by tyler | Dec 12, 2023 | Tech
The increasing need to reduce carbon emissions drives many industries, including airlines and transportation, to seek sustainable alternatives to meet emission reduction targets and fulfill corporate social responsibility commitments. One of the solutions is sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), which can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80% compared to traditional jet fuel.
An Ithaca, New York-based company called Dimensional Energy produces sustainable aviation fuel from carbon dioxide emissions and water, and the company said today it has closed $20 million in a Series A round to ramp up renewable jet fuel production.
Envisioning Partners led the latest funding, which brings its total raised to $28 million, with strategic participation from investors including United Airlines’ sustainable flight fund, Microsoft’s climate innovation fund, RockCreek’s smart aviation futures fund, DSC Investment, Delek US, New York Ventures and existing investors like Elemental Excelerator and Chloe Capital.
“The extraction and production of hydrocarbons has resulted in not only climate change but the displacement of indigenous people globally and myriad environmental catastrophes,” Dimensional Energy founder and CEO Jason Salfi told TechCrunch. “Dimensional Energy makes a replacement for oil from carbon dioxide and water. Dimensional is committed to sourcing feedstocks in balance with nature and communities where plants are built.”
The company plans to use the new capital to construct an advanced power-to-liquid fuels plant, utilizing emissions from Lafarge’s Richmond Cement Plant in British Columbia, Canada, in partnership with carbon capture tech company Svante. Dimensional also earmarked part of the raise to develop a 200-barrel-per-day commercial power-to-liquid facility in New York and introduce its first consumer (B2C) and B2B products, including fossil-free surf wax and a cruelty-free fat alternative customized for vegan food companies.
Image Credits: Tristan Davison / Dimensional Energy
Image Credits: Tristan Davison / Dimensional Energy
The seven-year-old company sells its products to airlines, freight companies and specialty chemical firms. Earlier this year, Dimensional Energy and Boom Supersonic, an aircraft maker, signed a sustainable aviation fuel offtake deal that Boom would purchase up to 5 million gallons of SAF per year for Boom’s airliner flight test program. The company’s investor, United Airlines, also sealed a 300 million-gallon offtake agreement deal last year.
Dimensional generates revenue via contracted offtake agreements, Salfi said, adding that it is actively looking for additional long-term contracts with airlines and specialty chemical companies. On top of that, the company will develop projects in partnership with EPCs (engineering, procurement and construction) to expand its business, the CEO noted.
“Over the last several decades, low carbon power and efficiency gains have been deployed at scale,” Salfi said. “Dimensional saw the need in 2016 to make the molecules that would support a circular economy from carbon dioxide and renewable energy. The company went on to invent, integrate, scale and develop platform technologies that produce environmentally responsible and socially just hydrocarbons.”
Apart from its Series A fundraising, Dimensional announced its filing of the Delaware Public Benefit Corporation. Salfi said it works with third parties to verify its performance, carbon intensity and full life cycle analysis.
“The world needs immediate and rapid decarbonization across all sectors, and Dimensional Energy shows great promise as a cleaner and lower carbon aviation solution alongside reductions in industrial emissions,” Brandon Middaugh, senior director of climate innovation fund at Microsoft, said in a statement. “Microsoft has been an early adopter of sustainable aviation fuel and sees this market as critical for global decarbonization, which is why Microsoft’s climate innovation fund is supporting Dimensional Energy’s work as a direct equity investor.”
Other renewable aviation fuel manufacturers include LanzaTech, Neste, Gevo and World Energy. Dimensional’s key specialization is unparalleled diversity of skills and backgrounds, Salfi said, without further explanation. The outfit has 41 employees.
“Dimensional Energy’s mix of proven large-scale technology, proprietary catalyst technology and project development capabilities positions the company very well for fast scale-up globally,” said Yong Hyun Kim, managing partner of Envisioning Partners.
Sustainable jet fuel company Alder Fuels seals investments from United, Honeywell
Shell invests in LanzaJet to speed up deliveries of its synthetic aviation fuel
by tyler | Dec 5, 2023 | Tech
Something that often gets lost in discussions about climate change is the massive health benefits the world would realize by ceasing to burn fossil fuels.
Pollution from coal, oil and natural gas isn’t just responsible for respiratory diseases like asthma and lung cancer, but also strokes, heart disease and even premature death. Fine particulate matter produced by combustion has been linked to greater risk of kidney disease , diabetes , preterm birth , osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s .
What’s more, a warming planet poses numerous health risks on its own. Extreme weather events like heat waves increase the risk of death among older adults and infants. Infectious diseases like malaria, dengue, Vibrio and numerous tick-borne illnesses thrive in warmer conditions, spreading those threats farther toward the poles than ever before.
Which is how I found myself, a climate tech reporter, talking with two partners from RA Capital, an investment firm better known for its positions in life sciences and healthcare.
A few years ago, the firm realized that even if it could be fantastically successful, backing a myriad of companies that could produce successful therapies that cure various cancers and other diseases, people would still be dying by the millions from the effects of pollution, said Kyle Teamey, managing partner of planetary health at RA Capital. If the firm didn’t also address the root cause of many diseases, it would effectively be failing at its mission to make people healthier.
by tyler | Dec 1, 2023 | Tech
For a person whose company is firmly tethered to terra firma, Brad Hartwig spent a long time trying to leave it.
As a high schooler, Hartwig built a pedal-driven helicopter after reading about a human-powered helicopter competition in Popular Science. (It didn’t win.) He then went to USC for aerospace engineering, where he and his team built a rocket to go to space. (It did.) After graduating, Hartwig worked on the engines for SpaceX’s Dragon so the crew and cargo spacecraft could dock with the International Space Station. (It did, safely.)
Then he decided that he didn’t just want to build things that went to space; he wanted to go himself. So he set out to burnish his résumé to become a NASA astronaut candidate, serving in the California Air National Guard and volunteering for Marin County’s search and rescue team responding to wildfires. He also worked for a short time as a flight test engineer for Kittyhawk, the Larry Page–backed, ill-fated e-VTOL startup.
“I held on to the astronaut dream a lot longer than the average kid,” Hartwig told TechCrunch+.
He hasn’t let go entirely, but early last year his life took a bit of a detour when he founded Arbor , a startup that builds specialized power plants to remove carbon dioxide from the air.
It’s cliché to say that everything Hartwig had done in life led him to that point, but in this case, it’s kind of true.
Arbor’s equipment converts waste biomass into syngas, which is then combusted in the presence of pure oxygen to produce pure CO 2 . The compressed gas is fed through compact turbo machinery similar to that used in SpaceX’s rockets to produce electricity. Hartwig calls it a “vegetarian rocket engine.”
When he first started searching for a way into climate tech, he wasn’t sure his experience at SpaceX would matter, but it turned out to be more applicable than he imagined. Much of Arbor’s technology is derived from the rocket world, including the turbo machinery that generates power and the cryogenic oxygen distillers that supply the oxycombustion unit. His time on the search and rescue team wasn’t wasted, either: He witnessed the massive amount of biomass that resulted from forest-thinning practices meant to reduce wildfire risk. That biomass could become fuel for Arbor’s power plants.
by tyler | Dec 1, 2023 | Tech
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts .
Hello and welcome back to Equity , a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Friday show, and we’re talking about the week’s biggest startup and tech news.
This week Mary Ann, Kirsten Korosec and Alex Wilhelm were on hand to chew through a veritable mountain of news. Despite the fact that today is the first of December, tech news is still dropping at a quick clip. So for now, there’s lots to talk about:
We are back on Monday! Chat then!
For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website .
Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto , a show that interviews founders and more!
by tyler | Nov 30, 2023 | Tech
Amini , a Kenya-based climate-tech startup bridging the environmental data gap in Africa, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Salesforce Ventures and the Female Founders Fund. Climate-tech VC Satgana also participated, alongside other investors, including Pale Blue Dot and Superorganism, which had previously backed the startup in its $2 million pre-seed round earlier this year.
Amini mainly pulls data from satellites and integrates it with other datasets, including sensor, research and ground truthing to, for instance, offer insights on biodiversity, soil or crop health, or to track farming progress and practices (regenerative) like water or fertilizer use. The startup says its platform enables the creation of real-time monitoring tools and ML models to support insights into diverse actions, including flood detection.
Kate Kallot , Amini founder and CEO, says the data aggregation platform taps artificial intelligence and space technologies to make environmental data on Africa easily accessible, for easier decision making and transparency in supply chains.
“What we are building is going to make brands more accountable and to do what is right for the people, environment and planet. It will also help them measure progress against what they say they are doing or will do, but also in a way that shows the world that they are truly sustainable brands…and can prove it because they have the data to do so,” Kallot told TechCrunch.
Its initial clients include enterprises in the agricultural and insurance industries, among them Aon. Amini also has its eyes on food and beverage companies and consumer packaged goods producers that are “aiming to sustainably transform their supply chains” as it doubles down on enabling multinationals to transform their supply chain to regenerative. This comes as new regulations in “the U.S and Europe that compel corporations to disclose the climate risks in their supply chains.”
Amini team. Image Credits: Amini
Amini team. Image Credits: Amini
Kallot says Amini being at the fore of enhancing transparency, data access and greater economic inclusion for farmers is a “unique opportunity to kickstart positive feedback loops that will transform global food systems.”
“We want to empower our people. We want to help all these farmers to move from surviving to thriving. Our thesis is that you can only do that if you have access to data because if you have access to data, there is transparency and if you have transparency, then you have trust. And when you have trust, people invest more,” said Kallot, who previously held tech roles in various companies including Nvidia and Intel.
“It’s exactly the reason why we’re doing this. We’re trying to empower people and flip the narrative when it comes to Africa. But also recalibrate a little bit the value chain, because if you look at the cocoa value chain, for example, people making the most money will probably be the ones who are selling the finished product. The people making the least money are the ones producing the commodities. How can you rebalance and innovate that chain and bring the value down into the hands of the farmers and the people on the continent?” posed Kallot.
Amini, which can provide historical data up to 20 years, has limitless use cases, and Kallot is keen on building it into a platform that can be used to build other solutions for the continent.
“The big aspiration of Amini is to be a pure platform play. We are not going to solve the entire continent’s problems, and that is why we are focusing on making sure that we have good environmental data for Africa. And then give thousands of developers and people tools to help them create even more innovative solutions for their communities,” she said.
Commenting about the deal, Claudine Emeott, the VP of Salesforce Ventures Impact Fund, which has invested in a handful of companies in Africa including Flutterwave, Andela and Angaza, said: “We are thrilled to support Amini, a trailblazing company at the forefront of artificial intelligence innovation and climate technology. Amini.ai’s cutting-edge technology is poised to redefine industries and drive transformative change. With a visionary team and a commitment to pushing the boundaries of climate AI, we are confident that it is poised for exceptional growth.”
African climate startups set to gain ground as VC funding shifts their way
