Carbon13 invests £1milllon in Net Zero ventures to reduce emissions

Carbon13 invests £1millon in Net Zero ventures to reduce emissions

Carbon13 invests £1million across startups generated by its Venture Builder, each with the potential to reduce CO2e emissions by 10 million tonnes per annum.

Eight innovative carbon emissions-mitigating startups have been launched by Carbon13’s venture builder for the climate emergency and have received an investment of £103,000 plus in-kind support to fast track their development into highly scalable Net Zero ventures.

Each of the ventures has the potential to reduce emissions by 10 million tonnes or more per annum, across sectors including agriculture, food waste, energy storage, materials, and renewable energy. Each venture aims at an even larger target for “total avoidable carbon” — the 10 million tonne figure is our threshold for investing—a substantial enough aim that the ventures are potential “carbon unicorns”.

The Carbon13 SEIS Fund 1 is supported by notable investors including ex-Dragon Nick Jenkins, Peter Cowley, Graham Hobson and Martin Frost.

Carbon13’s overall mission is to use entrepreneurship to reduce emissions by at least 400m tonnes per annum. And, it was founded with a belief that diversity in entrepreneurial founders is an important part of bringing the “think different” mindsets and perspectives to the fore which can achieve the kinds of breakthroughs required by the Net Zero challenge. It is notable therefore that five of the ventures are led by female CEOs and four have minority ethnic leaders (including three CEOs.)

Why Carbon13 is different

Carbon13 is the only venture builder hyper-focused on generating ventures with the explicit goal of reducing emissions by millions of tonnes. Our eight-month programme is “talent-first”, meaning we focus first on the founders’ potential, not the ideas’.

Carbon13’s founder and CEO Dr Chris Coleridge said: “the entrepreneurial process, which involves launching thousands of “small ships” to bring the innovations customers need to achieve Net Zero to market, is based on the idea that everything that a customer needs will eventually be built—the right question is “who will build it?” That’s why we put a strong emphasis on putting together great teams, who then go on to build innovations, founded in technical and commercial terms on sound first principles.” At Carbon13, we select high-potential, impact-driven individuals through a competitive application process. We build a cohort of 60-70 unique founders, a mix of scientists, developers, entrepreneurs and innovators while keeping an eye out for unusual backgrounds where people can fall into our wildcard category.

Our talent-first and mission-focused approach means that our cohort is significantly more experienced than comparable programmes; on average our founders have over 14 years’ experience.

Carbon13’s ecosystem

Carbon13 grew out of the Cambridge ecosystem of academia, entrepreneurship and innovation. This has allowed us to build a Net Zero ecosystem of our own, including partnerships with corporate innovators such as Arm, DLA Piper and bp ventures, as well as over 100 domain experts and relevant investors like the Clean Growth Fund, Potential Climate Ventures, Octopus Ventures and Zero Carbon Capital to support the startups on their journey.

At the end of November, the ventures will be showcased in a series of events in Cambridge and London, aiming to raise seed investment to take them to the next level.

A look at the Carbon13 ventures

Agreed Earth

Agreed Earth’s mission is to accelerate the adoption of regenerative farming practices to reduce global carbon emissions and improve the profitability of the farms themselves. Their platform will leverage technologies such as digital twin technology, satellite imagery and relevant data sources to become the data and decision-making hub for the rapidly expanding regenerative agriculture supply chain within the $10 trillion agriculture industry.

Windfinity

Windfinity aims to become a world leader in wind energy by acquiring legacy (20-year-old) wind turbines and then operating and maintaining them for another 10+ years. These legacy wind turbines are sunk costs both in terms of carbon and money, and therefore generate some of the cleanest and cheapest energy available.

Infyos

Electric vehicles promise a future of clean mobility, but their supply chains are complex, opaque and far from clean. Infyos are building a future where every electric vehicle battery is sustainable. Using expertise in the battery industry and supply chain technology for large organisations around the world, Infyos will help car makers, battery manufacturers and mining companies map and measure the impact of their supply chain, identify hotspots, and enable collaborative action to improve impact and reduce supply chain risk.

Offgrid.Finance

Offgrid.Finance works with clean and productive-use technology vendors to provide financing to their SME customers in emerging markets. Our online platform uses advanced risk analytics and AI to connect green capital and impact investors to small and growing businesses and solve one of their biggest problems: access to capital, enabling them to both grow and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Tierra Foods

Tierra Foods is a food company for the 21st Century.

We are optimising the potential of highly nutritious, but under-used plants from the Central American rainforest into innovative, carbon-negative ingredients for B2B. At the same time, we are also enabling soil regeneration, restoring biodiversity and capturing carbon. A truly regenerative business, we are driving system change, demonstrating how agriculture and food production can be reinvented to work in harmony with nature and communities.

xtonnes

xtonnes is the next generation carbon management platform empowering enterprises of any size to reduce emissions and start their journey to Net Zero. Using minimal data combined with state-of-the-art data science, businesses can begin to take control of their emissions in minutes, effortlessly remain up to date with changes to reporting standards, discover ways to reduce their footprints and achieve science-based targets.

PuriFire Labs

PuriFire Labs is a plastic purifying tech platform based out of the Cambridge, UK. PuriFire’s patented technology converts plastic back in oil, and eventually clean electricity. We are passionate about solving the world’s plastic problem through game changing innovation at the intersection of science, engineering tech and sustainability. Our solution has the potential to solve millions of tons of waste related emissions and address the world’s growing energy needs.

Materials Nexus

Materials Nexus is revolutionising how new low-carbon materials are discovered and developed using their AI platform. Typically, getting a new material to market takes 20 years but this can be markedly reduced using their new platform. Their initial focus is on novel alloys and ceramics, leading with high-strength, light-weight recyclable alloys to replace steel in the automotive industry, that promise up to 20% increase in fuel/battery efficiency.

Carbon13 invests £1millon in Net Zero ventures to reduce emissions

Why Carbon13 is different

Carbon13’s ecosystem

A look at the Carbon13 ventures

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