerged from Christina's doctoral research on mobile carbon capture, where she pioneered techniques for capturing CO2 from vehicle exhaust.

Paul, inspired by a solo bicycle trip across the US, convinced Christina to leave her job as an EPA scientist to commercialize the technology. Eric, a former diesel mechanic with experience building hydrogen and electric semi-trucks, brought the practical expertise to make it work on real vehicles.

They built their first prototype in Detroit and joined Y Combinator in 2021. Since then, they've raised $117 million from VCs like Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital and partnered with trucking fleet partners (Ryder and Werner) and rail companies (Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern). Field deployments began in 2025 :)

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. Each semi-truck equipped with Remora's technology captures 135-169 tons of CO2 annually, equivalent to planting 6,200 trees.

2. Up to 90% CO2 capture for trucks and 70%+ for locomotives. 5-minute offload time for trucks and during refueling stops for locomotives.

3. By 2030, Remora plans to produce 500 units annually, capable of reducing 714,000 metric tons of CO2 each year (equal to removing 155,000 cars from the road).

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your climate business: Automation and AI systems for climate companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues and their climate impact.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we’ll distill a company that’s turning plant residues into a super biomaterial to substitute plastic: Traceless 🇩🇪

This issue is sponsored by B Lab Spain:

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What Problem Does Traceless Tackle❓

Plastic pollution is one of the world’s most urgent crises, and the alternatives currently available often fall short. How big of an issue is it?

1. Huge Amounts: Since the 1950s, 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have been produced, with 79% still in landfills or the natural environment. Conventional plastic degrades into harmful microplastics over time, which are way more difficult to eliminate.

2. Emissions Intensity: Producing plastic is a very energy intensive process, and mostly uses fossil energy. Plus, plastic itself is made of fossil energy resources. Plastic production is by far the largest industrial oil, gas, and electricity user in the EU.

3. Health: Conventional plastics and some alternatives rely on harmful substances, like PFAs (also know as “forever chemicals“), that pose a risk to human health and the environment during their lifecycle.

4. Alternatives’ Drawbacks: Either by still being petroleum-based, creating a ‘food vs. material’ conflict, or not fully degrading in natural environments. Many bioplastics require specific industrial composting facilities to break down and can even contaminate conventional plastic recycling streams.

Product / Service 📦

They developed a patented material called traceless® made with agricultural plant leftovers. Key benefits?

The Material: It’s a natural-based granulate produced using agricultural plant residues (like grain processing leftovers). No more ‘food vs. material’ conflict.

Just Like Plastic: The granulate can be processed using existing, standard technologies (like injection molding, film extrusion, and coating) without requiring companies to invest in new machinery.

Versatility: The materials work for many applications: consumer goods packaging, gastronomy and food service, retail and e-commerce, etc.. They focus on plastics that are hard to recycle or easily pollute the environment, such as single-use items, paper coatings or adhesives.

Zero Trace: It’s certified plastic-free (very few of those) and breaks down under natural composting conditions into water, humus and CO₂ in 2 to 9 weeks. It leaves behind no microplastics.

Environmental Impact: 0 harmful chemicals in both product and process, it can be composted and turned into nutrients for new plants to grow, requires way less land and water, efficiently produced with renewable energy, and has a very small carbon footprint. Full LCA (life cycle analysis).

Market 🌐

The biodegradable plastics market is still small but booming thanks to legislation:

The EU Plastic Strategy wants all plastic packaging to be recyclable or reusable by 2030. Since 2021 the EU plastic tax makes member states pay 0.80 €/kg of non‑recycled plastic packaging waste.

Other Key Players

Notpla 🇬🇧: Biodegradable packaging solutions made out of brown seaweed to substitute single use plastics.

Sulapac 🇫🇮: Biodegradable materials made from plant‑based polymers and side‑stream wood or natural fillers to replace plastic in food and cosmetics.

Ecovative 🇺🇸: Specializes in mycelium-based packaging, using mushroom roots to create biodegradable materials as alternatives to traditional plastic foams.

Founding Story 🦄

Traceless was co-founded in 2020 by Dr. Anne Lamp (CEO) and Johanna Baare (COO), who met at the “Act on Plastic Challenge” incubator.

Lamp, driven by her passion for sustainability and prior experience founding the NGO Cradle to Cradle, invented the core technology for Traceless during her PhD at Hamburg University of Technology. Her commitment to finding a scalable, real-world solution was profoundly influenced by a sailing trip where she personally encountered a large “plastic carpet” polluting the ocean.

Johanna brought the entrepreneurial, business strategy and scaling expertise to complement the technical invention.

They’ve raised €42 million to date, they’re currently building their first industrial production plant, and they have partnerships with huge players like Mondi (for paper coatings) and the Otto Group (for e-commerce packaging).

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. Up to 95% lower CO₂ emissions over production and disposal compared with conventional virgin plastics.

2. Each ton of Traceless material produced saves 2.8 football fields of land and 20k liters of water compared with conventional virgin plastics.

3. Traceless materials require 83% less fossil energy demand during production than conventional virgin plastics.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your climate business: Automation and AI systems for climate/impact companies so they can free up time, scale their revenues and cut their costs.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you on Jan 10th, enjoy the holidays :)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we’ll distill the company behind the AI-powered browser extension and app making second-hand shopping effortless and sustainable at scale: Faircado 🇩🇪

This issue is sponsored by:

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What Problem Does Faircado Tackle❓

They address the massive disconnect between the desire to shop sustainably and the actual behavior of consumers.

1. Convenience Gap: 53% of consumers say they would buy more second-hand items if it were easier. Currently, the convenience of “1-click” purchasing for new items on giants like Amazon dramatically creates a barrier to entry for the circular economy.

2. Invisible Alternatives: Most online shoppers don’t know a cheaper, second-hand version of the item they are viewing exists just a click away. Since sustainable alternatives aren’t visible directly at the point of sale, consumers default to the linear “buy new-use-throw” model.

3. Market Fragmentation: The resale market is spread across many different platforms (eBay, Vinted, Back Market, etc.). Finding a specific item requires opening dozens of tabs and spending hours searching.

4. Linear Model Impact: Always buying new is an expensive habit. Consumers miss out on average savings of 50% found in the resale market and we unnecessarily generate millions of tonnes of waste and CO2 emissions.

Product / Service 📦

They created a free AI-powered browser extension and mobile app that integrates seamlessly into the traditional e-commerce flow to automatically find second-hand and refurbished alternatives for products.

Convenience: The extension pops up automatically while you shop on 1600+ sites like Amazon, Zalando or Apple. No need to visit multiple platforms separately.

Aggregation: Their software aggregates over 100 million products from 70+ trusted second-hand partners (eBay, Vinted, Back Market, etc.) into a single comparison view.

AI Matching: Advanced image-matching algorithms and NLP (natural language processing) precisely compare the new product with its pre-loved equivalent, solving the difficulty of searching for items that lack standard product codes.

Trust & Transparency: Both the pop-up and app provide essential, instant information like the item’s condition, detailed filtering options, and crucial details like the return policy of the second-hand seller.

Extra Features: You can search directly, save favorites, set price alerts, and receive personalized recommendations based on your preferences.

Market 🌐

The global second-hand goods market was valued at around $520 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach over $1.5 trillion by 2032.

That crazy growth is driven both by younger consumers choosing more sustainable behaviors and the need to save money to afford increasing living costs and overall inflation.

Other Key Players

Beni 🇺🇸: Browser extension that also offers second-hand alternatives while shopping, though it primarily focuses on apparel.

Encore 🇺🇸: This platform focuses more on AI-powered search to handle highly specific, natural language queries like finding a celebrity outfit.

Faircado stands out thanks to its AI image-matching tech and the huge range of products it covers.

Founding Story 🦄

Faircado was founded in 2021 by Evoléna de Wilde d’Estmael and Ali Nezamolmaleki in Berlin. The idea came when Evoléna moved to an unfurnished flat and spent hours frustrated searching for second-hand furniture across dozens of marketplaces.

She also grew up in an ecologically conscious environment and was passionate about sustainability, so that helps.

Realizing there was a need to consolidate all available second-hand goods in one place, she joined forces with Ali, a software engineer with a decade of experience and a friend from her previous work.

In 2021 they launched the extension and spent the next few years building the app, improving the image recognition, and scaling the number of partners and compatible websites as fast as possible.

It’s free for users, they monetize by charging for the traffic they send to the different marketplaces.

They’ve raised over €3.5 million since launch, won the prestigious 2023 Slush 100 competition (€1 million prize), and they’re already present in 12 markets.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. Together with Everwave, Faircado collects 1 kg of waste from the world’s waters for each download of the browser extension.

2. Buying a second-hand item typically saves up to 90% of the CO2 emissions associated with producing a brand new one.

3. Faircado achieves average discounts of about 60% on used products versus new ones, with up to 90% in some cases.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your climate business: Automation and AI systems for climate/impact companies so they can free up time, scale their revenues and cut their costs.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we’ll distill a company that’s completely eliminating PFAS (forever chemicals) from wastewater: Oxyle 🇨🇭

This issue is sponsored by:

With the launch of the new B Corp standards earlier this year, they created a 100% on-demand training (+30h of content) so you can learn how to apply them in your company’s daily work and achieve an impact business model.

As a reader of this newsletter, you get an exclusive 25% discount using the code: THECLIMATECOO25 (offer expires Dec. 19th). Join 300+ professionals who have already enrolled.

Want to sponsor Climate Tech Distillery? Here’s all the info.

What Problem Does Oxyle Tackle❓

They tackle the problem of PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances 🤓) contamination in water, commonly known as “forever chemicals”.

1. Widespread Contamination: PFAS are everywhere! Non-stick cookware, cosmetics, fire-fighting foams, food packaging, textiles, electronics, etc.

2. Forever Toxic:They’re incredibly durable and do not degrade naturally. Over 90% of the population carries traces of these toxins, which are linked to cancer and hormonal disruption.

3. Ineffective Solutions: Current standard solutions don’t destroy pollutants; they filter them out. This transfers the problem from the water to the filter, creating a highly toxic concentrate that requires expensive and hazardous incineration.

4. Energy Intensity: Traditional destruction methods (like incineration) require extreme temperatures and lots of energy to break the strong chemical bonds of PFAS, making them carbon-intensive and economically unviable for large-scale use.

5. Treatment complexity: Different water sources have varying PFAS concentrations, water flow rates, and co-contaminants, making uniform treatment solutions impossible. Plus, short and ultra-short chain PFAS compounds are particularly stubborn and difficult to remove.

Product / Service 📦

Oxyle builds on-site modular reactors that permanently destroy “forever chemicals” in wastewater.

Process: Their patented nanocatalysts are activated by simple mechanical energy, like bubbles or vibrations, rather than energy-intensive heat. This triggers a reaction that chemically shreds pollutants, instantly converting all “forever chemicals” into harmless water, CO2, and mineral salts. Zero secondary waste.

Customizable and Versatile: They design solutions specific for each client’s wastewater, solving for a wide range of contaminant concentrations and water types. It works for industrial waste water, surface and groundwater, and even soil remediation.

Permanent Destruction: They break the toughest chemical bonds, removing >99% of PFAS to below detection limits. This includes the hard-to-treat short-chain molecules.

Energy Efficiency: Their process operates at room temperature and pressure, consuming 15x less energy than incineration or other high-heat destruction methods.

Real-Time Monitoring: They offer “OxSignal,” a proprietary analytics tool that provides live data on pollution levels, ensuring instant compliance feedback without waiting weeks for lab results.

Future-Proof Industries: This helps industrial, pharma, and other companies comply with increasingly strict discharge regulations while protecting human health and ecosystems from persistent toxic contamination.

Market 🌐

Remember these chemicals are everywhere and regulations in the EU and US are only going to get stricter.

The cleanup cost for PFAS contamination in Europe alone could reach €1 trillion over the next 20 years. Rising lawsuits and multi-billion-dollar settlements in the U.S. are accelerating adoption of permanent treatment solutions across industrial, municipal, and environmental remediation sectors.

Other Key Players

Axine Water Technologies 🇨🇦: Uses electricity and advanced electrodes to destroy PFAS and persistent organic contaminants in industrial wastewater.

Aquagga 🇺🇸: They turn containers into “pressure cookers“. High temperature and high pressure to break the stable PFAS bonds.

Since Oxyle activates its nanocatalysts using low-energy mechanical sources, like bubbles or vibrations, they can achieve substantially lower operational costs than all other players.

Founding Story 🦄

Oxyle was founded in 2020 by Dr. Fajer Mushtaq and Dr. Silvan Staufert, both researchers at ETH Zurich.

Mushtaq grew up in Delhi facing water scarcity and anxiety about water quality, which inspired her to make water remediation her life’s mission. She developed novel catalysts to eliminate PFAS after witnessing toxic wastewater being incinerated rather than properly treated.

Staufert, trained in mechanical engineering and nanotechnology, recognized that water treatment alone wasn’t enough without real-time monitoring to verify effectiveness. The two met during their PhDs and combined their ideas to create a complete solution.

They deployed their first commercial PFAS destruction system in Switzerland in 2024 and since then they’ve already completed 20 projects. They now have a pipeline of 50+ potential clients and they’ve raised $26 million.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. Achieves >99% elimination rates of PFAS while consuming 15x less energy than alternative destruction methods.

2. The system eliminates all secondary waste, resulting in zero toxic sludge or contaminated filters.

3. They aim to treat 100 million cubic meters of contaminated water within the next five years (40,000 olympic-sized pools).

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your climate business: Automation and AI systems for climate/impact companies so they can free up time, scale their revenues and cut their costs.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)

Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.

This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.

Today we’ll distill the company behind the world’s first 100% natural, biodegradable and high performance colors for all industries: Sparxell 🇬🇧

Shoutout to my friend Hugo Rauch at New Wave, the only podcast you need to keep up with Europe’s climate-tech VC world.

Available on Substack, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Want to sponsor Climate Tech Distillery? Here’s all the info.

What Problem Does Sparxell Tackle❓

They deal with the problems of toxic chemical and plastic pollution from synthetic colorants in industries such as fashion, cosmetics, food, packaging, paint, etc. It’s a big deal:

1. Toxic Dye Pollution: Over 1.5 million tonnes of dyes and microplastics from colorants enter the environment annually, many taking more than 500 years to degrade. They contain harmful heavy metals like lead and chromium.

2. Fossil-based: The color/pigment industry uses more than 10,000 fossil-based chemicals in coloration and contributes around 500 million metric tones of global greenhouse gas emissions each year (1% of global GHG emissions).

3. Health Risks: Titanium dioxide, used in 70% of pigment production worldwide, has been classified as a “possible carcinogen” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. No wonder synthetic dyes, especially in food and cosmetics, are being banned due to health concerns.

4. Water & Energy: Conventional pigment and color manufacturing and applying requires crazy amounts of water and energy. In fashion alone, one tonne of fabric can require up to 200 tonnes of water during the dyeing process.

5. Shady Supply Chain: The pigment industry’s complex supply chains make ethical sourcing nearly impossible to verify, allowing child labor and exploitation to remain hidden.

Product / Service 📦

They make the world’s first 100% plant-based, high-performance pigments. Making color without colorants!

Biomimicry Tech: Inspired by butterfly wings, they extract cellulose nanocrystals from wood pulp that self-assemble into microstructures reflecting vibrant colors. No dyes, just physics and plants.

The Process: The cellulose crystals are dispersed in water, then dried into an iridescent film. By controlling how densely the crystals pack, they can produce any color in the spectrum. The film is then ground into pigments, glitters, etc.

Versatility: They offer top quality pigments, pearls, glitters, sequins, inks, films, and foils. All from the same concept. It works for existing supply chains in food, fashion, cosmetics, packaging, you name it! Extremely customizable to client specifications.

Durability: Unlike traditional natural dyes that degrade, structural colors don’t fade. The same principle keeps century-old butterfly specimens vibrant in museums.

Impact: 0 toxicity and totally safe for humans, 100% recyclable, fully biodegradable, extremely low impact on nature, 100% natural and sustainably manufactured. You get the point.

Market 🌐

The global colourants market is worth around $48 billion (2024) and is projected to grow to over $100 billion by 2030. Though the natural segment is under 1% of the total market, it’s growing much faster. That’s due to regulations (climate impact, health risks, etc.), consumer demand, and big brand investments.

Other Key Players

Nature Coatings 🇺🇸: Black pigments sustainably sourced from certified wood waste to replace carbon black in all industries.

Colorifix 🇬🇧: Develops biological dyeing technology using engineered microbes to produce sustainable, non-toxic textile colorants.

Sparxell’s structural color tech is just way more scalable and broadly applicable.

Founding Story 🦄

Sparxell was launched in Cambridge (UK) in 2023 by Dr Benjamin Droguet and Professor Silvia Vignolini.

Droguet, a materials scientist specializing in bio-inspired photonics, worked within Vignolini’s bio-inspired photonics research group at the University of Cambridge, where they developed industrial machinery to recreate nature’s structural coloration principles.

Once they proved the tech worked and realized how big the color market was, the company spun out of the university and they started looking for investment.

In 2024 they raised a $3.2 million seed round and secured a €1.9 million grant from the EU. They’re now part of LVMH’s prestigious La Maison des Startups accelerator program and they are now producing prototypes for partners in various industries.

Top Impact Stats 📈

1. There are still no precise numbers published but it is estimated their colors achieve 5x less CO₂e emissions, 90% less water usage, and 70% less energy usage compared to traditional colors.

2. Avoiding the usage of 10,000 different chemicals and all the bad stuff that comes with them.

3. The only 100% natural alternative to synthetic pigments, mined metals & minerals, and microplastic products.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Scale and optimize your climate business: Automation and AI systems for climate/impact companies so they can free up time, scale their revenues and cut their costs.

2. Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.

Thanks for reading today’s issue! If you liked it feel free to hit the ❤️ button and share it with someone who might like it too. See you next Saturday:)