The Green Techpreneur (GT) is here to #SparkTheTransition to a world where people, planet and profit align. We are a springboard platform for climate tech startups: we offer an investor/startup marketplace to help you raise funds and a magazine/podcast to share innovation and insight – by founders for founders. Join our network of over 5,200 climate tech entrepreneurs, investors, and sustainability warriors who are moving the needle on climate change.Investors take note:Ourobio - a synthetic biology and fermentation startup has just announced their pre-Seed/Seed round, in which they are targeting a raise ~$2M to construct their pilot fermentation line to deliver the first kilograms of PHA and pigment to customers, initiate material certification, secure long-term commercial offtake agreements, improve yields to scale production further to 1 tpa, file PCT and continuation in-part conversion applications, and bring new members onto their team. For investment enquiries, contact: abrewer@ourobio.comPluri’s Coffeesai - is raising $6.5 million to scale a ground-breaking solution in cell coffee production. It harnesses two decades of biotechnological expertise to deliver 100% authentic coffee through cellular agriculture, reducing water usage by 98% compared to traditional methods. Watch this video to learn more. For investment enquiries, contact: Michal.ogolnik@pluri-biotech.comTogether with co-founders Aslan Shamsutdin, Murshid M. Ali and Petter S. Berge, Pratik Ghoshal, CEO and Co-founder of Skyfri Technologies developed technology which could streamline and automate solar asset operations to make solar power cheaper and solar capital investment significantly more sustainable.Skyfri’s technology targeted a genuine market pain point and within just a few months of launching, company growth soared by 500%. And with Skyfri’s solar asset management solution offering immediate savings of operating heads by 20-30% for power plants that were previously manually managed, their skyrocketing growth is hardly a surprise.Backed by climate investors SpeedInvest, Singularity and Link Venture, Skyfri manages about 185 sites worldwide and is dramatically accelerating growth through targeted acquisitions.Pratik says there was a strong element of right place, right time serendipity to Skyfri’s growth: the solar market was in desperate need of a better management solution, to a point where money and investors may have started to flow out of the space if more efficient ways of operating weren’t found.But the most important component of Skyfri’s success, he says, was not the market or the service or technology they provide – it was the people behind the name.“What’s the most important thing I’ve seen in my journey as an entrepreneur?“It’s that your team is your biggest asset.“Most of the time you fail as an entrepreneur because you just don’t have likeminded people. You don’t have people who you can depend on. Because you alone can’t be a one man army.“For me, having a co-founding team, not just a co-founder, was the key for Skyfri.“I do my 10% of the work, they their 90% of the work and we all do it together. If we hadn’t found that team, we probably wouldn’t be here,” says Pratik.To launch and build Skyfri just before the pandemic shook the world, the co-founding team had to take a leap of faith; “we started recruiting people to work remote, that’s how we grew. It was six months before I even met my co-founders in person – by then we had already raised funds.”His motto? “The entrepreneur’s job is to make the receptionist rich.”In this Green Techpreneur interview, Pratik talks all things growth, solar and team-building.Where did the idea behind Skyfri come from?My co-founders were all serial entrepreneurs in Oslo, Norway. We’ve known each other since almost five years now - since 2017 when I was working as Head of Global Sales in a manufacturing company in Munich. They wanted to develop a solar project. I went my way and became a global asset manager in London, but we always kept in touch and thought we could one day do something together.And incidentally, we found we were all facing similar issues. In 2020, we started connecting with each other; we had these solar power plants that didn’t work. We didn’t know what was happening, it was like a black box that we didn’t understand and our investment was at risk. So we decided to do something about it and we had a breakthrough from a technological point of view and that’s how Skyfri was born.What are key elements to working together successfully as co-founders?The most important thing is, you all share a common vision, you all have the same pain points, and you all are frustrated with the status quo. You have to be frustrated with the status quo to start something new. There’s no way the world moves ahead with incremental changes, you have to change things overnight, or at least have the ambition to change things.What does your technology do?We wanted to make solar plant management more systemized, we wanted to modernise it with automation. We target and transform three key underperformance areas:We identify energy losses in real-timeWhen reporting happens on the asset management, you get a report after a month or a quarter and you suddenly realise that some of your plants didn't work. Something burnt out and needed replacement and by the time you know you already lost revenue and need to spend more to fix the issues. So we wanted to know exactly when things fail, or even futuristically predict when they might finish or start showing signs of underperformance. That's real-time management. We break the silosWe wanted to fundamentally change the system of operations, accounting and monitoring as siloed systems to have this be a single source of truth in a single integrated platform.We do all of this autonomously The algorithm runs on machine learning, deep learning setup, and it monitors solar plants and does things automatically that previously needed a 20–30 member team depending on portfolio size. So the final value proposition to the investor goes back in the form of increased rate of return.What’s your knock-on impact on the solar industry?20 years ago it cost 5 million Euros to build one megawatt of solar power – now that figure is just 0.5 million Euros per megawatt: because of the immense drop in capital expenditure, it has already become a mainstream class asset but what would have derailed its potential is the lack of management of the solar power plants – and that's where we come in. We are seeing an increased amount of investment and we want to not only sustain that money, we want more to come in to reduce global warming.If we had not done it, we probably would see the capital drain out of renewable energy investments.What is it about entrepreneurship that gives you that kick, and makes you go ‘yes, this is what I want to do!’?You of course have your freedom of thought, everyone has it in a free world. But the freedom of execution to channel the energy that you have without having to stick to a frame structure which already exists is what's most interesting.And the second thing is, at the beginning of entrepreneurship, there’s a lot of energy and that's what makes you get up in the morning, and like my wife says, I’m less of a thinker than a doer. I like to do things, so there’s no better avenue than entrepreneurship.Can you describe your entrepreneurial journey in three words?Extremely busy, very interesting, very scaryWhat’s the scariest part about being a climatetech entrepreneur?The scariest part is, ‘what if the team doesn’t feel the same way tomorrow?’I’m not worried about the market, because it’s clear, the market is there, but I want the team to be equally passionate and what if tomorrow we wake up and start to see a lot of disconnect in the team? That’s the scary part. To keep everyone motivated in the team – that’s our biggest asset by far – I cannot overstate this.The team has to stick together. Family is a cliche, but it’s a common vision, common mission that the team has to always feel, to always want to stay ahead of the curve by asking the most critical and even unpleasant questions – this is the motivation I want to see everyday in my team.How do you create that team spirit?We dislike the idea that there’s a value statement – because no one reads them – and the values may change over time.What we think is there’s one value that doesn’t change and that is a sense of care. Care for each other, care for the people with whom you spend 85% of your waking time with.And that care automatically translates into care for your customer. If you care for the customer and stand by them when they need help the most, that’s when you create lifelong loyalty.And you can’t write it on the wall, so someone reads it and says; ‘I’ll be caring, I’ll be caring, I’ll be caring.’ It has to be your natural self, so he or she sees that care happening in the company all the time.In the face of climate chaos, what gives you hope for the future?I give a lot of credit to the youth of today. You have Greta Thunberg and she has inspired a whole generation of youth. They don't have the data points, but they just get it with the snap of a finger, that this is not sustainable, this is not how they want to live. That’s the movement that is happening in front of the line.The second credit goes to the community of scientists that have been working tirelessly to prove beyond shadow of doubt that climate change is happening and we should do something about it.If you could teleport yourself into your future, where would you be?The company Skyfri would still be creating a lot of value as one of the most trusted and dependable in the internet enabled space. We will try to win the solar world and we’ll play a role in virtual power plants, the smart grid, anything that is on the supply side.I don’t know what management capacity I’ll be in 10 years from now, because it’s nice to make room for the next gener
The Green Techpreneur (GT) is here to #SparkTheTransition to a world where people, planet and profit align. We are a springboard platform for climate tech startups: we offer an investor/startup marketplace to help you raise funds and a magazine/podcast to share innovation and insight – by founders for founders. Join our network of over 5,200 climate tech entrepreneurs, investors, and sustainability warriors who are moving the needle on climate change.He thought it was the perfect asset.It grew by double digits over the last ten years, it’s regulated, trustworthy and phenomenally successful as a CO2 buster: the market and its mechanisms have helped drive an approximately 47% decrease in the EU’s industrial participants’ emissions since 2005.Serial tech entrepreneur Valentin Lautier had been browsing the front page of the Financial Times a few years ago, when a picture of the upwards curve of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme’s (ETS) carbon allowance price caught his eye – at the time it was priced at €20, it's since shot up to about €70. “I was thinking, how do I buy this stuff? Because it's going to continue to go up, and if I buy some, I actually help the price to increase because I’m confiscating some of the supply - and then I realise that I can’t.” It was this barrier to investment in the EU ETS that drove the French entrepreneur, who had been searching for his next venture – one that would make the proverbial ‘dent in the universe’ – to create investment platform Homaio. Fast-forward a few years and his company is unlocking the market for retail investors.The platform is in its infancy, but Homaio has already wooed clients from around the world—from Europe to Brazil, the United States to Singapore. Homaio is now sitting on a stash of 10,000 European carbon allowances, each one granting the right to emit one tonne of CO2. That’s 10,000 tonnes of CO2 permits taken off the market: the beauty of investing in the EU ETS is that it ‘confiscates’ emission allowances from the market, forcing prices up and thus creating the impetus for faster industrial decarbonisation.Homaio is betting big that this will become a superstar asset class: “investors are chasing investments that offer returns, are trustworthy, easy to grasp, backed by solid evidence, and measurable. When I search for those qualities, EU ETS is the only thing that fits the bill,” says Lautier.Kicking off in 2005, the Emissions Trading Scheme was designed to put the brakes on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, industrial factories and aviation in the EU. It works by setting a ‘cap’ on the number of emission allowances. Companies can receive, buy, or trade these allowances within this cap, which shrinks every year, pushing companies to cut their emissions as their carbon ‘budget’ tightens.This scheme has a massive reach, covering about half of the EU’s industrial emissions. It applies across all EU Member States, the European Free Trade Association countries, and Northern Ireland for electricity generation. Around 15,000 industrial players in Europe are required to hold allowances equal to their emissions and must return them at the year’s end.Valentin brings 15 years experience as a tech entrepreneur to the table and doesn’t shy away from discussing the realities of green techpreneurship. When asked about how he’d describe his journey with Homaio so far, he says it’s been enthralling and exhilarating, but the word that really springs to mind is “embattled – everything is a fight.”He remains motivated by a love for innovation, the environment, and a determination to not follow the path of least resistance: “I think what we’re doing is extremely hard and extremely new,” says Valentin. “The idea of doing the right thing, even if it’s hard, is really something that – live or die – I want Homaio to convey. We’re trying to build a different path. We’re a little bit uncompromising. There’s beauty and value in doing things right…I hope it makes a difference to those we touch.”Can you explain what the EU ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) is?The EU ETS is a compliance carbon market, trading a certain number of carbon allowances every year at a monetary value fixed by the EU. The supply, or number of allowances, decreases every year and the price subsequently goes up. So the market has a standardised trading unit. The primary market is the initial purchase of the physical asset and the secondary market is where players trade derivatives amongst themselves. One of the cornerstones of its success is that industrial parties are legally obliged to participate.It’s not the only market of its kind, nor is it the first. A great example of this kind of market is the US Sulphur Market, started by the US government in the 1990s. The aim was to drastically reduce sulphur emissions which were causing extreme acid rain in the US, and it proved successful over just ten years. Now, there are around 40 such jurisdiction/government-led schemes with a standardised trading unit, but Europe is presently the largest and most sophisticated. The EU only issues a fixed amount of allowances and this decreases every year: there’s always a need, but the supply is decreasing, so we get a politically driven price increase. The EU’s aim? To incentivise decarbonisation rather than offset. The price point of the allowances creates a fork in the road – do companies invest in the carbon allowances or invest in solutions and reduce their dependency?Why do emissions trading schemes in general have such a bad reputation for greenwashing?The reason for the negativity and scepticism around emissions trading schemes is because there are also voluntary carbon markets – thousands of them, with voluntary participation and various non-standardised units. This generates a lot of the controversies around the lack of opacity, lack of standards and lack of proven results. The voluntary markets are small, though, amounting to around $2 billion in value, or around 500 times smaller than the European market.What practical steps did you take to unlock access to EU ETS investing?We had to work with the regulation to open access to the underlying assets, via the EU Energy exchange and the Intercontinental exchange. Both of these exchanges trading physical assets and derivative contracts. Once access was gained, we had to wrap these assets. You need to encapsulate them in a financial instrument that can be distributed to general investors, in our case this is bonds, backed by the physical allowances we hold in custody accounts. We’re targeting smaller retail investors – not because it’s the best business – but because we believe they’re the most concerned by climate change and also by political participation in these markets.What does the process look like if you want to invest via Homaio?You simply sign up to Homaio online and subscribe to our investment product. We need some details – your basic KYC process – and then you can invest from around €1000*. Depending on the amount you hold, you could have a minimum holding period that’s as little as six months. But Homaio views this as a mid-long term investment. Of course, no return is guaranteed; there’s risk and you might also experience a loss, but we expect approximately a 12% - 18% increase per year over the next five years. This is backed by the fact that the member states have an interest in the increasing price of these assets, because they make money from them.What lessons did you take from previous entrepreneurial experience that you’re bringing to Homaio?Over time I’ve lost things and learned things. I’ve lost naivete.In my first venture, I had a very simplistic view of the world which helped me throw myself at challenges or obstacles because I didn't realise their size. And I've lost that – I kind of miss the 20-year-old me that was a little bit crazy. But I’ve gained a deeper understanding of who I am and of what I need. Knowing myself a bit better through experience is something that is important to me. Another key learning has been knowing how I work with others and what I need from a team. I think I’ve become a much better recruiter over the years. Team is everything. Your team has to fit with your personality. So, as an entrepreneur, you need great lucidity around what you need to succeed and what types of personalities you need. That takes time.What is your advice for other entrepreneurs in this space?I’ve had a lot of successes and a lot of failures and I’m still here. A lot of new entrepreneurs are afraid of risk. I find that strange – nothing will or can happen to you physically. The worst case scenario is that everything you’re trying to build crashes and you’ve learned a lot. You live to fight another day.Living through the entrepreneurial cycle of highs and lows gives you perspective and toughens your skin. You can only get this with experience, there’s no shortcut. You have to take the long route if you’re not piggybacking on already established ideas and mechanisms.Everyone’s trying to do things the way that ‘works’ without questioning whether there’s a way to do it better. There are a lot of times where I have to accept that I’m going against the consensus. There are other times where I’m happy to compromise and accept a conventional approach. As an entrepreneur you're always bombarded with contradictory advice or opinions and you need to know when to hold your ground and when to say ‘okay, I'm probably wrong there’. Having intuitive knowledge of which battle you’re facing is super important because you could be fighting the wrong battle for a very long time and then just hit a wall.Do you have any daily rituals that keep you going?I would love to say that I wake up at 4.30 a.m. and meditate, but I don’t.What keeps me going isn't so much a ritual, it's more that feeling that I'm working on something that's extremely hard and exciting and unique. It's going to have a huge impact and I think that is the perfect way to spend my time; that'
The Green Techpreneur (GT) is here to #SparkTheTransition to a world where people, planet and profit align. We are a springboard platform for climate tech startups: we offer an investor/startup marketplace to help you raise funds and a magazine/podcast to share innovation and insight – by founders for founders. Join our network of over 5,200 climate tech entrepreneurs, investors, and sustainability warriors who are moving the needle on climate change.You might think that working in waste-reduction, in a world that seems to be just keeping its head above the tidal wave of waste, would be a little thankless. But Todd Mathes, CEO of one of the US’ largest landfill-diversion firms, Denali, says he’s “more hopeful than fearful.” It’s a refreshing outlook – especially given the sector his company works with and food waste trends that show signs of a worsening wastage crisis.Denali specialises in landfill-diversion and repurposing solutions. The company operates across the US to take waste streams that typically go to landfills – spoiled produce and food damaged in transit, food waste, dead plant matter and even expired condiments still in packaging and food-soiled wrappers – and converts these into useful products that go back into the food and agriculture sector. The solids are turned into green compost, animal feed, soil and much more. Liquid products, like residuals in water from cleaning or used cooking oil, can be repurposed into fertilisers or biodiesel. Many of their solutions go right back into the industries that produced them to reduce the input costs for food manufacturers and producers.These circular solutions couldn’t be more urgently needed. Estimates suggest that the US wastes 38–40% of its food produced annually – that’s equivalent to 130 billion meals by some estimates, or over $400 billion worth of food, straight into landfills. That’s a huge financial waste, waste of space, and a great shame, given the amount of families living in food poverty in the US alone, some 17 million households in 2022 according to the US Department of Agriculture. The food waste epidemic is a global issue: the EU generates over 58 million tonnes of food waste each year according to the European Commission, while approximately 9.5 million tonnes of food waste are generated in the UK every single year. These facts should have us all hand-wringing as the cost of living crisis throws more families into food poverty. Financial waste and poverty aside, it’s also pretty damming for the climate. Research shows that approximately 8% of global (human-induced) greenhouse gas emissions arise from food waste as its rotting.So how can we produce affordable good food, stop the astronomical waste, and use earth’s land and water resources sustainably? Todd has been in the food waste business for a long time and sees plenty of reasons for hope – Denali has been around since 2013, but he was also part of its predecessor, Terrarenewal, which was founded in the 1990s. In this time, he’s seen companies go from arbitrarily and superficially keeping score of waste, to actually starting to take meaningful action. He says there are a lot of young leaders in the space, and nowadays you “see large organisations embracing sustainability requirements and actually using sustainability as part of their decision-making process” – something that was probably unimaginable in the 90s. The CEO says it’s “the excitement to work with the professionals I work with every day” that gets him out of bed in the morning. “It’s not hard to get up and work with the people I work with; I’m inspired by the excitement they have around our business.He jumpstarts his day with a cup of coffee…”and I drink that watching Squawk Box on CNBC (US pre-morning news and talk show). The only other thing I do on a daily basis is take time out for myself to get in an afternoon workout every day.” It’s certainly refreshing to hear CEOs talking about time for themselves – oft undervalued in the business rat race.“Every day I come to work with a plan…just about every day it gets derailed. But that keeps my work exciting,” says Todd. “We are part of an infrastructure that’s needed to keep the people who feed the world up and running – I think that’s really important and exciting. We want to make sure the world is fed and it’s done so in a sustainable way.”What are some of Denali’s biggest achievements?Denali recycled more than 2.6 billion pounds of food waste in under two years, working in partnership with over 10,500 grocers, including big names like Walmart and Kroger, as well as smaller food delivery services, like HelloFresh. We also partner with cities, hospitality providers and even the Super Bowl. The firm recycles more than 10 billion pounds of organic materials each year in addition to food (wastewater, sludge, plants, etc). The fertiliser produced replaces a commercial fertiliser that would normally be derived from raw materials. Many of the dry goods, fruits and vegetables that Denali collects and processes are converted into very nutritious animal feed – that’s a really important part of the circular economy. The compost is bagged and sold back into retail outlets…We are a happy participant in how society is evolving and becoming more responsible. What are Denali’s origins and how did you evolve?This company grew from a small company called Terrarenewal and that company started addressing specific needs for processes where companies have to clean their water prior to discharging back to a municipality or into the environment and in doing so they would create this nutrient-rich slurry that we would take, test, and repurpose as a fertiliser for farmers. There were some very passionate entrepreneurs that started that business and that led into handling other organic waste streams. What was pivotal to getting to where you are today?There was tremendous vision from my predecessor. He had a big vision to compile different solutions to organic waste and bring them together as one network. He went out to find acquisition targets that fit that model for landfill diversion – he worked very hard to do that and it’s his vision that we’re continuing on today. What are the main challenges your business faces?We have a lot of competition from businesses offering similar services but not identical offers. So we have to compare ourselves to those solutions and convince customers that we have the better solution. This is an emerging market and there are lots of ideas out there, and lots of companies out there, but we are out there telling our story every day and we believe it makes a difference.The acquisitions that we made to fit into our wider network - that comes with great change for those smaller entrepreneurs who were out there in local markets and that can be difficult. But once you see those entrepreneurs embrace the things we’re doing, it’s exciting to see the change and how they can evolve.What trends do you see emerging in the food waste sector?I see impetus at all levels primarily to reduce the waste. People are saying, let’s prevent waste food in the system and that’s good. So, over time we will continue to grow and develop solutions but I think we’ll [at Denali] have reduced raw material in our systems. But when you get into the mass-production of food, you’re not going to fully eliminate waste. There will always be byproducts and waste products in the system, and we’ll continue to use those.We believe waste should not be wasted.I also think re-use options will change with new technologies that are coming all the time – we’ve got our ear to the ground in that regard. Other trends include improvements in anaerobic digestion, increased fertiliser value, and new market products for organic waste. We’ve been doing this a long time but the space itself is starting to emerge into a new era.How did you persuade over 10,500 major grocers – and many more partners besides – to buy into this particular circularity concept?We did a good job of understanding their needs and what their goals were, so we could develop solutions that actually make sense not just from a sustainability perspective; they have to make sense financially too. If it’s too expensive, they won’t use the solution. I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to provide good, value-adding service – always be at the service of your customer and provide robust feedback about what’s happening with their waste. It’s really all about good relationships. We’re getting better at it everyday, and the better we get, the better our relationship with our retail customers.What are your top tips for other climate entrepreneurs?Vision: Have a big vision for the future of your business. Don’t think small, think big. Be thinking, ‘I can do this today, but what can I create tomorrow?’Persistence: you have to be persistent in pursuing that vision. You have to serve your customers well, provide value back to them. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of offering your customers superior service and give them a true value proposition. What’s your favourite quote?My favourite quote is from Einstein “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” I apply this by thinking, ‘how do I learn from yesterday to improve on tomorrow?’ My life philosophy is connected to this, I don’t like to look back, I like to be thinking ahead and forward. Learn and then move forwards. I call it ‘looking through the windshield, not the rearview.’What have you learnt from role models?When I was younger, it was definitely my grandfather. He was a farmer in Kansas and a very wise man, I learnt a lot from him.My college coach – Ethan Reed – was very influential in my mindset. A lot of my collage teammates are also in leadership roles now, in their sectors, and I feel like his way of coaching led us to be leaders, to have a leadership mentality.As I entered into business, one of my former managers said something that really stuck wi
A warm welcome to the 40 new subscribers who have joined since the last edition! If you haven’t subscribed, sign up below to join a network of over 2,850 climate tech entrepreneurs and investors. The Green Techpreneur (GT) is a comprehensive platform with a marketplace and magazine to help your climate startup raise funds and gain the actionable insight you need to make your mark on the planet.Investors take note!! We have a fantastic opportunity for you below to make money while making a real difference in empowering Sustainable Finance, Trade, Energy, Money & Community. Find out more below.In tough-to-disrupt industries, going for size and scale can sometimes be the only way to truly rewrite norms and shake up supply chains that are at odds with people and planet.This was the realisation that green techpreneur Boris Wullner Garces, CEO at Green Coffee Company (GCC) – Colombia’s largest producer of Arabica coffee – came to in 2021 when he set out on a scale up journey: “value share is very important for us: everything we do, we are not only doing for us as a company, we are also doing it for the coffee growers. We’re getting away from intermediaries and going directly to the consumer so we can pay a better price to farmers. But to do this, you have to have scale.”Despite the coffee sector acting on sustainability initiatives, commercial practices still often exploit farmers with only 10% of coffee’s total value staying in the countries of origin. The coffee market is largely steeped in a power imbalance where coffee farmers are disempowered by intermediaries who control access to buyers and take the majority share of profits, while the coffee farmers are often left struggling to pay for education and healthcare. “If you can buy green coffee at $1.09 per pound, and the roasters are selling you a bag of roasted coffee in the U.S. at $12.99 in the supermarket and it is only 12 ounces, who’s getting the money? Not the growers and they’re the ones doing everything,” says Boris.In six short years since it’s founding in 2017, Columbia-based Green Coffee Company has not just grown into one of the largest coffee producers in the world, it has been on a fast-track growth journey to cut out intermediaries, disrupt, reshape, own and green every aspect of its supply chain. “We’re thinking completely outside of the box: we are being disruptive at every step of the chain, from the nursery to the dry and wet milling to the roasting. We’re reducing our operating costs all across the chain….we’re attacking all the old parts of the chain that normally are not tackled by growers. Today, GCC has more than 12.5 million coffee trees. Its size and scale gives it the bandwidth to successfully disrupt an often exploitative industry and its proving that the green economy is also better for business.It implements cost-saving, cutting-edge technologies to green its supply chain and is a circular economy pioneer, adding new product lines by repurposing coffee cherry waste to produce ethanol (used in gin/vodka) and cascava flour. “The company generates something very important in the agricultural sector: a mirror effect,” explains Marcela Urueña, Colombian government chief advisor for coffee affairs."I see them as an 'anchor producer' that sets the coffee business dynamics in the area …from delivering information about technologies to centralising purchases of fertilisers to get better prices for all producers around the region, sharing these economic benefits with all the small producers and coffee farmers around GCC. It is a truthful generator of enriched social networks that should lead to social and economic stability in the region where it is located."GCC has already raised a total of $65 million of equity, and is currently seeking $65 million of institutional debt capital to execute expansion plans. By 2026, the company projects it will be in a position to launch a U.S. IPO exit.Here’s a look at what it took to scale up and transform supply chains to put social and climate justice into the heart of your next brew. How did you first get involved with GCC?I'm a biological systems engineer. I've always been involved with agriculture. I spent over a decade working in the Colombian flower business, primarily in sales and marketing. Following that, I led Invest in Bogota, a startup incubator focused on bringing international business to the region. Before joining GCC, I held a position at a university as the Vice Dean for Biological Systems Engineering. I also took on consultancy roles and helped the Colombian palm oil industry improve their sustainability efforts.When I was invited to join GCC in 2020, we talked extensively about the transformative changes they envisioned for the industry, I thought, ‘this is what I've been waiting for.’ We discussed the goal of becoming a highly profitable yet inclusive company. It seemed like the only way to change the culture in Colombia and provide growers with a sustainable income. These past 3.5 years with the company have been nothing short of amazing. We've accomplished so much.How are you disrupting norms in coffee production? We own the entire supply chain, the roasting, milling, byproduct and harvesting processes and then we go direct to consumers into mass market supermarkets in the U.S. and around the world. We've been completely reimagining our approach to production. When we first embarked on this journey, the wet mills in the coffee industry felt like a trip back in time to the 1910s and 1920s. Today, we have state-of-the-art mills, fully optimised with cutting-edge technology. This transformation ensures not only profitability but also consistency, which we've incorporated into every step of our supply chain. We're disrupting the nursery process, we're disrupting wet milling, and we're even disrupting dry milling.Sophisticated processing machinery in GCC’s wet mills recycles water so it uses just 0.3 liters of water per pound of green coffee compared to 20 liters per pound used in traditional processes.We reuse coffee waste to create new product lines We take a close look at every point where waste is generated and explore ways to turn that waste into an additional industrial benefit or reduce its environmental impact. To produce one kilogram of coffee, you typically need five kilograms of cherries. Out of these five kilograms, approximately 2.5 kilos are considered waste or Cherry Cascara. We ferment and press the Cherry Cascara to extract cherry juice, which is rich in sugars. Through fermentation, we produce pure neutral ethanol. This ethanol will be available for commercial use next year, potentially in the form of spirits like vodka or gin. We also use the cascara to produce baking flour.We’re exploring using the waste from our fermentation process; drying the waste material and subjecting it to a pyrolysis system, which would allow us to create biochar and generate energy.Worker benefits100% of our workers are formally employed with benefits and health insurance and they only work five days a week, 40 hours - not 7 days a week like all other growers in the area. Cutting out intermediariesOur journey began with internal sales to exporters in Colombia. Later, we expanded our reach by selling directly to U.S. importers. Last year, we introduced our green coffee brand to the European market, started a pilot programme to sell our specialty coffee brand online, and we're making steps to offer white-label products in the U.S.. We now have complete control of the supply chain and expect to sell millions of pounds of roasted coffee by year-end.What’s ahead for your supply chain expansion plans?We're diligently working on the necessary preparations to sell roasted coffee in the US: including hiring a sales representative, establishing a delivery structure, and ensuring we have all the right resources in place to sell directly to supermarkets.We're taking a deliberate and careful approach to prevent any disruptions in our relationships. Building and maintaining strong relationships, especially with supermarkets, is crucial. We want to ensure that when we establish these relationships, we have a seamless supply of products without any hiccups. Our strategy involves careful planning, relationship building, and steady growth as we continue to expand our presence in the coffee market.What has been the hardest part of the innovation journey?In Colombia, coffee growers are not accustomed to using a centralised wet milling facility. Instead, each producer has their own small, technologically dated wet mill, resulting in low efficiency. Convincing them to sell their cherries to a central facility to improve traceability, consistency, and quality was initially challenging because they weren't prepared for such a change. It took two years of training and teaching. This process has involved a complex cultural shift, as we needed to explain our approach and change how we communicate information to these growers. Changing established cultural practices has been a challenging aspect of this endeavour, but it's ultimately proving successful.Change requires audacity What drives me and our team is determination, particularly when it comes to leveraging technology and adopting a circular economy approach. As a biological systems engineer, I have a knack for identifying ways to transform one thing into another. When I spot opportunities, I act swiftly, but it requires a strong sense of determination. Our company culture thrives on constantly seeking ways to improve and disrupt the norm. What does the future hold?We weigh in on the cost of an investment, but if we see a compelling opportunity, such as the distillery project, where we're investing $8 million, it's a no-brainer investment because we anticipate recovering our investment in less than two years. For us, it's about seizing these opportunities and moving forward.Our ultimate goal is to create a fully automated roasting process. This project represents
A warm welcome to the 60 new subscribers who have joined since the last edition!If you haven’t subscribed yet, sign up below to join a network of 2,730 climate tech entrepreneurs and investors. The Green Techpreneur (GT) will provide you with the actionable insight and connections you need to make your mark on the planet with your business!In this Green Techpreneur episode, I spoke to the Co-founders of Gimme Seaweed to share how their journey of infusing passion, love, and a personal touch - connecting with customers as you would with friends and family - became keys to growing a household name brand that’s both delicious, nutritious and good for the planet.“I’ll never forget that feeling I had, in the early morning, it was 6 a.m., I was 35 and at the farmers market and feeling like I was in charge of my life and about to go on this very refreshing journey. And that became Annie Chun’s and the start of all that transpired. It was based on really wanting to be myself and sharing the love and experience that I have. Based on this, I always make sure to connect with myself, who I am, and what I have learned.”Annie Chun is the pioneer of an organic seaweed US snack brand, Gimme Seaweed, that has shifted what was a niche product into the mainstream market. She immigrated from Korea as a young woman in 1976 - but it was in selling homemade produce at a farmers market in 1991 that she found her North Star as a green techpreneur. At the time, she would never have imagined that her humble outdoor market beginnings would lead to building a household brand name.So how did she beat the odds to build an exceptional business from the ground up?“You're not really calculating, I'm going to put that into the US market, I did it truly as a friend, as a neighbour, one by one. And by doing so, I learnt a lot about what American culture is, how they connect, what they like. It just came to me naturally through that experience, and I think that's the base of our reach to our market and our buyers.”Along the way, she met her husband and co-founder, Steve Broad. They launched Gimme Seaweed in 2012, where Annie brings her Korean roots to the US with the introduction of seaweed as a snack. Together, they created the world’s first USDA Certified Organic, non-GMO Project Verified seaweed snacks.“I couldn't have built the business by myself,” says Chun. “It was almost like that was the path we had to walk together.”Seaweed is the underrated story of our time – it’s the ultimate regenerative crop – and along with shellfish, it’s one of the few farmed foods with a net positive environmental impact. In a world of water scarcity, it provides valuable nutrition without use of freshwater, and if farmed organically, it helps keep the oceans clean and fights climate change. Seaweed farms sequester carbon and improve water quality: one ton of seaweed can sequester over 1 ton of CO2 annually – a stark contrast to the heavy toll traditional agriculture takes on the environment. But it’s also a commercial success story: since 2018 the seaweed category has grown by 63% with strong double-digit growth YOY.Today, Gimme is on track to double its business sales since 2021 and deliver 40% year on year growth. It’s the #1 organic seaweed brand leading the way in online channel sales with a 60% category share on Amazon and can be found at major US and Canadian retailers including Wholefoods, Kroger, Publix, Target, Safeway, Sprouts and HEB. What sustainability practices does Gimme Seaweed employ?Annie: Our commitment to sustainability starts in the ocean, Gimme was the first US company to offer organic, non-GMO seaweed. We worked closely with seaweed farmers in South Korea and in close cooperation with the Korean National Federation of Fisheries Cooperatives to develop the standard for organic, non-GMO seaweed that is widely used today by the industry.It was a lot of work for us to coordinate between the Korean Control Union and the USDA and then to find a supplier – because organic wasn't in the vocabulary in Korea, nor non-GMO, and it took a lot of time. In recognition for helping transform the seaweed industry we received a Supplier of the Year Award for Organic Commitment from Whole Foods Market. We use 250 tons of dried seaweed a year which requires 2,500 tons of wet seaweed, this absorbs 4,265 tons of CO2 per year.How were you able to take a niche product and introduce it in a mainstream market?Steve: Understand what you have as a product and understand where the consumer is and what they're seeking and how you bring that together.* What helped us was starting at the farmers market and directly speaking to the consumer as opposed to just looking at a data story and then figuring out what needs to happen.* Then you create the brand with the values you embody to create that consumer love that's really where the magic happens. * We built a brand that was more mainstream than the seaweed market had previously been.Annie: It's been a great journey. Finding myself, connecting with people, and sharing my passion and love. The customers teach me a lot as well. It's just a cycle of learning.Where there key moments that were pivotal to your success?Steve: It took luck meets hard work opportunities to get it going.Annie: When we first started, I was the creator, and Steve was a business partner. I was also the salesperson making cold calls. There are times when it is very challenging to persuade the buyer even if you know you're doing the right thing. You get a lot of rejections and then you run into someone who just helps you right there. If I didn’t walk this path, I would not have had the break. You encounter a lot of rejection and failure, but it’s not failure, because you just get up and keep walking that path again and again – it may take you four or five years, but then the door opens for you. Here's what I learned: no matter what happens, you need to walk on that path, then you will have a break, and failure is not a bad thing because you make your situation much better from that learning.How do you navigate being both business and life partners?Annie: It's essential to have a common goal. You almost have to be one person even if you're two separate people. You have to ask if beyond marriage and beyond business, just as individuals, ‘can we walk this path together if we have a common goal?’It certainly hasn't been easy but we've known each other for 35 years now, we have two beautiful grown up kids – young adults - and two businesses. So one can only imagine lots of ups and downs and tears and sweat but it's important to see that light at the end of the tunnel, and that is the goal that you have, and then we can just walk the path together. And we're actually best friends, we think alike. Steve: It’s certainly love and mutual respect and we also have complementary skills, it’s bringing these things together where the genesis happens.What do you love most about what you do?Annie: Seeing people enjoy the product is a blessing. It’s also amazing to see the wide range of ethnicities that enjoy the seaweed and how it makes a difference in bringing healthy nutrition into American diets – especially for children. What advice would you give to other green techpreneurs?Steve: Make sure you're in touch with what the actual economics are of what you're trying to do and ask, ‘what's that market going to look like?’ It's easy to jump in and then all of a sudden you're spending money and then you don’t have an understanding of what the future is, where you're trying to be, or what you need to accomplish. That economic/financial piece is always tricky. Also knowing what kind of capital you bring in and how it might support you or not after you put in so much hard work to get to a certain place. Have the answers, but without trying to constrain yourself, because you know what the answer is, if you don’t get started.How would you describe your journey in 3 words?Steve: Amazing, challenging, rewardingAnnie: Dream, visualise, work hardWhat’s your mantra or life philosophy?Steve: Work hard, respect others, listen and learn constantly. Appreciate others, from your suppliers to your employees to your customers.Annie: In the past seven years or so, through my journey, I had to learn to be patient and try to take the higher road.Do you have any daily rituals that keep you grounded?Annie: I normally play with my dog – she makes me run around and throw balls on her walk. I try to walk every day and I remind myself ‘I’m good in this moment’, and I just focus on this moment and on now.……………...if Annie and Steve could teleport themselves into the future and be anywhere, doing anything, they’d be in Italy or Hawaii; “we’d have a difficult time choosing one or the other,” says Annie, “I’d learn to cook, learn to surf, learn to paint. I love how warm and hospitable people are, I’d love to share that and learn about their cultures and I’d love to explore…we haven’t gone to New Zealand or Australia yet.”The proof is in the pudding:Thank you for reading and listening to The Green Techpreneur.Have a great weekend! 🥂#SparkTheTransition,MarianneP.S. If you enjoy reading the GT, please share this article to help spread the word! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thegreentechpreneur.substack.com/subscribe
A warm welcome to the 50 new subscribers who have joined since the last edition!If you haven’t subscribed yet, sign up below to join a network of 2,600 climate tech entrepreneurs and investors. The Green Techpreneur (GT) will provide you with the actionable insight and connections you need to make your mark on the planet with your business!If you’re a climate tech startup raising funds, we can connect you with a global investor database of 2,000+ proven climate tech investors. Learn more here and contact us today!In this Green Techpreneur edition I spoke to Going Green Media to share their insight on how to effectively communicate your climate innovation with the world and gain customers and loyal followers!For climate tech businesses that want to connect with consumers and inspire action, creating compelling stories online is a crucial marketing tool. Going Green Media is a growing media platform that does just that.Founded by a creative duo –Ben Brown and Ciara Doyle – the project boasts over 200,000 Instagram followers and creates inspiring films that showcase innovative green projects around the world.Like many Green Techpreneurs, Ben founded the business out of a frustration with the status quo: “I was a student of architecture and getting really frustrated with lecturers talking about modernist designs with no sustainability credentials. So I bought a second hand camera and travelled to locations to film sustainable building projects, in the hope it would encourage the lecturers on his architecture course to teach the principles of environmentally-friendly construction.”Little did he know the initiative would change the course of his life – “it became a viral hit on Youtube, and I realised it wasn’t just the architecture space that needs to get up to speed on environmental innovation, it’s the whole world.”Ciara joined Going Green Media in 2020, and the brand has since steadily grown, working alongside organisations as varied as the WWF, Mastercard and The Olympics.“We film green projects that inspire action,” says Ciara, “we go visit climate tech projects and allow them to tell their story. We translate often very high-tech projects and make the average person understand them and get excited about them.”Winning followers and fans online is especially important for climate tech startups that want to connect with Gen Z and Millennials: according to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, this demographic is far more likely to care about environmental issues than previous generations. They’re also more likely to engage with sustainability content on social media: some 56% of Gen Z reported seeing at least two posts on climate action during their weekly scrolling, with 45% of respondents in that age group engaging with the content.Ben and Ciara share what it takes to communicate effectively and build community in a virtual world.What are the goals of Going Green Media?Ciara: Our tagline is: ‘We film green projects that inspire action’. We are fortunate enough to find incredible green solutions from around the world, whether it’s an organisation or an individual who has come up with a solution to a big climate problem and help them tell their story using video.The second part of our business model is to inspire people to take action for the environment in their own lives and get involved in their community in any way they can.Ben: We feel like a lot of the climate news out there is so negative. That’s why all the content we produce is hopeful and inspiring. And that’s why we feel we’ve been able to have this success so fast, because people want to see content that makes them feel hopeful and like a better solution is possible.What’s a project you’ve worked on that stands out?Ciara: One big moment was back in early 2021. We went to visit a small greentech startup called NotPLA. They were making plastic alternatives from seaweed.It was a really small team at the time. They were in a little office but they were so knowledgeable. Fast forward to the end of 2022, they won the Earthshot prize, which granted them a million pounds toward their project.It’s those incredible startup transformations and journeys that are so amazing, and we hope we played a part in that.What are your tips on creating content and growing online?Make your content personable and accessibleBen: The most successful climate tech startup stories that we’ve seen have made their content personable and accessible. So, taking a wider perspective and looking at ‘what is the problem we’re trying to solve? And then relaying that by breaking it down for people, making it easy to understand, so it’s not in this complex language.Connect your service or product to an individual personCiara: Put a person behind [your product] and say: ‘this is how I use it in my daily life’, or, ‘this is what it’s done for me’. Make that connection to how the product benefits the individual.Collaborate as much as possibleCiara: I think collaboration is undervalued. If you have a niche, find someone else who is doing something similar. That collaboration obviously isn’t only good for reaching new audiences and reaching new people, but also puts you in touch with more like minded people.Ben: People in this space tend to be so welcoming; everybody’s working towards the same goal. We all want to make the biggest impact possible: reach out to other companies, influencers or content creators that are in these niches and collaborate on content and cross-promotion.Passion and enthusiasm matter more than perfectionBen: The first videos I created connected with people, I didn’t have the production quality, but they saw the enthusiasm was there. People connect with passion more than perfection in content.Make the algorithm work for youBen: Follow the trends that are happening on social media. The algorithms are constantly changing, so you have to make them work for you. If you’ve been posting images for a long time and you’ve not seen it working, stop and change that. Reels on Instagram are just blowing up for both creators and businesses right now.Build community through consistency and mutual engagementBen: Make sure you’re active on your stories – share the real aspects of your life to build connection and community.Ciara: Building a community around your brand is so important, whether you’re an individual or a huge team. Engage with your followers, if they comment, respond, start a conversation.What’s the biggest mistake you see startups making on social media?Ben: The biggest mistake is making things too complex in explaining your topics, or not putting a person behind a story.Ciara: Keeping it simple is the most important thing. As a creator, or as a business on social media, you have to create the type of content that you yourself would want to see or that you would want to take action from.Do you have a mantra or life philosophy you follow?Ben: Leave the earth better than you found it.Ciara: We don’t need ten perfect, sustainable people doing absolutely everything they can for the planet. We need millions and millions, and billions of people living sustainably but imperfectly.We’re human, we’re imperfect. It’s about having that little voice in the back of your head pushing you to be a little bit more conscious in your day-to-day life that makes such a difference long-term.What daily rituals keep you grounded?Ciara: We fortunately have a park in our neighbourhood. At the end of a really long day, even if we have a million things that we have to do, we take 15 minutes to go outside. We have a favourite bench that we like to sit on. So we’ll go back to the bench, just breathe a little bit and then come back to it.What does the future hold?Ben: I’d love to get into documentary filmmaking and long form content, maybe getting into Netflix and the biggest streaming services.Ciara: Our dream is to be that point of reference for people, if they’re having a bad day, or they’re feeling really weighed down by not just the climate crisis, but the news in general. We’d love to be a place where they can get some inspiration and feel hopeful again.💥 Find out how you can stand out to attract enquiries & investors…For details visit...becomemorevisible and book a call.Check out these pre-vetted startups seeking investmentINVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY – From The Green Techpreneur MarketplaceGreentech Innovators has already secured $10 million in phase II funding, they are now asking for 750,000 Euros in convertible loan note to match grant funding of 750,000 and a tax grant of 19%.PRODUCT: We use food waste to produce a growth media used for fermentation for production of micro-algae high in omega-3 oil and protein that can substitute fish oil. We act as a service provider for waste companies and charge a gate fee for the raw-material we use. Learn more here.Ourobio is a synthetic biology and circular economy company. We're using fermentation to turn agricultural byproducts into low-footprint biodegradable plastic resins and colorants. We are currently looking for partners interested in adopting more sustainable materials and waste management practices and investors for our current and future round(s). Please check out our site and reach out if you are interested in learning more!Further reading:Failure is not Failure, but being Foolhardy can be Your DownfallThe Green Techpreneur is Partnering with Climate Marketplace to help Climate Startups FundraiseFollow the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.If you enjoy reading the GT, please share this article to help spread the word!Thank you for reading and listening to The Green Techpreneur.Have a great weekend! 🥂#SparkTheTransition,Marianne This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thegreentechpreneur.substack.com/subscribe
A warm welcome to the 112 new subscribers who have joined since the last edition!If you’re reading this and haven’t subscribed, sign up below to join a high-value network of 2,300 climate tech entrepreneurs, industry leaders and investors.The Green Techpreneur (GT) will provide you with the tools, resources and connections you need to make your mark on the planet with your climate tech business! Every other week, I interview extraordinary climate tech entrepreneurs, investors and sustainability experts to share practical advice on how to build, grow, and thrive. Follow the GT podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.As an architect from Syria, Anas da Kassas, Founder and CEO of INOVUES, has come a long way. His journey into green techpreneurship took him from Damascus to Dubai where he worked in architectural facade engineering and manufacturing before moving to Boston to get a Master’s degree in architecture. Along the way, Anas caught the entrepreneurial bug. He wanted to create scaleable solutions for buildings that could help tackle the climate crisis: “the problem for me was that you invest several years in every project, but it's a one-off prototype. You go to the next project and you face the same challenges again.He was staring out the window of his apartment, brainstorming ideas that could have a big impact, when the window itself became his source of inspiration: “I thought, ‘what if there was a way to transform these windows into smart systems without having to remove or replace anything at all? I was thinking about ideas from my multidisciplinary experience in architecture and facade engineering.”That was the day INOVUES – innovative views – was born. Anas’ idea has since grown into a multiple-award winning startup that has already participated in several accelerators including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy and is ready to take on a global $9.5 trillion market opportunity for more energy-efficient buildings. It's the only patented solution in its class that can transform building facades with the latest energy-saving and smart glass innovations without rebuilding or replacing any parts. INOVUES retrofits a second window pane to existing windows using adhesive structural material, creating a 10x cost reduction compared to existing methods, and reducing energy inefficiency of buildings by up to 40%. And with the push of the energy crisis and inflation putting pressure on energy costs and the strong pull of incentives from the US’ Inflation Reduction Act or the European Green Deal’s energy efficiency directive which requires EU countries to collectively reduce energy consumption by 9% by 2030. Anas is bringing a right place, right time, solution to conquer a real estate retrofit market that’s largely untapped.How does your solution work?We don't use mechanical fasteners in our system, we rely on structural glazing materials. The system integrates with the existing facade and does not require drilling or altering anything. It's a very clean and easy installation process, we can add a window to create double pane windows.We use 70% fewer materials compared to existing methods and prefabricate the system off-site so installation costs are cut by up to 80%, reducing the total cost of window upgrades buy up to 10 times.We’re pushing the boundaries of facade engineering on many aspects…transparent photovoltaic or dynamic tinting or vacuum insulated glass. All of these now can be available for existing buildings at a fraction of the usual cost. There’s no disruption, and no need to replace anything. How big is the market opportunity?Experts estimate that about 40% of all US buildings still have single pane windows and a lot more have low performing double pane windows, so 70% of existing building stock is in need of an upgrade. Globally, there are estimates that this is a $9.5 trillion market opportunity. The potential impact on the climate and carbon reduction is huge because windows account for up to 40% of the energy loss in buildings.Through our installations, we're reducing carbon emissions by 100 tonnes annually, and the potential impact, at scale, is close to half a giga tonne to a giga tonne of reduced emissions.These efficiencies means we can disrupt the built environment which has been painfully slow to retrofit ageing infrastructure in commercial real estate. INOVUES has already installed upgrades for leading industry players like Saint-Gobain, 3M and the University of Minnesota. 2022 was our breakout year. We finished some major pilots and got $50 million of potential projects in our pipeline. What were the make or break moments you faced in getting started?I had quite my job in Boston and moved to Houston so spend 1 year doing my architectural Master thesis on the INOVUES idea. That got me a year to devote full-time to it, but I was not making any money. We moved in with family to cut costs to almost nothing. But after a year, I told my wife: ‘if by the end of the next month, we don't secure any funding, I'll stop and put this on the back burner and find a job.’ At that point, I was ready to give up, although it's not part of my personality or nature to do that, but it was too challenging to continue alone without any sort of funding. My wife was fully supportive of this, it made me able to push through these tough moments. She acted as my co-founder in the early days, she was the primary person I would talk to about any challenges or pain points.The first 2-3 years was purely R&D on a shoestring budgetThere was literally blood, sweat and tears at almost every step of the process of the R&D phase. It was on a very, very tight budget, almost bootstrapping. There where moments where you spend a year or more of work then know that everything could fall apart because the next few tests are very important. And if I failed in the test, I didn’t have the money to repeat the tests. And that would’ve been a kill switch to the entire thing. Imagine devoting time, resources and everything you have for two years, and then there's this key test that you're waiting for. And if it passes and succeeds, we're moving forward, if not, I’m going back to finding a job in the industry and starting over. There were a lot of these moments.How did you first secure funding?Being a foreigner who came to the US, I didn't have the network here. My English is much better now than it was a few years ago, but imagine trying to explain what you're trying to do as a foreigner asking people to trust you and give you money. It was very hard and we started small. I went through the Cleantech Open accelerator programme and one of the advisors wrote our first check and then more people followed him. He’s on our board of directors now and has invested five times. I tell him ‘you’re a true angel investor in the literal meaning of the word.’ Because without that first check, there would be no interview today. It was a $50,000 check that enabled me to fund the next few months and build the first system and pass the first test and then get the funding from other angel investors. And then we won the International Award from Cleantech Open which gave us more validation.How do you keep your team engaged and focused on the mission as you grow?TransparencyIt's very important to keep everyone involved in everything that is happening in the company and tell them where we are, what kind of challenges we have and how everyone's role make a significant impact on the overall mission.TrustTrusting people to be leaders in their roles and giving them authority and ownership of what they're doing. What’s ahead for INOVUES?We're looking to raise a $10 million Series A in the next few months to scale up our team and operations so we can execute on multimillion dollar projects in our pipeline. We're excited about 2023 and 2024.What’s your mantra or life philosophy?I'm an eternal optimist. I believe in the Law of Attraction, so I'm always positive. I belief that with hard work and dedication anything is possible.What daily rituals help to keep you grounded?Meditation and exercise. These are very, very important to me on a daily basis. Without them, I wouldn't be able to push forward.Is there a mentor or role model who has been highly influential?My Dad was a true entrepreneur and I watched him push forward on new ideas and new solutions and new businesses throughout his life. And I worked with him in multiple phases, so I experienced exactly what it takes to bring ideas to fruition.If you could teleport yourself into the future and be anywhere, doing anything, where would you be and why?I want to leave an impact on the built environment world and have the resources to work on a few things related to my home country, improving education and improving the situation in Syria to make things better for future generations.Would you like to support the GT and place an ad?Consider becoming a GT Patreon for just $100 a year or $10 a month.Further ReadingIn case you missed it, check out these recent fascinating GT interviews…An Inside Look at How Flashfood Revolutionised the Grocery Shopping IndustryWhy Imperial College Launched a Climatetech Pre-acceleratorHow to Work With Sustainability InfluencersAnd here’s one from my Forbes column:Going Global: 4 Considerations for European Climatetech Startups Seeking Media Coverage in the US Check out the latest climatetech jobs from our friends at Work in GreenThank you for reading and listening to The Green Techpreneur.Have a great weekend! 🥂#SparkTheTransition This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thegreentechpreneur.substack.com/subscribe
A warm welcome to the 53 new subscribers who have joined since the last edition!If you’re reading this and haven’t subscribed, sign up below to join a high-value network of 2,200 climate tech entrepreneurs, industry leaders and investors.The Green Techpreneur (GT) will provide you with the tools, resources and connections you need to make your mark on the planet with your climate tech business! Every other week, I interview extraordinary climate tech entrepreneurs, investors and sustainability experts to share practical advice on how to build, grow, and thrive. Follow the GT podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Hello there 👋🏼Before we launch into today’s episode, I wanted to share a couple of ways The Green Techpreneur can help you:We can help you with: * personalised support and coaching to help you prepare for and find investors * a website makeover/upgrade. Or a new website, if you need one.* amplifying and growing your LinkedIn presence – get a personalised and easy-to-implement strategy or buy our LinkedIn for Sustainability Leaders course here. * telling your founder story – nothing connects people more strongly to your business than hearing about where you came from!* place an ad on The GT website and newsletter by purchasing GT membership.* We’ve put together a checklist to help you assess if you’re investment-fit:GT Collaboration OpportunityWe’re looking platform sponsors who want to get in front of the climatetech startup/investor ecosystem to collaborate on content and promotions over a 6-month period. It would suit a climate tech investor, accelerator, or a B2B climate tech business. Get in touch at: marianne@thegreentechpreneur.uk Flashfood is on Fast Company's annual list of the world's most Innovative Companies for 2023, coming in at first place for Social Good. The Canada-born startup tackles food waste with a digital marketplace and app that alerts consumers to discounted and near end-of-date food products. Customers can buy bargains directly through the app and then do a same-day pick up from a Flashfood designated store zone. Within 7 years since inception, the concept has spread to 1,600 stores across Canada and the US.Flashfood founder and CEO, Josh Domingues, had always wanted to tackle environmental issues; “you turn on the TV and there's just a different city under water or there’s a horrible storm. Whatever I was going to spend my time on through my working career, it was going to have to be something with the environment.” But it was after he heard about an incident at his sister’s workplace that his journey as a Green Techpreneur began: “My sister was a chef, she called me after a catering event and said ‘I just threw out $4,000 worth of food.’ I started laughing; ‘Polly, you idiot. Why would you do that?’ She said, ‘oh, this feeling sucks, my boss was over my shoulder making me do it.’“So I started reading about food waste and I learned that if international food waste were a country it'd be the third leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions behind the US and China.“That led me to talking to store managers in Toronto and I learnt they're throwing out fresh food that still has two or three days of shelf life because consumers won't buy it. The idea I had was if there's a way for the store to mark the price of the food down and send me a notification so I could see the deal on my phone, pay through my phone, and pick up from the store the same day – people would shop like that all the time.”As it turned out, Josh was right: as prices surge today, his idea has helped many thousands of people navigate the cost of living crisis. To date, saved shoppers over $150 million on grocery bills, and diverted over 65 million pounds of food from landfill.“We're still so early in our journey in terms of what we can accomplish, it's really humbling to think about,” says Josh.“I don't want to come off as if it was easy the whole time. This was basically impossible, this has been so hard to do at so many different levels. And even to be named in Fast Company’s list of most innovative companies…this was just an idea seven years ago and now looking at where we're at, it's just a wild journey.”How does the Flashfood app work?The Flashfood app shows which grocers in your area have partnered with the startup. It enables consumers to browse deals – directly from their phone – to save up to 50% off high-quality items nearing their best-by date, such as meats, dairy, seafood, produce, bakery items and more. When retailers partner with Flashfood, they enter into a revenue sharing agreement.How did you first market the app and gain early adopters?We offered free pizza to studentsWe got our first set of users by organising an information session and offering free pizza to students. Sometimes the simplest marketing tactics can be the most effective, especially when you're just starting out.We leveraged local Facebook groupsI leveraged local Facebook groups to promote the app. It was a great way to reach potential customers in our target market and establish a presence in the community. I went into hundreds of local Facebook groups and said “I'm Josh, we're building this company that's trying to solve food waste by partnering with your local store.” I had to keep changing the location on my Facebook to be accepted into the groups. That’s how we got lots of our early users.Apps can be a saturated market, what gave you the conviction that the idea can work?Prior to this, I was a management consultant and we did a project for a demolition company and all these companies were bidding $12 or $13 million to bring down a building. My company bid $3 million, got the job, and by the time they resold all the precious metals because there was so much copper in the walls, they made $20 or $22 million. That got me thinking there's value in waste.The value proposition is just so meaningfulAnything that drives the customer into a grocery store is valuable for the grocery store, and on the backside, the customer can save 50% off groceries, I just thought that value prop on both ends is so obvious if you can get this to scale.We didn’t go into it thinking ‘we have to have so many downloads,’ it's just make this process simple and easy and valuable to the end-user and it should theoretically work and fortunately that's been the case. What are your top tips for other Green Techpreneurs?Keep asking why your idea won’t workYou have to be so bloody honest with yourself, especially in the early days. You have to come at it from the lens of ‘this thing's not going to work. I shouldn't do this.’ In the earliest days, we got people to poke holes in the business from so many different angles to make it better, and ultimately, the value prop stayed strong enough. Money has to flow to a stakeholder in a meaningful way for environmental companies to take off. It's unfortunate, but it's still capitalism, somebody really has to benefit financially.Refer back to your mission and vision dailyEarly in my journey, I thought mission statements were just fluff. Now we're at 100 people and the mission of the company is to reduce the environmental impact of food waste and feed families affordably. You need to refer back to these things daily, especially with remote working, for people to remember why we're doing what we're doing. Authenticity and belonging brings people along for the journeyWhen I sit down with grocery executives, I show them nobody cares more about this than we will on behalf of their company. When it's authentic and you want to make an impact, that comes through and people want to be a part of the journey, everybody wants to feel like they're belonging to something.What were the elements of luck that made the business work?Every time you hear about an entrepreneur speak about building a business, it often comes back to…’a few things just worked out in our favour’ and I believe in luck and that you have to work to build your own luck. I got a chance introduction to a former executive at the biggest grocery chain in the country. That was just happenstance. I told her the exact same story I'd been telling everybody else for three years and she decided to give us a chance. We started with a three-store pilot and it turned into a massive opportunity to scale up the business and expand to 400 stores in just 5-6 months. It's a testament to the power of networking and being ready to execute on opportunities when they arise.If that introduction didn't come and that executive didn't take a chance on us, we would have never been talking today.Did you ever feel like giving up?Oh yes, like everyday. Every day in my life is the best day of my life and every day in my life is the worst day of my life and it's just based on what email comes in. You just have to be even keel at all times and never get too high, never get too low. What’s kept me going is the knowledge that if we don’t pull this off, nobody will.I like seeing what our shoppers have said. One of our shoppers is a young mother with three kids. Her husband got laid off during COVID and she wrote us that without Flashfood she couldn't afford to feed her kids. For Christmas we were able to get her kids a whole bunch of candy stocking stuffers and they didn't expect to have anything, and their faces just lit up. What does the future hold?We have several innovations in the Flashfood app. The app is now accepting snap and EBT as a payment method, which are digitised food stamps in America. This is a significant development for the app's partners as it expands their customer base and makes it easier for people to access affordable food.Secondly, the app is ingesting data around dynamic pricing and progressive markdowns, which will help retailers understand what price points are most effective in different markets. This information will enable retailers to make more informed decisions about what products to stock and how to price them. This could also help reduce food waste by identifying pr
A warm welcome to the 40 new subscribers who have joined since the last edition!If you’re reading this and haven’t subscribed, sign up below to join a high-value network of over 2,100 climate tech entrepreneurs, industry leaders and investors.The Green Techpreneur (GT) will provide you with the tools, resources, and connections you need to make your mark on the planet with your climate tech business! Every other week, I interview extraordinary climate tech entrepreneurs, investors and sustainability experts to share practical advice on how to build your business. Join us for connections, advice, ideas, and mentors. Follow the GT podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.GT Collaboration OpportunityWe’re looking for a sponsor with an aligned mission and vision to collaborate on content and promotions over a 6-month period. It would suit a climate tech investor, accelerator, or a B2B climate tech business. Get in touch at: marianne@thegreentechpreneur.ukImperial College has just had a star-studded lineup with Bill Gates and Rishi Sunak helping to kick off the climate tech accelerator Undaunted which is for full-time founders ready to run with their ideas. But it's got another first-of-its-kind programme that has just launched for students with brilliant entrepreneurial ideas who want a chance to sharpen these ideas in a supportive environment.For pre-accelerator Co-founders Filippo Varini and Elliot Queisser de Stockalper, a passion for protecting nature came from life experiences that were close to home. While growing up in Geneva, Switzerland, Elliot saw ecosystems, quite literally, melt away: “watching the snow, the glaciers, the little details from my home region dramatically changing, it made a difference. It pushed me to address these problems and these unmet needs in a tangible way.”In Italy, Filippo had always been in close contact with the sea as a sailor, fisherman and a free diver; “I witnessed it firsthand – the depletion of the sea – which brought me to start to look for solutions into the area of biodiversity and climate change.”“It was so nice to find each other because we had this passion that was so raw for everything climate, sustainability and entrepreneurship,” says Elliot.They developed the idea for the pre-accelerator programme last summer after noticing that many students who wanted to make a difference and help solve climate change had entrepreneurial ideas that died on the vine: the pressures of needing to find work and repay student loans immediately after graduating meant many would-be founders never got started. Their solution? Provide students with a complete support system for validating and testing their ideas, building a team and network, and pitching to institutional investors – a pre-accelerator.“We wanted to set up something that will be heard,” says Elliot, “but also something that will inspire people and give clear opportunities and possibilities at the end. That's how we came up with the pre-accelerator to help student founders get investment-ready and validate their idea.” How do you help student founders validate their ideas at the pre-accelerator?Elliot: We give student founders every tool in hand to propose either an MVP at the end of a programme, or at least a solution that has the possibility to become a startup in the future. We have programme sponsors, collaborators, mentors and partners on board to help in shaping the idea. We’ll have a series of workshops, challenges and pitching days and we’ll finish with Demo Day, where teams will present in front of investors and partners, show what they are addressing, and how that idea compliments a gap in the market sector. It’s an opportunity for them to speak about something they’re deeply passionate about at their first pitching event and build on these capabilities in the future.How many student founders are in your first cohort?Filippo: We’ve had 200 applications and have launched our first cohort with 100 students – from PHDs to undergraduates – after opening up applications to students from universities including Cambridge, MIT, Oxford, the Royal College of Arts and LSE. Half of the people we selected already have a team and idea they will want to work on and half of them are unsure about what to work on and need to find a team. We have a multidisciplinary cohort because we believe something great happens when you mix perspectives from different backgrounds.What are the benefits of starting young as an entrepreneur? Filippo: I think the benefit of starting young is that you have energy and you also have the beginner mindset that lets you approach a problem with a new perspective and sometimes that can lead to authentic solutions.However, you don't have experience and your network or skillset can't compare with people that already have experience. But it depends on the personality, if you can learn by doing and you're a resilient person, those qualities can help you succeed. Obviously, you will need help from mentors and a good dose of enthusiasm to learn everything as you go along, but it’s totally doable. Elliot: One of the advantages is that in our outlook or perspective, we're allowed to be very spontaneous, very creative, and we can just come in and propose something and the pressure and judgment is less heavy because we are trying our best and aiming to tackle something at a young age that is very close to our heart.Is this an idea you see spreading to other universities?Elliot: it’s one of the things we’ve talked about – my motto is Carpe Diem. I think the pre-accelerator has the potential to shape the entrepreneur journey for lots of students and be able to touch a wider community, not only in London but across the UK. We’ll take things step by step, but there are all the ingredients for it in the future to be implemented on a wider scale.Who are your role models?Elliot: Jacqueline Novogratz is certainly one of my role models. She's the founder of Acumen and what I respect in her journey and her ethos is the intersection between entrepreneurship, activism, inspiring people and the power of speech. Speech can unlock lots of doors and it has something very subdued, it can really touch you emotionally – the gestures and also the words can make the difference. Filippo: the first one is my Grandfather because his life and connection to nature are an inspiration for me, and the second person is Astro Teller, the Captain of Moonshot X, which is part of our summit. I look up to him and his company’s mentality of radical creativity and disrupting current technologies with a beginner's mindset. It’s something I've always believed in even before hearing about him. I recommend people look him up because it inspires people to be creative and find radical solutions to problems.Do you have a favourite quote or a life philosophy you follow?Elliot: Being able to enjoy the present moment. Reflect on the past and have good objectives for the future, but I feel like time is the modern-day missing piece. I think it's how you can accomplish all your goals in life – understanding that in the present moment there's so much happening and you don't have to overthink, sometimes you just have to go with the flow.Filippo: More than a quote, I have a story, which is from a book by Paulo Coelho. He talks about a voyager who goes into a Master’s castle to learn about the secret of life. The Master gives him a spoon with water and tells him to explore the castle. The castle is amazing and he runs around and comes back and asks again about the meaning of life, but now the spoon is empty.And so it says the meaning of life is to enjoy the beauty of the castle without losing the water in the spoon. That resonates with me, because I think there are so many important things in life, that you should always be balanced and not lose sight of what is right in front of you.What do you do when it’s time to unwind and relax?Filippo: I love surfing, so I never miss an opportunity to surf. I enjoy free diving as well, which is something you can do in London. Elliot: I love to read and it's something that really shaped me as a person. Given the literary background of my Mother, I'm very sensitive to the arts, thanks to her. I also enjoy handball and windsurfing.If you could teleport yourself into the future and be anywhere, doing anything, where would you be?Filippo: I’d be working on ocean conservation and restoring marine biodiversity and global biodiversity. It’s a problem that I fell in love with many years ago and it's something that still intrigues me to solve.Elliot: I’d like to be somewhere where lots of different questions and problems are addressed; being able to unite people around the power of discussion, communication and awareness-building around different themes and proposing concrete solutions for it. I've been always very interested by the intersection between life science and diplomacy; that's something I will be considering in the future…and I hope to still be the person I am today. Would you like to support the GT and place an ad?Consider becoming a GT patron for just $100 a year or $10 a month.Further ReadingCheck out these posts from my Forbes climate tech column:A Marshal Plan for Building Back Green in Ukraine?Through Pandemic and War: the Inspiring Story of How a Belgium Scaleup Brought Net-zero to Food RoastingThank you for reading and listening to The Green Techpreneur.Have a great weekend! 🥂#SparkTheTransition This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thegreentechpreneur.substack.com/subscribe
A warm welcome to the 50 new subscribers who have joined since the last edition!If you’re reading this and haven’t subscribed, sign up below to join a high-value network of over 2,100 climate tech entrepreneurs, industry leaders and investors.In The Green Techpreneur (GT), I interview extraordinary climate tech entrepreneurs, investors and sustainability experts to share practical advice on how to build your business. Join us for connections, advice, ideas, and mentors. Follow the GT podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.GT Collaboration OpportunityWe’re looking for a sponsor with an aligned mission and vision to collaborate on content and promotions over a 6-month period. It would suit a climate tech investor, accelerator, or a B2B climate tech business. Get in touch at: marianne@thegreentechpreneur.ukIn 2022, influencer marketing was a $16.4 billion industry and it’s due to 5x to reach $84.89 billion by 2028. This phenomenal growth is down to just how effective it is; influencer marketing content delivers 11X better ROI than traditional marketing tactics. Why? 92% of consumers trust influencer marketing over traditional advertising.So for climate tech startups that need to make every dollar count, quickly spread the message and attract clients, a carefully targeted ‘guerrilla’ influencer marketing approach could deliver more and cost less than a PR campaign.Influencer marketing expert Gordon Glenister is the author of Influencer Marketing Strategy and a columnist on influencer marketing for the London Evening Standard. He stumbled into the industry “by accident” – “I couldn’t find a book that explained influencer marketing, so I wrote one and started the UK influencer industry with my business partner.”In this Green Techpreneur episode, he breaks down how to select and work with influencers as a climate tech startup.How do you judge whether an influencer is a good match?Look for shared values and engagementWhat’s important to your business? Does that reflect well in the type of content that you're seeing from that individual?Another thing to look for is their level of engagement. How responsive are they to their followers? And are they good at creating a conversation and growing their audience?Look into the relevance of their followers, where they're coming from, it's not about numbers, it's about quality.Are they working with your competitors?The last thing you want to do is work with an influencer who's working with all of your competitors day in day out. That's not going to make you feel special within your own brand.Ask for their media deckThe first thing you should do before engaging them is to ask for their media deck which is equivalent to a CV, you want to know how they've grown their audience, what their level of engagement is, what type of campaigns they've worked on before.Focus on long-term collaborationUnderstand what sort of success criteria you want, but also what the influencer wants. There's a reason we use the word collaboration because that's exactly what it is. It's about actually joining at the hip because there are two things that an influencer wants: one is a reward for the work that they've done, and also anything that sustains and grows their audience. So look for how you can create and help them with exclusive content, opportunities to come to your events, or something where you could bring them onto a panel.The more you brief the influencer and help them with understanding the markets in your area, the better. You wouldn't hire a salesperson and say ‘off you go and do your best,’ you would properly brief them.Don’t think transactionalDon’t think transactional, like ‘should I employ an influencer for one post?’ Think about the bigger picture and be creative and involve them. Think about ‘how can I help you? We're a startup we don't have huge amounts of money, but what I could do is I have this, I have that, and I have this’ and the influencer may say ‘wow, that's super cool. I can do some really good things with that.’How can you co-create an immersive experience?Oxfam brought influencers to one of their big hub centres and showed them the entire back office system of what they do when clothes come in the recycling centre. They gave them a complete, ‘behind-the-scenes’ experience, and that got huge amounts of engagement on the influencers content and on Oxfam's engagement as well.“I believe in immersive content. If you're talking about climate change, can you go somewhere together? Think about the impact you want from this. You can do some amazing things with influencers.”What types of content campaigns benefit from using influencers?* Co-created content* Podcasts* Inviting the influencer onto your podcast* Sponsored posts and videos* Competitions and contests* Tik Tok has been great for challenges* Tutorials and reviews of your products/services can be really successful* Social media takeovers - hire an influencer to work with you on your social media campaign* Anything where there’s a sense of momentum, and it encourages others to get involvedHow do I measure the success metrics of an influencer engagement?Set your goals and objectives right at the start. Influencer marketing is not a silver bullet, sometimes people think, ‘I'm gonna work with this influencer and pennies are going to come down from heaven’. That’s not the case if their audience doesn’t know your brand, and that is why long-term partnerships can be a really effective way to engage with influencers.What advice would you give to climate tech startups on growing their own audience?Go for slow, consistent growth and authentic contentWe engage with emotion, more than any other attributes. So you want your customers or your target prospects to really feel that that you give a damn about this.Slow, consistent growth and relevance in your content is hard. Don't get me wrong. It's harder to build an Instagram following right now than it ever was before. But if you are consistent in your posting, if you use reels and video content, if you bring your authentic self to the channel so people can really feel, you’ll see growth.Look at the content that works for your competitorsDeliver content based on what you know works, not what you think works. Before you accelerate your content plan for 2023, look at 10 of your competitors that are in a similar industry to you.Look at their last 10 posts on whatever channel you want – LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook – look at the type of content and note down what reaction they're getting, put that into an Excel spreadsheet. Do that with 10 posts with 10 competitors and look at what is working best.Who is your role model?My biggest influence is Sir David Attenborough. Articles are important, but in a multimedia world, podcasts, videos, photos, those are ways to really grab emotion and draw the audience in a bigger way. It's those moments, those images, those metaphors that grab emotion that are going to create influence.Do you have a favourite quote or motto?Your brand is what people say about your business when you’re not in the room.What do you do when it’s time to unwind after work?Badminton is my passion when I get a moment and I enjoy having dinner with friends. I live close to 5 lakes which is a bird reserve, which is lovely to walk around on a lovely day. It’s so important to keep positive and do different things.If you could teleport yourself into the future, and be anywhere, doing anything, where would you be and why?When I was in my early 20s, somebody said I should be on stage. I love presenting but I've never worked in theatre or on a film and I'm getting closer and closer to that space now, so I think the future is going to be something in television or in film.Would you like to support the GT and place an ad?Consider becoming a GT patron for just $100 a year or $10 a month.Further ReadingCheck out these posts from my Forbes climate tech column:Nets, Plastic, Underwater Crime - How to Stop Ocean Pollution5 Steps to Effective Storytelling as a Climate Tech Startup3 Fast Growth Climate Tech Startups to Watch in 2023Thank you for reading and listening to The Green Techpreneur.Have a great weekend! 🥂#SparkTheTransition This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thegreentechpreneur.substack.com/subscribe
A warm welcome to the 86 new subscribers who’ve joined since the last edition! The Green Techpreneur (GT) is here to help you thrive as you build your business. Subscribe if: 👉🏼 You're interested in business growth and attracting investors 👉🏼You want connections, community, inspiration, ideas, and mentors. Click below to join a high-value network of over 2,000 sustainability leaders; subscribe to the GT podcast on Apple Podcasts. GT Collaboration OpportunityBefore we launch into today’s episode, I wanted to share an opportunity to partner with The Green Techpreneur as a platform sponsor. We’re looking for a sponsor with an aligned mission and vision to collaborate on content and promotions over a 6-month period. It would suit a climate tech investor, accelerator, or a B2B climate tech business. Get in touch at: marianne@thegreentechpreneur.uk “Investing in equity and entrepreneurs was this really hard to access, illiquid asset class which has been the bastion of the elite, and that hadn’t really changed in over 100 years: somebody who wanted to invest in ships to import spices would go to Mayfair and find an investor. 100 years later, an investor looking to fund their startup would go to Mayfair. “With the invention of the internet, there was an opportunity to open the market up, and now 12 years later, the world looks somewhat different,” says Jeff Kelisky, CEO of Seedrs.Seedrs - is an equity crowdfunding platform that enables investors of all shapes and sizes to invest in ambitious startups, its helped startups raise a total of £2.3 billion, with 1,870 deals funded so far.To get started as a crowd fundraising platform, Seedrs faced the challenge of needing to get cooperation from industry incumbents: “investing is very different in the sense that it defines in some ways coopetition. A lot of the founders get funding from multiple sources from the big institutions to the retail investor. So we participate alongside private equity and alongside angels, so we needed to be accepted as an equal or value add platform.“There was this tarnished view of crowdfunding because it was retail investors, and not necessarily professional investors, so building credibility was one of the fundamental hurdles to overcome and that took time because it was reliant on relationships which were reliant on proof.”Today, Jeff says, climate tech is Seedrs’ fastest growing investment vertical - clean energy saw 40% more investors on Seedrs in 2022 compared to 2023: “that news spreads each of those investors becomes a storyteller to their network so that will only accelerate.Jeff believes in 2023, we’ll see an investment growth trend in all forms of EV’s - cars, bikes and boats as well as in renewable energy.What type of startups succeed on the platform?There are over 17 different sectors represented, from climate tech, data analytics, consumer products and food and beverage, and there isn't any one sector that represents more than about 12% of the total. That said, the fastest growing sector right now is climate tech – energy, and sustainability as a category.How do companies benefit from using crowd fundraising?They want to use the opportunity to create brand ambassadors, to actually turn customers into evangelists of who they are, and in some cases, to also acquire new customers and bring on board new members of their community. That community dimension becomes an important part of making a round successful. Be creative about how to harness your networkWe had a small group of founders who put together a business around ice cream. They'd recently won a contract with Waitrose, but it's a small business, and so there was no way they could actually see how that contract was rolling out across all the Waitrose stores in the UK. So they gave their investors a mission; ‘next time you go to your local Waitrose, please take a photo of the ice cream on the shelf, because we'd like to know that it is on the top shelf, and the label is facing forward, which is part of the contract.’ Three things happened: they got photos, their community of investors and customers felt connected to the business, and the third thing is, they probably bought the ice cream!Is Crowd fundraising better for B2C or B2B startups?It's definitely easier as a B2C business to tell your story in a way that's understandable and as something that consumers can relate to. That being said, B2B represents 40% of what we do, so it is absolutely not exclusive. We've had very successful software accounting companies raise capital. One thing to look at is how what you’re doing has a strong emotional connection. Increasingly, investors are millennials and Gen Z, and are making investment decisions which connect to who they are, their values, the things they're passionate about. But whether you’re B2B or B2C, you need to tell your story well.What are your top 5 tips for effective storytelling?* Show us your roots - The most endearing stories are those that give us that moment of inspiration and/or personal experience. For example, the story of Mr Lee’s Noodles (a healthy pot noodle business) told investors of the Founder’s inspiration for healthier noodles following his battle with cancer where he craved for healthy comfort food.* Align your vision with your community - consider how your business’ beliefs, mission and values align with the community’s desires. For example, Ripple, which enables households and businesses to part own large scale wind farms and (in the future) solar parks, met many people’s desire to be part of something greater and make an impact.* Translate your mission creatively - A brand’s creative can be done on a shoestring and still hold a powerful role when it comes to connecting with an audience. It can visually create an immediate emotional response and a consistent and unique visual brand identity, illustration style, and even brand ‘characters’ help cement space in people’s minds from day one. Look at the sustainable hygiene B-Corp Cheeky Panda - their logo and style is instantly recognisable.* Make them feel involved, bring them on the journey - This is key to forming an exceptional brand experience. Developing key touch points through newsletters, social media channels and events are effective ways to get closer to your audience and make them feel engaged as you scale.* Be known for openness and transparency - Be open and transparent about your company’s culture, realistic for your valuations and give insight into how the company performs that is clear and easy to understand. Don’t be afraid to talk about your failures. Most of our successful entrepreneurs are “phoenix founders” on their second or third startup. Being open about the difficulties you’ve faced and the learnings is a critical part of telling your entrepreneurial story.Do you have advice for startups on building community?Connect with your existing networkFirst, it’s about connecting with the founder's existing network, it’s very much about the story being told and how to do that and then getting introductions to the right groups to do that. So if you're in a particular space, who are the institutions that would also be interested in joining and anchoring around that?It's about honing your story for different audiences. And again, that sounds perhaps an obvious step that all founders have to do anyway. But you're doing it in the context of a broad crowd and therefore it needs to be consumable at scale. Build Momentum Build momentum in a campaign. There's a lot out there for people to invest in. There's a lot out there for people to be distracted by, especially in a social media context, so getting attention is something you should manage. And while it takes a lot of effort, the construction and sequencing of a campaign is important.Have you seen a decline in investment due to the recession?Last year, we saw over 141,000 individual investments in 324 campaigns and just over half a billion pounds raised. We served more entrepreneurs last year than we did the year before.The biggest challenges were less from the direct retail audience, it was more that institutions were more timorous. So that reduction in the institutional side or anchoring side was where we saw a difference; it wasn't the retail participation.Uncertainty Breeds EntrepreneurshipThere's one common truth and that is uncertainty breeds entrepreneurship.It is often when entrepreneurs are born. In some cases, they're born because they have something they want to do and say and they see a problem, and sometimes it’s because necessity meets opportunity. We've seen the birth of more entrepreneurs during difficult times.We've seen it with the Ukraine war, the outpouring of communities looking to solve problems, and get behind founders who have solutions to some of those problems. So that gives me hope, entrepreneurship is not in decline.Who are your role models?It's hard not to answer that question without bringing both my parents into that answer. My Mother, who passed away many years ago, will be very happy that we are having this conversation. She was absolutely a woman of nature, of the environment, supporting ecology. The fact that my professional life is intersecting with something that she spent so much time putting her love into probably fills me with enough energy to go through most obstacles. I started my career in a corporate context in IBM. At the time it was a 50,000 employee organisation and it was going through turmoil. In the early 90s, it declared the largest ever loss by a company, which was $53 billion. And a new CEO came in by the name of Lou Gerstner and he solved that problem of saving IBM. It was an impossible task, because the only thing you could do was to break it up into small units, and I got to see his work from the inside. To see someone wrestling with an almost impossible corporate challenge was phenomenal to watch. He was very much about, ‘we need to harness the power of all the parts of IBM to do somet
Merry Christmas, dear Green Techpreneur readers and a warm welcome to the 93 new subscribers who have joined since the last edition.If you’re reading this and haven’t subscribed, sign up below to join a high-value and fast-growing network of over 1,900 climatetech entrepreneurs, investors, and industry leaders.As we wrap up one year and move into the next, The Green Techpreneur remains ready to help you in 2023 and beyond:For entrepreneursGet practical advice on how to build your business and find funding through interviews with climatetech entrepreneurs and investors. It’s insightful, actionable and fun to read or listen to.Boost your visibility & get the connections you need to succeedSign up to become a paid subscriber to The GT ($100 for 1 year) for an opportunity to place an ad in The GT – whether you are looking for investors and want to advertise your fundraise, or you just want to tell the climatetech community about what you do and how you can help!For climatetech investorsThe Green Techpreneur publishes lists of pre-vetted startups seeking investment. Subscribe to be the first to know.Dear Santa,I don't need toys and I don't need sweets. I would just like a lamp that stays on when there is no electricity." 🎄- boy in Ukraine at NGO Care in Action's creative Hub writing to St. Nicolaus.It's been 25 years since my parents first set foot in Ukraine to start Care in Action, the team pivoted quickly since the war - helping vulnerable children find safe homes, continue education, and overcome trauma.For this Christmas special edition, I spoke to Maria Boiko, the Director of ‘Turbota V Dii’ - the Ukrainian branch of Germany-based Care in Action.For Maria Boiko, this will be a Christmas unlike any other. Like millions of Ukrainians, her life was turned upside down at Russia’s shock invasion.“And a lot has changed since February 24th. We work with children in care and with foster families and vulnerable youth. But within a week of the war starting, we expanded our work to support internally displaced people. Many, many people have come to L’viv since the war, one of the reasons is because it feels safe as it's the most western part of Ukraine. And the other reason is that it’s a cultural hub, and it has a lot of opportunities. “From March onwards we started renting out beds in hostels to accommodate people who had to leave their homes. Sometimes we would accommodate 200 people at a time and we added new services for internally displaced people. Because after the shock, the main thing people needed was a secure place and food. “Many people needed psychological support, because they mentally refuse to believe that the war will last for a while, and they didn't want to look for a job. Like ‘why would I look for a job. If I'm not going to stay here. I will go home back home soon.’ So we got a psychologist to help people recover. We hired a social worker in July to accompany families to help them with a range of needs, like legal advice, medical treatment, getting needed documents with a certificate of internal displaced person or getting a child into school. Some people decided to emigrate as refugees and we helped them with transfers to the border. We also started a care centre, which provides 20-30 beds for women and children,” says Maria.But despite the tragedy of war, the chaos of blackouts, and living through an energy crisis where the country has lost 40% of it’s electricity due to Russian attacks on the grid, Maria says Ukrainians remain determined to celebrate Christmas in style:“On Christmas, we traditionally have 12 dishes.”In honour of the 12 disciples, the traditional Ukrainian Christmas lays a feast with 12 dishes; verenyky (dumplings), Holubtsi (rolled cabbage), compot (dried fruit compot), fish, borsch, pancakes, pyrizhky (hand pies), Kapusniak (sour cabbage soup), Kutia (sweet grain pudding), peas, Pampushky (yeast bread)…“We also put Didukh…wheat stalks on the table - it symbolises the spirit of our ancestors,” says Maria.“Children go Christmas carolling, they sing for their neighbours and its a chance for them to earn some sweets and coins. We also have a nativity skit tradition, where a crew dresses up and goes door-to-door to perform.“For believers, the most important thing is to go to church. There are some Christmas services that last all night."To keep our spirits high, Ukrainians don’t want to give up traditions which make us happy, and celebrating will be a sign that Ukrainians are unbreakable.”What impact have the energy grid attacks had on Ukraine?Let's start with the bigger picture. It’s had a big impact on business, and some businesses had to stop. Others had to learn how to survive, and maybe they had some shortages in the companies or had to raise prices, because now it's big expense to buy generators or other things to make it work. And I was reading an article, that one big company which works with in the metallurgy sphere, they had 5,000 employees, and now they have 20.It is expected that by the end of this year, 30 % of the population will be without work.We have regular scheduled power cuts. And power cuts often last for four hours – sometimes you can have at least eight hours a day without electricity. But sometimes there are also emergency power cuts which are unexpected. So sometimes you have 16 hours a day without light, it affects hot water and cooking.There are some buildings that don't have a gas supply and they fully depend on electricity, electrical stoves, and heating – so they would not have heating or be able to cook so people come up with alternative solutions like a portable stove. I guess when there are many children in a family, it's really difficult to do everything within the four hours of having electricity. A lot of children have long-distance education, and it’s really difficult to keep up with school because of the power cuts – you don’t have WiFi, you don’t have heating.How has your personal life been affected?In my personal life, at the office, we are able to work because we always have light. There are some rumours that there is a court office or something important nearby. We have a creative hub with a daycare for children so it's not affected.But I live just three minutes walk from here, and we have power cuts and my husband works remotely teaching English so when we have power cuts, he can't work at all. He would be out of work, but luckily, because we have WiFi at my office at Creative Hub, when there is some space here he comes here.Our heating depends on the light, we tried to put an electrical heater when there is heating so because the gas heating doesn't give much warmth. And also we just sleep under a huge warm blanket, so it's warm under the blanket, but if I just touch the top of my head, I can feel how cold it is. How have you been supporting people through the winter?We’ve been providing people with warm blankets, sleeping bags, and camp lights which can last up to 24 hours when there is no light, and it’s really helpful. I use it to cook, read, and when I go to the bathroom or have a shower. Just this Monday I travelled with a colleague to family-style orphanages to bring a displaced family a generator. A family is starting again here after their home and the hospital and schools were destroyed in Mykolaiv. They don’t intend to go back - there are no prospects for the children with the school completely destroyed.The Father is an electrician so they made a plan for how to make it work at home with the generator. The generator will help the kids to keep up with their education, because the power cuts impact education a lot, and they have several teenagers. One of the teenagers is taking an English course which will give her access to take part in an exchange programme in the US. So for her it's also highly important to do that course and learn English, so they were very happy. What’s the best way for readers to help with donations?You can check our Care in Action website, and donate via bank card or through Paypal.Karolina Ottspodina, Founder of We Do Solar, is a Ukrainian entrepreneur based in Berlin. She is on a mission to make home grown renewable energy available to everyone – whether or not you own a home. The We Do Solar kit consists of 8 solar panels that can be installed on your balcony, they’re super lightweight and thin and they’re easy to install. We have an app where you see how much CO2 you’re saving and how much electricity you’re producing.“We launched in February this year. It was a complete coincidence that the war broke out at the same time. It definitely was a super hard time because I also have family, and a lot of friends in Ukraine. I was going to the borders, picking people up, developing my product, talking to investors, and it was just a completely crazy time. But now it's a bit easier because I know that everyone is at least safe,” says Karolina.“Right now, we’re shipping to 24 countries in Europe and we will have the UK on that list very soon. There is huge demand for the product and of course, when the war broke out, our demand went up.”Is this a solution that could help people in Ukraine? Absolutely, in the future. We are in contact with the government in Ukraine and can launch in Ukraine when the time is right. Right now, what is needed in Ukraine is generators which are off-grid. My solution works when the grid is there. How much of a cost reduction do people get with your balcony-installed solar solution?It depends on how much you can install in your home and every single country has its own regulation on how much you can install by yourself without an electrician. So for example, in Germany, it's 600 watt and this is what our set currently provides. It's 600 watt, and that can reduce up to 25% of your electricity bills. Of course, if you want to install more and you have the space also to install more, you can do so with the help of an electrician.How will you be celebrating Christmas?I do celebrate Chris
I’m looking for 20 Green Techpreneur readers who want to become GT Founding Members:A Founding Membership costs $500 and benefits include:* LinkedIn for Sustainability Leaders Course * Free advertising on The Green Techpreneur newsletter (1 ad placement)* Exclusive invites to members-only online events* A GT website article (1-dedicated article subject to Terms & Conditions)* Boosted networking in the GT online community* Your name and company listed on the soon-to-come Founding Members’ section of the GT website….and you’ll have my gratitude and some gifts and surprises! 🙂Hello Green Techpreneur readers,After interviewing countless founders and investors and writing about their founder launch journey, I figured it was time to share my story and tell you why I started The Green Techpreneur. I’ll join my interviewees in the vulnerability arena and reveal the behind-the-scenes blood sweat and tears, the hustle and grit that lies in front of, and behind those who choose the entrepreneurial path. Fasten your seatbelts and get ready for a wild ride.The truth is that in March 2018, when I quit my job as a reinsurance journalist and moved from Brighton to London, I didn’t set out to build an online business or have any dreams of starting The Green Techpreneur. I set out to not be miserable.I had worked two jobs for one year after finishing my MA in Multimedia Journalism: juggling a part-time, back office job at American Express alongside a 6-month unpaid internship and then a part-time role as a video journalist at Brighton’s local broadcast TV channel – LatestTV. In that chapter of life, two worlds collided.The corporate world was well-organised and well-managed. I had monthly one-on-one meetings with my manager: a performance review where I was given a chance to discuss any training I wanted to progress in. My work was dull but voluntary overtime was paid 1.5x normal rates, and cake was often passed along the long rows of desks – there was always someone who had a birthday in Amex’s giant, shiny European HQ.In a chance encounter, I had met someone at a party towards the end of my studies who referred me for an internship at LatestTV. LatestTV was a pub by night and a broadcast studio by day. It smelt of beer, musty furniture and sweat. Equipment was old, heavy, and often missing a piece or breaking down. LatestTV was born because magazine owners in Brighton had gotten a 2-year startup BBC grant to launch a news channel – it was part of a nationwide attempt by BBC, backed by some MPs, to bolster the dying local news sector.Sadly, the programme was largely unsuccessful, and nearly all fledgling local news start-ups collapsed when the grant money ran out. What it did do, was offer an army of young aspiring journalists a brief window of opportunity to get their foot in the door of a highly competitive, struggling sector.I would often work a half day at Amex and then run out to LatestTV, pick up a backbreakingly heavy old camera and tripod and whiz off on a news mission, writing the script for the 2-minute news package as I took a bus to the shooting location or interviewee. As a one-woman show, I learnt how to shoot, edit, write for broadcast and self-record my piece-to-camera.My first paid job with LatestTV was to report on the controversy caused by a photo of Brighton’s naked bike ride. I spoke to local charities, priests, scientists, businesses, residents and politicians. I was paid £60 per day and had to produce two 2-minute news video packages a day. This left me often spending evenings and weekends doing unpaid overtime to catch up on video editing. It was tough, but my heart was in it.For LatestTV, however, the writing was on the wall. BBC grant money was running out and the company was edging closer to bankruptcy. And after over a year of juggling two jobs, I was running out of energy. I’d gotten my foot in the door of a media career and it was time to move on. But across the UK, media was in trouble. It was incredibly daunting to be running towards an industry that was increasingly fighting for survival.During my MA, I had done a one-week placement at a local London newsroom and had stayed in touch with one of the reporters. She had been out on the street protesting when her newsroom closed down not long afterwards and she’d begrudgingly gone on to get a job at a tabloid. It was a global phenomenon: in the booming age of social media, tech giants had become the winners and newsrooms the losers. Companies were spending advertising dollars to pay for ads on social media, not newspapers. Many media outlets have since transitioned to putting up paywalls – but less freely available, verified reporting comes at a cost to democracy.I found that more jobs were going in finance-related journalism than most other news sectors. I got a role in a reinsurance news startup and moved into the world of risk management, cat bonds, insurance-linked securities and…churnalism. There was little to no original reporting. I regurgitated, rehashed and respun press releases, industry reports and articles. I churned and churned and churned – under pressure daily to spin out article after article – produce, produce, produce.At least I had my weekends free. I tried to write a blog about environmental issues on the weekend. Two years earlier I had gone down the rabbit hole of learning about climate change and I couldn’t unsee what I saw. I had stumbled on an article that shocked me and then I dug in and dove deeper and deeper: oceans close to collapse, soil degradation, soon more plastic than fish in the sea, climate chaos, floods, droughts, freshwater depletion, an existential crisis ahead. I was shocked.This was before the climate crisis had become front and centre of the news agenda. Why weren’t people talking about how bad things were? Why was most of the world walking around with their head in the sand? Why were people carrying on with life as normal? It was madness.From that point on I became an activist. I made lifestyle changes to live more sustainably and started encouraging others to do the same. At the Amex office Starbucks cafe, hundreds if not thousands of disposable coffee cups were thrown away daily. I talked about it with my manager; ‘if everyone could keep a mug at their desk and take it down to the cafe, we wouldn’t have to produce so much waste.’ It was easier to create this change at the reinsurance news startup and the boss did buy reusable cups to keep at the office and replace disposables.As time wore on, my churnalism role ground me down. I regurgitated content at speed day after day, had burn out, and lost all enjoyment I had once had in the creative process. I robotically moved through each day, counting down the hours until work was over and I could go home. In evenings and on weekends I felt exhausted and brain-dead. What had it all been for? Taking out a loan to do an MA in Multimedia Journalism, long evenings spent practising shorthand and studying media law, unpaid internships – to become this low-paid – (I was on 19k a year) – content factory worker? I became increasingly miserable and despondent. I had to break free.After several months of trying to find a new role in London, I decided to quit my job. I felt I had nothing to lose. I moved to London with £4,000 in savings and a promise to myself that I would never again live a life of existence. I would do whatever I had to do, but I wanted to truly live each day, not count down the hours until it was over.I moved into a property guardianship – a scheme where empty buildings waiting to be sold are converted into temporary homes and rented out at a discounted price. I had a room in what had been an office block, and a makeshift shower and kitchen. I was elated. I remember snow falling in a cold winter spell in London and the sheer joy of being in the city with all its diversity and bubbling aliveness. The run-down grungy areas, the elegant parks, the modern skyscrapers and the old pubs.I had an open highway ahead of me, a clean slate, and it was mine to write on.I started applying for jobs and had gotten an offer for a role I knew I didn’t really want, but then a friend gave me a ticket to a tech conference that he’d been unable to attend and suggested I use it as a networking opportunity. I had often thought of freelancing as a better alternative to churnalism, but I imagined it would be nearly impossible to achieve – a far-off dream. But what if….what if the self-employment path was possible? I had to try.Armed with a business suit and business cards that stated the areas I could write about, I made a point of speaking to as many people as I could, passing out my card and asking them if they needed a freelance writer. When I told a conference goer I had quit my job to move to London and become a freelance writer, he said, “it’s a bold move,” I replied that “fortune favours the bold.”In that conference, someone referred me to a contact who gave me some unpaid work which led to me quickly finding paid freelance work. I had done the thing I thought was impossible, and the red sea had parted before my eyes. I was over the moon with my luck and I became more bold. What if the things we think are difficult are actually easier than we imagine and if we just take the next obvious step in that direction in faith, the next step will become clear?So I kept on, pushing through fear and uncertainty, stumbling forwards. I quickly learnt that I could get into just about any conference if I requested a media pass. I loved learning about the latest innovation at tech conferences, and I’d look for and approach editors and ask them if they worked with freelancers. I joined and got support from the National Union of Journalists and started sharing my experiences in their panel discussions about freelancing. I joined Google campus’ co-working club and made a friend who was developing a business idea, she suggested I join The Allbright – a private members c
A warm welcome to the 136 new subscribers who have joined since the last edition!If you’re reading this and haven’t subscribed, sign up below to join a high-value and fast-growing network of over 1,760 climatetech entrepreneurs, investors, and industry leaders.Here’s how The Green Techpreneur can help you:For entrepreneursI interview extraordinary climatetech entrepreneurs and investors and share practical advice on how to build your business and find funding. It’s insightful, actionable and fun to read or listen to.Do you want help with boosting your visibility, engagement & getting the connections you need to succeed? For details visit...becomemorevisible and book a call if it resonates.For climatetech investorsThe Green Techpreneur publishes lists of pre-vetted startups seeking investment. Subscribe to be the first to know.As a fourth generation farmer, Pablo Borquez Schwarzbeck is acutely aware that in farming industries, long-term security and resilience needs an urgent overhaul.The climate crisis and Russia-Ukraine war exacerbated food insecurity issues this year, leading to a $2.3 billion World Bank designated food security fund, but farmers aren’t getting the support they need to secure their produce and business in the first place.“Farmers are often in a group that is largely taken advantage of,” says Schwarzbeck, “they take on 90% of the liability that comes with growing crops – it doesn’t really make sense for produce farmers to take all the risk and not get the majority of the return for that commodity.“Most of the products that we consume come from emerging economies, and often the emerging economies are the ones that have the most fractured and broken or least accessible capital markets.”But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure – what if there was a better way to support farmers so their harvests and income was sheltered from climate and macroeconomic shocks?The question plagued Scharzbeck. He had travelled extensively throughout North and South America to meet farmers: “that’s where I really understood that the issues that I saw back home were the same issues everywhere,” says Schwarzbeck.Agricultural commodities are often sold through intermediaries which means only a small percentage of the profits remain in the hands of the farmers: “a lot of the farmers will fail to make the product available to the end consumers because they don’t know where these consumers are ultimately – the clients that are willing to buy the product,” says Schwarzbeck.The average piece of produce travels 1,600 miles to your plate, is handled x4 – x8 times due to non-value add middle-men, is rebranded x2 due to a fragmented market–making it extremely difficult to trace where produce has come from. Produce is marked up x3 – x6 as a result of changing hands so many times.Was it possible to disrupt and eliminate these intermediaries to put more power in the hands of the producer?Schwarzbeck set out to find answers. He launched ProducePay as a fintech and digital marketplace solution that gives farmers access to capital and connects produce-growers directly to the end buyer.ProducePay also helps growers find end buyers in its marketplace and underwrites the farming and trading risk for growers, which involves weather, logistics, etcWithin 8 years since inception, ProducePay has helped 700 farms – worth about $4 billion of produce – get access to capital and receive the best return on their commodities.What services do you offer farmers and how are you disrupting the market?ProducePay provides Pre Season Financing from $200k to $5MM up to 12 months before harvest. It offers a new Quick-Pay service, which is a first-of-its-kind Quick-Payfinancing option that allows growers to maintain cash flow by getting up to 96% of the value of their shipments within 24 hours after a buyer accepts the product.How does ProducePay strengthen farmers’ resilience?We build strong technical infrastructure that connects farmers to the consumers and services to allow them to reach customers. As the alternative solution for farmers, we provide strong markets of consumption, strong pricing, along with the capital and the infrastructure to reach those clients – this we believe is the formula for maximising long-term yields.”We built a mechanism for traditional funds in the United States to reach farms all across the world. And by doing so we help the people that are best equipped to grow the fruits and vegetables to reach global consumers.The startup venture and investment world now looks at agriculture with a very different light because they have seen what the world without access to food looks like. And it’s very scary, right?During the pandemic where access to food was in question, it was our ability to ultimately help these farmers get the product to these places like Los Angeles that allowed us to make sure that we brought healthy food to the local communities that we work in.How does your sustainability programme work?As part of its support offer for farmers, our sustainability and decarbonisation programme evaluates and offers support on:EXPERTISEDo they have the expertise, the company infrastructure, accountants and other experts to help them manage effectively?COMMERCIALDo we need to help this person have the proper relationships to be able to move and sell the product?SUSTAINABILITYWhat we ultimately focus on is whether something could theoretically be done in perpetuity, or if you’re doing something that is creating short-term gain at the expense of the resources of the community. Sustainability includes social responsibility. Are they doing things that ultimately make sure the people that consume this food will do so in a way that is healthy? Are you preserving the water to the point you’re not exploiting those resources?We’ve launched the first decarbonisation initiative in fruit and vegetable farming, and by that we ultimately partnered with different experts to figure out how to help farmers understand how their particular commodity can reduce the carbon footprint of their farms – depending on the crop they’re farming. This includes anything from how they irrigate, what they apply to the soils and ultimately how they tilled the land.What sort of growth have you seen?In the last 18 months, we’ve tripled our market share. A lot of that has to do with our ability to take our model and successfully replicate it across different countries in the Western Hemisphere. We’re very happy to see our model resonating with other geographies across the world. The produce industry has become largely globalised, and a lot of produce today is being grown in emerging economies. So it is essential for the success of our business and for the network effects that we can replicate our model across different different geographies. We’re very excited to follow this through until we can bring a new reality that is largely available to the farming community across the world. We’ve grown from North America and the Americas and our next expansion is mostly focused in Europe. If you were to look back in 10 years’ time, where do you want to be?I’d like to be sitting down with my daughter and telling her once upon a time, the farming industry was much more impaired because they they lacked the technology or the data.Ultimately, I think I can feel proud that I’m passing the baton on by showing her that everyone can help their industry in their own way. I did it by creating better technology, infrastructure and availability of resources. In some ways we can all help, so hopefully I can be passing the baton to my daughter, so she can start thinking about what she can do as a fifth generation farmer.Do you have a mantra or a life philosophy that keeps you going?My mantra is Be Better. I think humanity’s best moments or best innovations come from pushing yourself to exceed beyond our former self. It’s about having the humility to understand that regardless of who you are, how successful, or how enlightened, you can always learn something. If you can always see yourself as being one step before your next step to self improvement, then you can always be kinder or more philanthropic.I think intergenerationally. Is this something that I would want my children to see me do? If the answer is yes, it means you’re doing something that you can feel proud of.If you want to connect with ProducePay, reach out to: info@producepay.com 💥 Do you want help with boosting your visibility, standing out, & getting the connections you need to succeed? For details visit...becomemorevisible and book a call if it resonates. 👉🏼 Job AdLibrary of Things is looking for a Back-End DeveloperLibrary of Things exists to help people save money and reduce waste/ emissions, by affordably renting out tools like drills, sound systems and sewing machines from local spaces like libraries. We're currently providing this joyful alternative to wasteful consumerism from 11 locations around London, and soon many more around the UK. We're looking for a brilliant Back-End Developer to join our joyful team of ~20.* Salary: Up to £50k (depends on experience)* Time input: 9-day fortnight (every second Friday off)* Location: Remote, but able to easily join monthly meetings in Bristol or London (& option to cowork weekly in our London office)* Perks: flexibility of time/ locations (you can work from abroad!), twice yearly team nature weekends, share options scheme, culture that prioritises wellbeing & joyMore details & apply: https://libraryofthings.co.uk/jobsDo you have a job or an investment opportunity you would like to advertise?Get in touch to have it published in The Green Techpreneur.You may enjoy catching up on…. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thegreentechpreneur.substack.com/subscribe
A warm welcome to the 149 new subscribers who have joined since the last edition!If you’re reading this and haven’t subscribed, sign up below to join a high-value community of over 1,600 climatetech entrepreneurs, investors, and industry leaders.Here’s how The Green Techpreneur can help you:For entrepreneursI interview extraordinary climatetech entrepreneurs and investors and share practical advice on how to build your business and find funding. It’s insightful, actionable and fun to read or listen to.Do you want help with standing out to attract enquiries, talent & investors?For details visit...becomemorevisible and book a call if it resonates.For climatetech investorsThe Green Techpreneur publishes lists of pre-vetted startups seeking investment. Subscribe to be the first to know.“When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.” —John F. KennedyFew crises are as pertinent today as the energy dilemma as we enter what is looking to be a lean winter. With millions of Europe’s most vulnerable facing the option to ‘heat or eat’ without government intervention for unbearable energy costs, the vulnerability of nations that depend on autocratic regimes to meet their energy needs has been laid bare. Energy independence is an immediate matter of national security and an environmental and social necessity. But a time of great crisis can also be a time of great opportunity; this is proving true for the transition to renewable energy – a climatetech sector that’s seeing growth like never before.Anthony Agnew, Development Director of Yoo Energy, a sustainable energy fund and developer, working in wind, solar and battery early stage projects in Western Europe, has worked in renewables for 12 years. His clients span the globe stretching from Greece, the UK, Spain, Italy, Zimbabwe and Holland to the US and Latin America. Anthony first discovered an entrepreneurial streak while studying Mechanical Engineering at uni – along with a friend, he built and developed a vodka business which grew in popularity. Shots sold far beyond the university bar: “at its peak, we were employing 36 people and selling vodka in China. It was a fascinating, interesting time, but it wasn't really where my heart was. I always wanted to go into sustainable energy.”His next venture – an attempt to commercialise construction technology – was stopped in its tracks by the 2008 crisis. But it turned out to be the bend in the road he needed to move into where his true passion lay. He took the cue and launched his journey into green techpreneurship. Anthony set up a renewable heat and power installing business including solar pv, solar thermal, biomass & heat pumps and went on to find his niche as an enabler for renewable energy projects: “with any sort of project development or funding it's a case of just putting people together and making it work – it's all these disparate parts that you can bring together to create value.”This year, he says, has been pivotal for renewable energy; from new government policies to an acceleration of investment, technology and projects, momentum is without doubt on the side of renewables. “It's not a case of investor sentiment is quiet, renewables have been one of the highest performing sectors globally and it's a part of the super cycle. All of the government policy points that are coming out are increasingly helping that.“So whilst the initial invasion of Ukraine certainly caused a bit of a pause on things, two months later, people realised that actually, it's going to drive up those power prices and certainly for the medium to short term, those power prices are going to stay high – that's the expectation for the next couple of years.“Renewable energy and power generation is countercyclical, so it doesn't go up and down as stocks do; we always need energy and energy demand is typically going up anyway. There's now a greater demand and a greater return on investment in renewable energy power projects.”Where is the renewable market headed?Long-term planning for renewable power has really stepped up as a result of these high fuel costs. If you look at the US’ anti-inflation bill, it’s all about sustainability. The impact that can have in the US is huge. So it’s really exciting to see these things come forward as a result of the world suffering and showing that we can address some of these issues.We're certainly seeing on the project side, in delivering sustainable assets, huge influx and growth. And the COP agendas are furthering that. We've already seen New Zealand in 2018 banning all new offshore rights. We saw Quebec this year in April ban all new oil and gas licences, which for Canada, one of the top five oil and gas producers globally, is an incredible thing to state. That's huge. This is the ball rolling, there's the carrot and sticks and we're seeing more and more of that coming. And aside from being forever a hopeful optimist, I'm seeing as I work on the forefront of all these technologies, that deployment rates are quickly and continuously on the rise. So we're seeing more people want to do renewables, in more markets, and more money coming into it – the whole thing is just growing and growing.Where do you think there's a lot of potential, both geographically, and in the type of renewable energy?I hope we’ll see a bigger upsurge in concentrated solar power because when you store heat in liquid salts, you can run it for an extra 4-8 hours and potentially almost get 24-hour power generation. This can be hugely effective in high solar yield locations like southern Spain. Solar with battery, wind with battery, anything with batteries helps the market. I think we can get to 80% renewables deployment, without baseload power. You've got baseload power, which is something that generates power 24/7, like a nuclear power station, and then you've got intermittent power, like wind and solar, which is only going to create power when the wind blows and the sun shines, and then the batteries work to balance the load on those intermittent powers.I believe it's absolutely possible to switch to running the world using fully sustainable sources. It's just a question of building momentum and also building these large networks of people who come together to make it happen.What do renewable developers often get wrong and how they can improve?For project development, you need to derisk the project as much as you can and you need to have five things lined up:1. It's all about taking as much risk off the table as you can.The investors are looking at it in terms of how do we get it past our debt providers and past the board? 2. You need to have the land and agreements for it in its place3. You need to have the proven energy resource - which is going to be the sun, the wind, or the supply of waste from a waste plant. 4. You’ll need to have the build permits5. You need to have grid connectionOnce you've got those five things, you've created value and it's pretty much plain sailing, then it's just engineering and construction which isn't risk by comparison to the early stages.A lot of it comes down to making sure those parts are done really well. It’s showing the expertise you need to to derisk whatever it is that you're trying to do; having local people who have local knowledge and connections and who know how to get those permits as well as specific technical knowledge. Once you put those two together, they're quite potent.Do you have any tips on derisking projects and getting the messaging right? A lot of it comes down to the message and story; making sure it's presented in the best way possible.It's always worth understanding your own strengths and weaknesses, because an investor will know or understand what your weaknesses are likely to be. You can say, ‘look, I'm not good at this, we need to get this part and we've done everything else.’Keep it simple, don't over complicate things. If you have too many words on an investment memorandum you're going to lose everyone because investors are looking at 10-15 of these a day.What type of support is needed to further accelerate renewable uptake?The boulder is already running downhill. We just need more people to push the boulder and get obstacles out of the way. We already have the technologies we need to deliver.There are so many fantastic technologies coming into the market. One of my clients is working with a technology to separate methane into hydrogen. If you run methane through an electrolyser it creates water and electricity – fantastic stuff. And they are sequestering the carbon into high value graphene. Graphene is this bonkers wonderful material, 10 times stronger than diamond and more conductive than copper. You can add it to concrete as an additive and you can get rid of reinforcing steel, for example, or you can use 40% less concrete, because it's that much stronger. 40% less, that use case alone, if it was fully deployed in the industry would create a 2% saving globally on carbon. You always need support from the government to make it happen. But right now, you can build solar in the UK purely based on the current market pricing, and that's before Ukraine happened. You can build these without any support and they make money, so it's already happening, that ball is rolling. If it makes more sense to put solar on your house than not put solar on your house because you're going to live in a house for six years, then suddenly the world gets covered in solar.UBS, for example, are advising their private wealth clients that renewable energy is where you should invest not because you like sustainability, not because you believe in the environment, but because it's outperforming everything else. And that's the perfect news story.Do you have a philosophy or a business mantra?Do the hard thing first. I think the most important thing is just to do the next thing, whatever is in front of you, just take that
A warm welcome to the 260 new subscribers who have joined since the last edition! If you’re reading this and haven’t subscribed, sign up below to join a high-value community of 1,500 climatetech entrepreneurs, investors, and industry leaders.Here’s how The Green Techpreneur can help you:For entrepreneursI interview extraordinary climatetech entrepreneurs and investors and share practical advice on how to build your business and find funding. It’s insightful, actionable and fun to read or listen to.Do you want help with standing out to attract enquiries, talent & investors?For details visit...becomemorevisible and book a call if it resonates. For climatetech investorsThe Green Techpreneur publishes lists of pre-vetted startups seeking investment. Subscribe to be the first to know. From converting their office into a makeshift school for Ukrainian refugee children to planting 25 million trees to seeing 20% YoY revenue growth – Ecosia has continued to thrive and contribute throughout a year that’s been rocked with macroeconomic crises.As a not-for-profit search engine, Ecosia punches above its weight in terms of impact; it’s planted an incredible 153 million trees, transformed entire communities and brought degraded land back to life. It’s a tribute to how the cumulative power of small actions taken by the collective over time does create truly powerful global change.And it all started because as a teenage boy, Ecosia Founder Christian Kroll was touched by the plight of the poor during a trip to India and determined he would use his future career to learn how to harness technology to drive positive impact. At university, Christian had created a comparison website and was earning money from commissions: “I realised how much money I was spending on online advertisement and that Google is a really good business model." His university side-hustle became the idea from which Ecosia was born, but Ecosia’s explosive growth would only come after Christian persevered through several failed projects – it was his third attempt at building a search engine.Today, Ecosia is the world’s largest not-for-profit search engine and one of the best-known cleantech companies of our time. Supported by 15 million users worldwide, it plants millions of trees every year across 26 countries and powers its engine with 100% renewable energy.The Green Techpreneur caught up with Ecosia’s extraordinary founder, Christian, to share insight on how they’ve navigated today’s fast-changing business climate.How has the last year been for Ecosia?In terms of trees being planted, we’re at 153 million at the moment, so that’s roughly 25 million more trees since last year. Of course, if you compare this to the number of trees we need to plant, it’s still much less than we need. We’re planting more trees than ever, but we would like to plant much, much faster! We hope more people use us so we can plant more trees.Do you have statistics on your year on year growth?We’ve had about a 20% revenue increase compared to one year ago - all our progress and statistics are publicly available in the financial reports we publish. Everyone can check the numbers on our website. What’s the goal that you’re working towards?We need to plant a trillion trees as quickly as possible. We’re still far away from achieving that – by we, I mean not just Ecosia, but we as a global society – we have to scale up.We calculated that if everyone used us instead of Google, we could plant around 300 billion trees every year and we would get to that 1 trillion very quickly – it’s not impossible but we need more users to do it.How have you navigated the challenges of this last year with all the crises globally?Covid is still a problem and we’ve also been affected by that with people not being able to come to the office and also people spending less online which means less revenue for us to some extent, but I think it’s affected us much less than other industries.The other big crisis was the invasion of Ukraine by Russia – that was a big shock for us. As a company, we committed to upscale our investment in renewable energy to do our part to transition away from fossil fuels and all those autocratic leaders that hold us hostage.In Ecosia, we made investments into renewable energy to not only power our own service, but multiples of that – 500% of what we consume ourselves. We calculated what Google could do if they did the same, they could almost finance the entire transition away from fossil fuels in the European Union within just a few years. So if other companies did the same, we wouldn’t even have this problem, we would be energy independent and this invasion would probably not have happened. Now with fossil fuels getting expensive and it hurting our economy, it’s a consequence of us not taking the measures we should have taken 10 years ago. Now we have to deal with it and we’re trying to do our part with investment in renewable energy. We transformed parts of our office, which were not in use because of the pandemic, into a temporary home for Ukrainian school children and we supported a project that helped refugees find accommodation.But one of the issues is that the climate crisis has gotten much less attention over the last two years. It’s always the elephant in the room. Yes, we need to deal with COVID. Yes, we need to deal with this war. But don’t forget about the big monster that is waiting for us. Our house is on fire and we should talk about that every day and act accordingly. What strategies did you use to rebrand Ecosia? When you build things, after a while they get outdated. Design-wise we had some old looks and things didn’t really fit together and nobody had the time to look at it. We put in a joint effort to update it and make the brand a bit more exciting. We wanted to make it clear that this is more than just a search engine, it’s a big movement, it’s potentially the biggest movement to solve the climate crisis online. We wanted to be bold in not only the looks but in the communication on our website, and we highlighted a few things that we felt were underrepresented.Often, we get the question, ‘yes, you’re planting some trees, but you keep the profits for yourself?’ People misunderstand that very often and we have to correct it and say ‘no, we give 100% of our profits to solving the climate crisis, and this will be true forever. It’s impossible to take any profits out of the company. It’s impossible to sell the company.’The new, more bold visual style fits better with what we’re trying to do at Ecosia.You’ve just launched freetree.io as a new browser extension, was this something you built based on feedback from users?To some extent, it’s something that we incubated within Ecosia.Freetree.io is a browser extension that you can install in your browser and it allows you to plant trees when shopping online without having to pay extra.For example, say you’re purchasing cat food in an online shop, if this shop is a partner, then freetree.io will automatically pop up and a share of your purchase value will go into planting trees. The good thing about it is that users don’t have to pay extra – it’s the shops that give a share of the purchase value. The concept behind it is that online shops often pay commissions to partners to drive traffic; if I bring traffic to that shop I get a commission, we used that concept for tree-planting.It’s super easy to install and it’s a great addition to Ecosia. Instead of just planting trees through searches, you can plant trees when browsing other websites: we have thousands of partners, so freetree.io works when, for example, you’re booking a hotel, purchasing something online, or subscribing to a service. If someone is a partner, you’ll automatically get a popup that asks you if you want to plant trees.We’ve received good feedback so far and would like more people to use freetree.io – the more people use it, the more trees we plant.What are the social impacts of tree planting with Ecosia?We pay people to plant trees in very low-income countries, so the income financially supports the people there and it regenerates the degraded land so it’s fertile again. Many of the trees that we are planting generate income later. We not only plant trees, we plant hopeWe start a positive cycle. People realise, ‘this degraded land that has gotten worse and worse over time, I can turn this around.’ This is super inspiring - especially for younger people. We have community collaboration so people understand that the trees we’re planting are important for soil fertility, for stabilising the local water cycles and for the well-being of the entire community. All of that combined has a massive impact.I sometimes think of trees as our superweapon in the fight against many different crises. Do you have Ecosia forests made up of all the trees planted?It’s more of a mosaic than one big Ecosia forest; we have more than 20,000 different locations where we’ve planted and most of them are a maximum of a few hectares big. If you look at the circumstances on the ground, there’s often no space to plant one big forest, so it makes sense to have lots of small pieces. What message do you want to leave the readers with?The final message is to take individual action, whether it is reducing your carbon footprint, offsetting your CO2 emissions, or participating in environmental projects. We have to be a lot more active when it comes to solving the climate crisis and it’s urgent that we do all these things and go beyond the small changes to approach the big topics.💥 Find out how you can stand out to attract enquiries, talent & investors… For details visit...becomemorevisible and book a call.Check out these lists of pre-vetted startups seeking investmentRhizome2 Hydrogen, Traceless, Utility Bridge, Everdye, Kyomei Beworks Automation, Cultivated Bio, Phase Biolabs, Salient Energy Further reading:www.thegreentechpreneur.uk This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with
Welcome to the 98 new subscribers who have joined since the last edition! If you’re reading this and haven’t subscribed, you can join a high-value community of 1,227 climatetech entrepreneurs, investors, and industry leaders by signing up below.Here’s how The Green Techpreneur can help you:For entrepreneurs:2-4 times a month I interview extraordinary climatetech entrepreneurs and investors and share insight on how to build your business and find funding. It’s insightful, actionable and fun to read or listen to. For climatetech investors: The Green Techpreneur publishes lists of pre-vetted startups seeking investment.For job seekers:We post climatetech job ads:Climate fintech startup Earthbanc is hiring a Marketing Communications Manager. “We're looking for someone to be an essential support to the Executive team and a trusted go-to colleague to help us get things done in marketing, sales, communications, brand building and strategic project management to improve our products from user feedback.” Sometimes a random encounter is all it takes to change the course of your life. This was certainly true for Uruguayan Santiago de los Reyes and Chilean Danilo Perez who met at a Latin American community networking event in New Zealand. The two hit it off and together with mechanical engineer Freddy Gonzalez they started working together to bring Danilo’s innovation in energy-efficiency to market. After years of painstaking research, Danilo had successfully turned his idea into a patented technology that makes anaerobic digestion and fermentation processes more efficient and faster to deliver, ultimately offering better quality renewable biogas energy at lower cost. Vertus Energy technology unlocks an extra 60% energy from the same waste, and it does it three times faster than the current processes in place, reducing all ongoing costs while increasing both the quantity and quality of biogas processed. Benjamin Howard later joined the co-founding team, bringing expertise in commercial construction and a plan to help bring Vertus Energy technology to the UK.“We all converge here in New Zealand as four migrants trying to do some good for the world. We got on pretty well and all have the mindset that we have to do something. It’s not an option to not do anything about the current energy situation that we live in,” says Santiago.“Essentially, what we are trying to do is to develop a biological platform to make renewable gas more affordable and achievable in this energy transition era. And with rising energy costs placing increasing financial pressure on consumers and businesses and the REPowerEU strategy aimed at reducing Russian gas imports significantly in 2022 and weaning Europe completely off of Russian energy by 2030 – the pressure is on to fuel the energy transition. Vertus Energy is ready to rise to the occasion. What impact does your technology have on the energy industry?Our technology impacts the biogas industry in two key ways:BRIO is a small but powerful unit that lives inside the anaerobic digester. BRIO allows AD plants to process three times more waste in the same sized tank while delivering biogas with 60% more energy potential than ever before.Our second technology, BODA, is carbon sequestration and conversion technology. BODA can either be used to “upgrade” the biogas from AD into Bio-methane or it can capture raw CO₂ and convert it into Renewable Natural Gas. BODA is a strong and powerful unit that eats CO₂ and H₂ to produce Renewable Natural Gas. Our technology unlocks an extra 60% energy from the same waste, and it does it 3 times faster than the current processes in place. What challenges have you faced in setting up Vertus Energy?We were looking to be that infrastructure company that would deliver the full anaerobic digestion plant along with our technology. However, with limited funding and resources, we decided to change our focus to developing a technology that can be implemented into existing anaerobic digestion plants. New Zealand is quite behind in the anaerobic digestion industry. Hence, one of the challenges we have right now is to develop a way to help regions that don’t currently have a mature biogas industry and to push the biogas industry forward.Why is biogas a crucial part of the energy transition?Biogas is the only fuel that can be upgraded and provide a direct drop-in replacement for Natural Gas without having to change any of the current distribution methods. This means that it can be one of the fastest renewable fuels to be implemented within the decade to help us towards net-zero targets and it keeps it affordable for consumers as we transition. It can be produced from organic waste, which as humanity grows, is only going to increase. Biogas is very versatile. It can be used to produce electricity, heat, upgrade to renewable natural gas, replace many traditional fossil fuels in the transport sector and even provide sustainable aviation fuel from a carbon negative perspective. Its applications are truly endless. What are the opportunities for expansion for biogas as an alternative energy?The biggest opportunity for the future for biogas would be to address energy security for communities that do not have reliable access to energy from renewable sources, but have organic waste that could be treated. Currently biogas is used for a multitude of applications, but the Vertus technology will enable existing plants to deliver more biogas at higher energy quality, resulting in more fossil fuels being displaced. It will enable new plants to be much smaller and still deliver the amazing benefits of waste to energy. Vertus could power schools, communities, households, restaurants, and the list go on, with energy from their own food waste. Who are your clients or pilot projects?Large energy corporations who want to go greenWe want to be working with any large corporations who want to decarbonise their energy production, distribution or assist their clients achieving energy security. The likes of Aramco, Shell, Exxon, Engie and those corporations who could really make a wholesale change for good in the fastest time possible. Existing biogas plants We are currently working with a multitude of potential partners around the world. We are developing partnerships with some large existing biogas plant builders and owners in Europe to accelerate Europe's move away from Russian fossil fuel reliance that is currently causing so many issues. Communities and local partnerships with cities and farmersWe are in partnership with an influential figure in Africa to establish how we deliver energy justice and energy security for communities and regions there. With our current base being New Zealand, we have developed many local partnerships. For example, an inner-city school which has a small educational farm, we now process some of their waste for them to prevent methane emissions.The gas from our laboratory is going to be used to recharge electric scooters in the city and provide them with off grid power. We are working alongside several farmers who have a waste and renewable energy problem. We are surrounding ourselves with key partners that can help us scale our technology offering and we're working towards our purpose of energy justice for all. We want to be an energy innovation hub; we want to collaborate with everyone that wants to make this world a better place.Can you give me 5 surprising facts about biogas?1. The most surprising fact is that it can be a carbon negative energy source and thus aid global cooling.2. It comes from a completely natural process that was first identified by the Egyptians nearly 4000 years ago. The first use of biogas in the UK was in 1895 when it powered streetlamps in Exeter from Sewage waste.3. It can either create and/or store energy for decades without losing any of its power.4. It's versatile. The energy it produces can be used in a wide variety of cases. From electricity generation through to Sustainable Aviation Fuel.5. It solves many societal and environmental problems in one application. It comes from organic waste and delivers high power renewable energy. Interesting fact: there is enough organic waste in Africa to provide the 600 million people that live in Sub-Saharan Africa with renewable electricity for life. Does your technology work with existing infrastructure?Yes. In our business model we pay for the installation of our technology into existing infrastructure. It can have a real impact because it can be distributed through already established and well-connected networks.Biogas and biomethane is an amazing part of the transition because it can utilise the current infrastructure without need of new engines because it can directly replace natural gas.Why is it important that various alternative energy types are used together? We could produce enough solar power in summer to power New Zealand throughout the whole year, but there is no storage capacity for that, and gases like hydrogen and biogas could provide an option for easier energy storage capacity and winter supplies.There's a reason our energy matrix is so complicated and so intertwined. You have some renewable energies, you have some biofuels, and they all have their inherent best applications and their best delivery methods. And there needs to be that crossover to achieve what we need to achieve in the timeframe that we have available to us.Scientific data suggests that if we only stick with carbon neutral technologies we have a 50-50% chance of averting climate disaster, essentially. So we have to start focusing on carbon negative fuels, which inherently is anaerobic digestion, and where that waste comes from. So let's utilise waste and turn it into a resource and a valuable fuel that stops carbon and stops emissions from reaching the atmosphere. What is the most frustrating part of your work?The thing I've struggled with most is getting across and really articulating how vital th
Together with co-founders Aslan Shamsutdin, Murshid M. Ali and Petter S. Berge, Pratik Ghoshal, CEO and Co-founder of Skyfri Technologies developed technology which could streamline and automate solar asset operations to make solar power cheaper and solar capital investment significantly more sustainable.Skyfri’s technology targeted a genuine market pain point and within just a few months of launching, company growth soared by 500%. And with Skyfri’s solar asset management solution offering immediate savings of operating heads by 20-30% for power plants that were previously manually managed, their skyrocketing growth is hardly a surprise.Backed by climate investors SpeedInvest, Singularity and Link Venture, Skyfri manages about 185 sites worldwide and is dramatically accelerating growth through targeted acquisitions.Pratik says there was a strong element of right place, right time serendipity to Skyfri’s growth: the solar market was in desperate need of a better management solution, to a point where money and investors may have started to flow out of the space if more efficient ways of operating weren’t found.But the most important component of Skyfri’s success, he says, was not the market or the service or technology they provide – it was the people behind the name.“What’s the most important thing I’ve seen in my journey as an entrepreneur?“It’s that your team is your biggest asset. “Most of the time you fail as an entrepreneur because you just don’t have likeminded people. You don’t have people who you can depend on. Because you alone can’t be a one man army. “For me, having a co-founding team, not just a co-founder, was the key for Skyfri.“I do my 10% of the work, they their 90% of the work and we all do it together. If we hadn’t found that team, we probably wouldn’t be here,” says Pratik.To launch and build Skyfri just before the pandemic shook the world, the co-founding team had to take a leap of faith; “we started recruiting people to work remote, that’s how we grew. It was six months before I even met my co-founders in person – by then we had already raised funds.”His motto? “The entrepreneur’s job is to make the receptionist rich.”In this Green Techpreneur interview, Pratik talks all things growth, solar and team-building.NOTICE: We just launched The Green Techpreneur Job Board! We are super excited to build this connector platform for climatetech entrepreneurs. If you are interested in advertising a job please get in touch: marianne@thegreentechpreneur.ukLink to our website- www.thegreentechpreneur.ukWe’re offering free ad space for jobs for the first 90 days.Where did the idea behind Skyfri come from?My co-founders were all serial entrepreneurs in Oslo, Norway. We’ve known each other since almost five years now - since 2017 when I was working as Head of Global Sales in a manufacturing company in Munich. They wanted to develop a solar project. I went my way and became a global asset manager in London, but we always kept in touch and thought we could one day do something together. And incidentally, we found we were all facing similar issues. In 2020, we started connecting with each other; we had these solar power plants that didn’t work. We didn’t know what was happening, it was like a black box that we didn’t understand and our investment was at risk. So we decided to do something about it and we had a breakthrough from a technological point of view and that’s how Skyfri was born.What are key elements to working together successfully as co-founders?The most important thing is, you all share a common vision, you all have the same pain points, and you all are frustrated with the status quo. You have to be frustrated with the status quo to start something new. There’s no way the world moves ahead with incremental changes, you have to change things overnight, or at least have the ambition to change things.What does your technology do?We wanted to make solar plant management more systemized, we wanted to modernise it with automation. We target and transform three key underperformance areas:We identify energy losses in real-timeWhen reporting happens on the asset management, you get a report after a month or a quarter and you suddenly realise that some of your plants didn't work. Something burnt out and needed replacement and by the time you know you already lost revenue and need to spend more to fix the issues. So we wanted to know exactly when things fail, or even futuristically predict when they might finish or start showing signs of underperformance. That's real-time management. We break the silosWe wanted to fundamentally change the system of operations, accounting and monitoring as siloed systems to have this be a single source of truth in a single integrated platform.We do all of this autonomously The algorithm runs on machine learning, deep learning setup, and it monitors solar plants and does things automatically that previously needed a 20–30 member team depending on portfolio size. So the final value proposition to the investor goes back in the form of increased rate of return. What’s your knock-on impact on the solar industry?20 years ago it cost 5 million Euros to build one megawatt of solar power – now that figure is just 0.5 million Euros per megawatt: because of the immense drop in capital expenditure, it has already become a mainstream class asset but what would have derailed its potential is the lack of management of the solar power plants – and that's where we come in. We are seeing an increased amount of investment and we want to not only sustain that money, we want more to come in to reduce global warming.If we had not done it, we probably would see the capital drain out of renewable energy investments.What is it about entrepreneurship that gives you that kick, and makes you go ‘yes, this is what I want to do!’?You of course have your freedom of thought, everyone has it in a free world. But the freedom of execution to channel the energy that you have without having to stick to a frame structure which already exists is what's most interesting. And the second thing is, at the beginning of entrepreneurship, there’s a lot of energy and that's what makes you get up in the morning, and like my wife says, I’m less of a thinker than a doer. I like to do things, so there’s no better avenue than entrepreneurship.Can you describe your entrepreneurial journey in three words?Extremely busy, very interesting, very scaryWhat’s the scariest part about being a climatetech entrepreneur?The scariest part is, ‘what if the team doesn’t feel the same way tomorrow?’ I’m not worried about the market, because it’s clear, the market is there, but I want the team to be equally passionate and what if tomorrow we wake up and start to see a lot of disconnect in the team? That’s the scary part. To keep everyone motivated in the team – that’s our biggest asset by far – I cannot overstate this. The team has to stick together. Family is a cliche, but it’s a common vision, common mission that the team has to always feel, to always want to stay ahead of the curve by asking the most critical and even unpleasant questions – this is the motivation I want to see everyday in my team. How do you create that team spirit?We dislike the idea that there’s a value statement – because no one reads them – and the values may change over time.What we think is there’s one value that doesn’t change and that is a sense of care. Care for each other, care for the people with whom you spend 85% of your waking time with. And that care automatically translates into care for your customer. If you care for the customer and stand by them when they need help the most, that’s when you create lifelong loyalty.And you can’t write it on the wall, so someone reads it and says; ‘I’ll be caring, I’ll be caring, I’ll be caring.’ It has to be your natural self, so he or she sees that care happening in the company all the time.In the face of climate chaos, what gives you hope for the future?I give a lot of credit to the youth of today. You have Greta Thunberg and she has inspired a whole generation of youth. They don't have the data points, but they just get it with the snap of a finger, that this is not sustainable, this is not how they want to live. That’s the movement that is happening in front of the line. The second credit goes to the community of scientists that have been working tirelessly to prove beyond shadow of doubt that climate change is happening and we should do something about it. If you could teleport yourself into your future, where would you be?The company Skyfri would still be creating a lot of value as one of the most trusted and dependable in the internet enabled space. We will try to win the solar world and we’ll play a role in virtual power plants, the smart grid, anything that is on the supply side. I don’t know what management capacity I’ll be in 10 years from now, because it’s nice to make room for the next generation to manage the company and we as co-founders step down at some point in time. I believe in that. But I want to be involved with everything that has to do with encouraging a sustainable lifestyle.Dear Green Techpreneur reader,If you have a job or product/service you would like to advertise, or are interested in being featured in an upcoming interview article or exploring an ongoing branding partnership in the beautiful GT magazine, please get in touch.Did you know?The GT publishes a weekly list of high-potential, pre-vetted startups seeking investment 👉🏼 check it out:10th May – Invest in hot pre-vetted startups This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thegreentechpreneur.substack.com/subscribe
For Tom Duncan, nature had always been more than just a place for recreation, it was an all-consuming way of life. He lived out on the land, in the vast, sun-kissed Australian outback, in an extended family farming community that would gather to help each other with the harvest:“It was such a great time in my life, working together on farms in rural Australia. It was really instructive for me to learn about how nature works and some of the complex systems that farming operates within.“There's moments of great beauty in nature and being immersed in it and just appreciating nature for its own wonder and amazement that we have so much biodiversity, so much abundance, and that's what really inspired me to this day to love nature the way I do, and do the work that I'm doing.”“My mother was a positive influence on me, as a child we would pick native seeds and gum nuts, and make Christmas wreaths for people’s doors, to spread the Christmas cheer. We would sell these ornate Christmas wreaths at weekend markets out of the back of our family Holden station wagon.”But Tom’s rural idyll was shattered by a boding realisation that extreme climate events were becoming more and more frequent. From a young age, he noticed a worrying pattern of the land increasingly being ravaged by more fires and more floods. “Our farming businesses was hard work, long hours, and sometimes less than spectacular returns if there were extreme weather events.I could see the changing climate and water and soil fertility conditions on our farms deteriorate over the years - this was my wake up call.”He decided he would be more than a witness to nature’s destruction and channelled his deep-rooted connection to the land into a life-long dedication to regeneration.Fresh out of university, he travelled to Inner Mongolia and to the North Central Plains to work on large-scale grassland restoration projects.After 15 years of working in land restoration he learnt that it’s “complex, difficult, it needs grassroots up as well as policy and incentive top-down to really succeed.” He noticed a disconnect between how we value, finance and incentivise regenerative and sustainable land management practices:“I worked on some pioneering ecosystem service markets in Australia where farmers would bid to provide ecosystem services to improve water quality, biodiversity values and sequester carbon. “That project raised about $300 million and showed me that you could develop and deliver ecosystem services markets, but there just wasn't enough scale.”For Tom, this was both deeply hopeful and deeply frustrating. The solution to stopping runaway climate change was not only within reach, but in sight:“By transitioning to regenerative agriculture across 2.5 billion hectares, humanity could sequester all of our global emissions every year.”Yet there was no mass adoption of land regeneration; “it was still just the domain of government policy units and ad hoc programs, and when a government changes, the program might get scrapped or be toned down.“I saw that there was a need for a mass market approach to financing land regeneration, and the creation of new incentivisation models.”Tom founded Earthbanc – a digital green banking investment platform – as a groundbreaking private sector solution to bring regeneration to mass markets. Earthbanc is bridging the market incentives gap with viable, proven and profitable investment solutions that are dramatically advancing the transition to a regenerative, sustainable future. Earthbanc’s climate fintech innovation was recognised last year when it won the Mastercard Lighthouse FINITIV program in Spring 2021, and the company is now ready to scale to the next level in the booming climate and fintech sector.How do Earthbanc fintech solutions solve the problem of how to finance mass adoption of regenerative agriculture?Finance has been missing from carbon project developments in a big way, and Earthbanc is solving that problem.Earthbanc makes climate action profitable for any stakeholder. It offers:1. Verified carbon credits 2. Corporate and private investment accounts to invest in a carefully curated and audited portfolio of land regeneration/carbon removal projects 3. A regenerative finance (Refi) revolution for the masses: a soon-to-be launched app will enable anyone to easily invest in and profit from land regeneration projects.Earthbanc’s green investments finance agroforestry, regenerative agriculture, mangrove and sea grass restoration, kelp forest protection, holistic grazing and more.It’s aim is to enable sustainability-fuelled abundance as a core incentive for all of humanity. It’s something that we need to live and we know that aligned incentives allow many different stakeholders to start moving in the same direction and toward the same goal.A major problem that Earthbanc solves is providing the infrastructure and aligned incentives that not just allow trillions of climate finance funds to flow each year, but encourage it by verifying the climate and carbon reduction claims of the finance - enabling investors to trust in the outcomes by examining the data and claims. We sell carbon credits on our fintech blockchain platformEarthbanc can be described as a carbon bank. We're the first fintech blockchain platform where you can deposit your carbon into a bank-like vault that sits on a blockchain. Farmers register on the Earthbanc platform, and we measure the carbon sequestration in the landscape of that farmer. How do you verify and measure carbon sequestration and credits?Despite the growing corporate commitment to net-zero, its been difficult for carbon buyers to find third-party annually audited carbon credits. Earthbanc is solving this by offering the world’s first continuously audited offsets. We use AI models that are trained on satellite remote sensing data from the European Space Agency, we then get that carbon credit verified as a true carbon reduction.With venture backing from the European Space Agency, Earthbanc leverages AI, web3 and data science to annually audit the underlying carbon asset in carbon credits bringing increased transparency and credibility to carbon markets.The company has audited the carbon stocks of over 13M hectares of forest globally using satellites and proprietary remote sensing technology.Who buys Earthbanc carbon credits?We have large corporate buyers who are buying carbon on our platform every month. We’re selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of carbon, so a farmer can get paid for their ecosystem services.What makes Earthbanc’s solution so potent in combating the climate crisis is its basis on expert knowledge of land restoration and paying farmers in areas of the world where the impact is the greatest – both for nature, and for people.How fast is the carbon credit market growing?Last year there was a 969% increase in nature-based solutions carbon futures contracts. It was hard to find a 969% growth in any asset class in 2021 – but it the growth was in futures contracts on nature-based carbon solutions which is what Earthbanc measures.We mint the carbon on a layer one blockchain, and when we mint those carbon credits that are then available for sale on our market platform.To democratise sustainable abundance through climate investing, Earthbanc is launching an app The Earthbanc app will provide a carbon bank with easy on and off fiat ramps for users globally, including for the unbanked, bringing the next billion users into the regenerative finance revolution.It's a desktop app that you can access on your laptop computer. It's not a mobile app yet, but once you sign up on our existing carbon investment platform, there’s a portfolio of carbon projects that you can purchase.We've got a waitlist for the blockchain-based investments app, which is going to be launched soon. So we encourage people to sign up on the waitlist and register their email so they’re the first to find out how they can get access to these amazing opportunities.Our platform will enable investors to access 8% fixed - 15% variable APY yields and finance nature-based carbon removal projects globally. What impact do Earthbanc investors have? At the individual level, Earthbanc makes investing in climate action easy and we make climate action profitable for those who are sequestering the carbon. They get the incentives that they deserve for carrying out regenerative land management methods. There's a win for the farmers who are doing the hard work on the ground, getting their carbon incentive payments, and investors are able to benefit from the rising demand for carbon removal. Earthbanc works with a network of NGOs and finances regeneration projects that protect the most vulnerable people and vital ecosystems at the forefront of the climate crisis For a farmer on the ground in India, for example, if we talk about our mangrove restoration project, if someone buys carbon from that project, those farmers can start receiving a 91% increase in their annual salary.This is just life changing for those people. These are some of the most climate vulnerable people in the world who are subjected to hurricane-driven storm surges washing away their homes, destroying their agricultural infrastructure, their power infrastructure. They're very vulnerable people so they need all the help they can get. Planting mangrove trees prevents people from becoming climate refugeesBy planting mangrove trees, it's creating a green wall against those hurricane-driven storms. This slows down the rush of water that comes every hurricane season, to a level where, by the time it reaches the villages it's just a steady trickle. That's incredibly important to protect those people's homes and pay them the carbon incentive to protect the most vital ecosystems on the planet so they don't become climate refugees.Mangroves are where 50% of all fish clusters are bornIn mangrove ecosystems in rivers, in estuaries, just like the Sundarbans in India, 50% of fish clu
Welcome to the 34 new subscribers who have joined since the last edition! If you’re reading this and haven’t subscribed, you can join a high-value community of 1,037 climatetech entrepreneurs, investors, and industry leaders by signing up below.2-4 times a month I interview extraordinary climatetech entrepreneurs and investors and share insight on how to build your business and find funding. It’s insightful, actionable and fun to read or listen to.This week I’m venturing away from the usual Green Techpreneur interviews to publish a special Easter edition about a topic close to my heart – Ukraine.I lived in Ukraine for a number of years as a child and feel compelled to share my experience and shed light on Ukraine’s culture and history. It’s my little way of showing support and solidarity with Ukraine as they combat the horror unleashed by Putin.…….The rugged, potholed dirt road in front of our house had a large water pipe that would break so often it almost seemed precued to leak, releasing a steady trickle of water that would deepen the rut that ran down the middle of the road.The dirt road may have been a navigational nightmare for the car driver - bouncing passengers would have to steady themselves by gripping the sides of the vehicle – but to nine year old me, it was a playground.My parents had moved to Ukraine to build a charity, Care in Action. As foreigners living in L’viv, we stuck out like a sore thumb. Just walking down the street speaking English would elicit stares.It wasn’t long before our house became a meeting spot for a small group of neighbourhood kids that lived along the dirt road on the outskirts of L’viv.Our Ukrainian friends would gather by our house in the afternoons - knowing we would be coming out to play. We played Badminton, capture the flag, catch, tag, and football in summer. In winter, we built snow castles and had snowball fights.The neighbourhood kids were keen to practise their English. I remember when I first met Christina who lived down the street. It was winter and the dirt road was covered in snow. She used a couple of artificial-sounding, memorised English phrases she had learnt in school - “the weather is so chilly.” After a few years of playing together, our friends would take pride in speaking ever-more fluent English.The girls would ask me to listen to Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys songs and write out the lyrics - so they could learn to sing-along to their favourite pop songs in English. When bell bottoms were all the rage in the West, they made sure they were on trend.For Christina, there were a few surprises: I remember her shock at once coming to our house and seeing us eat tomatoes in winter - it was something she had never seen before. Like many Ukrainians, Christina grew up eating seasonal food, often grown in a backyard or plot of land, or purchased in an outdoor Ukrainian market. Some food is preserved for the winter in jars.Christina’s family bred rabbits in a backyard cage. When I asked her the rabbits names, she told me that they were for meat. For many Ukrainians - living in the poorest country of Europe meant that you had to know how to survive.She had some minor bone deformities because her Dad had been exposed to Chernobyl radiation, and some damage had been passed down through the genes.Another surprise for Christina was that we had cooked meals - our Ukrainian friends thought Westerners ate mostly fast food. Their point of reference for life in the West was movies and pop culture; for most Ukrainians at the time, leaving Ukraine to visit Europe required a visa that was not easy to get. They lived in a country that bore the hallmarks of Soviet oppression - an entire system of governance built on corruption. Survival of the ‘haves’ and a small gang at the top at the expense and degradation of the ‘have-nots’. A bribe can get you most places, but without one your hands are tied.Babuschkas would stand in markets for long hours, selling berries, jam, milk - whatever they could source from their land. In the biting cold of winter, a vodka bottle would help them withstand the cold. Their legs were thick and stubby, their deeply weathered faces shone out from behind their headscarves. I remember a Babuschka breaking down in tears of gratitude and relief when my Dad paid her more than what she asked for. For many Ukrainians, the reality was that winters were bitter and cold and poverty was grinding. Life was hard.It’s hard to truly describe what oppression feels like. It’s an invisible blanket of misery that hangs in the air. A depression so thick you can feel it in the atmosphere, in the Ukrainian cultural love of the melancholy - an adopted sense of the dignity of suffering. It was like the land itself kept secrets - hidden tales of sorrow and tragedies that run so deep they dare not be revealed. Whispers and sighs that almost came out of Ukrainian fields and forests.The Ukrainian experience of the Holodomor - the widespread famine that ensued when Stalin stole their wheat - was so harsh and so alive in their memory, that even as a pre-teen, it was something I picked up on.A bitter memory of absolute cruelty and injustice; when millions of their own starved to death, because of the mechanisms of a bigger, more powerful neighbour next door. But along with that memory lay something else - something remarkable in the Ukrainian national consciousness: an ironclad determination to survive. An almost obstinate inner pride, an unbreakable, patriotic sense of being fiercely bonded in collective resistance, and in needing to defend what was theirs. Ukraine may have been the poorest country in Europe, steeped in problems, oppression and corruption- but it was theirs - their Ukraine. Their story.I remember exploring deserted railway tracks on the outskirts of L’viv, balancing my way along the tracks; they were overgrown and led mysteriously through forests and meadows. What stories were they hiding? In that vast, fertile land, bordering Europe and Russia - with its birch trees, its crows and its fields, deserted railway tracks lay as remnants of old projects that had started and stopped and gotten nowhere.Rusting skeletons that spoke of having been trapped between consecutive invading powers that pushed in from both the East and the West. Empires that were built and then crumbled. Only Ukrainians had been left behind, always picking up the pieces.Now a generation of Ukrainians had grown up entirely outside of the Soviet Union.I wasn’t in Ukraine during the watershed Orange revolution, but I remember meeting a Ukrainian student, an acquaintance of my parents, who had been studying in Germany. She was passionately, wholeheartedly and zealously involved in supporting the revolution. In Olga, I saw that underlying Ukrainian patriotism and fire come to the fore. A nation that summoned incredible determination from its history of struggle and rose up.In 2014, once more, tens of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets in protest as Yanukovych threatened to steer them off the path of Europe and freedom. Many were beaten, some were tortured. But their choice was clear and they would not waver. They had looked across their borders to both the East and the West. They saw a union of comparatively free and prosperous democratic nations to the West and yearned for the same freedom and privilege. To their East they saw Russian neighbours living in dictatorial oppression. When President Yanukovych bowed to intense pressure from Russia to scrap Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU, they chose to fight for their future.In ensuing years, I heard of a Ukraine that sounded very different from the Ukraine of my childhood. For ambitious, intelligent young Ukrainians, there were remote jobs in foreign technology companies. Travel abroad had become easier, new airlines and cheap flights had brought tourists to L’viv.They had overthrown the Russian puppet regime and elected their own leader who would work towards the Ukraine they dreamt of. There was something fresh in the air, a bubbling vibrancy - was this what hope felt like? A spring-like feeling that things were getting better after a long dark winter.I will never forget the feeling of absolute dread I felt the night before the invasion. ‘Russian troops are now 100% in attack position’ - was the last thing I’d read.And then the shock of waking up to see that the Russian army had launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine.‘Not Ukraine,’ I thought, ‘my God, not Ukraine.’I felt absolute devastation.Horror, anger, agony, rage, heartbreak.I had lived in Ukraine. I had seen their poverty, their struggle. It was all the more painful to know how incredibly hard their upwards climb had been.It was like watching someone who you knew had suffered deeply, but who had painstakingly clawed their way up into a better place, being battered and beaten back down just as they had come to see the light at the end of the tunnel.Memories of Ukraine came flooding back.Christina, Beata, Olena…childhood friends. What had become of them now?Were poor, historically oppressed nations destined to remain that way? Is change possible if you fight long and hard enough?Here I am, in my 30s, engaged in the rollercoaster ride of building a digital magazine. It’s not easy, but the incredible opportunity I have to build my own future and live in a free, democratic country isn’t lost on me.Meanwhile, my old childhood friends in Ukraine are giving their last breath to defend the right to have a dream: to determine their own future and the future of their children in a free, sovereign country.Once again, that vast land between East and West is battling imperial tyranny. And the battered bodies, psyches, and homes of a new generation of Ukrainians - once filled with hope - will become a living witness to the brutality of their continued struggle for freedom.“You crucify freedom, but the soul of man knows no bounds.”Russian bombs may be falling in Ukraine, but the att