Carbon13, the Cambridge-based venture builder for the climate emergency announced their most significant round of investment to date with a total of £2.4 million of funding being deployed. Carbon13 is investing by way of an LP Fund, which has received the commitment of 15 institutions and individuals dedicated to supporting early-stage climate tech entrepreneurs.
Carbon13 only made their first investments in September 2021, yet this year they have expanded their Venture Builder programme from the UK to Germany and launched an accelerator, the Venture Launchpad. This expansion in 2023 has been fuelled by the increasing level of interest in the Carbon13 approach to venture building.
As a result, Carbon13 has run three concurrent programmes over the course of 2023 with a total of over 200 individuals participating in over 75 ventures. Following a rigorous analysis of both the financial return and the carbon credibility of each venture, Carbon13 has selected 21 ventures for pre-seed investment and ongoing support.
Carbon13’s portfolio
Carbon13’s venture building programmes are the origin of other high potential climate tech startups who have since raised follow on funding including the world’s first carbon insurer Kita (Earthshot 2023 nominated), Infyos (EV supply chain platform), Materials Nexus (AI-powered materials discovery), Nium (green ammonia), Sun Bear Biofuture (precision fermentation), Biozeroc (carbon negative concrete), Preoptima (low carbon building design) and Tierra Foods (agroforestry, Earthshot 2023 nominated). Investors in these alumni include top tier climate VCs such as Pale Blue Dot, Agfunder, Octopus Ventures, High Tech Gründerfond, Unruly Capital, Climate VC, DCVC, Zero Carbon Capital and Ada Ventures.
What makes Carbon13 unique?
Born out of the Cambridge tech ecosystem and expanded to Berlin, Carbon13’s commitment to mitigating CO2e emissions is underscored by its unique approach to venture building – using first principles to support founders to understand the fundamental challenges in reaching Net Zero. This produces innovative ventures with carbon impact embedded into their value proposition from the start, and equips founders with the ability to evaluate their impact in parallel with commercial results throughout the startups’ growth journey. This approach seeks to avoid the risk of greenwashing or incremental solutions and aims to result in compelling and scalable ventures.
Both the latest Cambridge Venture Builder and the Venture Launchpad investments share the same foundational target, set by Carbon13: to be able to mitigate a minimum net of 10 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) emissions per year once at scale.
Venture Launchpad
- Natural Building Systems – producing a carbon-negative, modular system for sustainable construction.
- Pattern Project – reducing waste in fashion production by offering an AI-driven supply chain and digital twin service for made-to-order garment manufacturing.
- Future Greens – solving the energy conundrum to scale carbon negative vertical farming through circularity.
- Hubl – revolutionising cold chain logistics with their unique pods, using advanced phase change materials.
- Cercula – accelerating decarbonisation in the construction sector through a carbon data calculator.
- Optimise AI – reducing energy and carbon emissions from buildings via its revolutionary AI assisted Digital Twin.
- Pulse – introducing their HydraPulse, an innovative turbine designed to achieve unparalleled efficiency and power output.
- Reaforma – making circularity in construction a reality by valorising mineral waste streams.
- Danu Robotics – advanced and accessible AI and robotics technology that enables efficient and effective recycling globally and rapidly.
Venture Builder
- Adia – tackling the soft costs of heat pump adoption with simple sensors and digital-twin driven controls.
- Deep Blue Biotech – pioneering synthetic biology of cyanobacteria to develop a biomanufacturing platform for carbon neutral chemicals.
- Cocoon Carbon – capturing CO2 and upcycling industrial waste to decarbonise the steel and cement industries.
- Mozaic Earth – enabling financial markets to put a value on the services that nature provides; carbon sequestration, healthy soil, fresh water, thriving biodiversity – through a community-led AI monitoring solution.
- Climate-i – reducing the most potent greenhouse gas emissions through predictive monitoring gas-leak detection systems.
- Cbamboo – building the operating system for carbon border taxes, giving firms the tools they need to decarbonise the world’s supply chains.
In numbers:
- 9 new teams from the Carbon13 Venture Launchpad programme: an accelerator for established teams, which in 2023 was delivered in partnership with Barclays Eagle Labs, leveraging the sizeable Carbon13 community (e.g., over 300 domain experts) to support ventures to work on their carbon case and go-to-market strategies.
- 6 ventures make up Cohort 5 of Carbon13’s Venture Builder programme- a platform which supports co-founders at the earliest stage of their journey, through to realising a start-up at operational level.
- 46% of the 15 teams named here have at least one female cofounder.
- ⅓ of the 15 startups named here are software based, ⅔ have hardware or science-based solutions.
- £120,000 – the amount of pre-seed investment from Carbon13, setting the ventures up to embark on the final phase of their programmes, focusing on gaining traction, refining their fundraising strategies, and enhancing their capacity to maximise carbon emission mitigation.
- 65 – the total number of ventures launched and invested in by Carbon13, since the venture building programme’s inception in 2021.
Speaking about the new announcements, the cofounder of Carbon13, Dr Nicky Dee said “At Carbon13 we believe in entrepreneurs to re-imagine what is possible, the power of innovation to re-invent the rules, and the art of the venture studio to accelerate startups. This is exactly what we need in order to robustly and productively deliver Net Zero.”
“Our latest round of investments shows how new ventures can prompt stakeholders to reimagine what is possible – from mobility to carbon utilisation, the built environment and beyond. Creativity is prompted by constraints. In my opinion now is not the time for policy to loosen those constraints. We need to get on with scaling up innovation and addressing a critique that has befallen the UK for years – a lack of vision.”
Michael Langguth, cofounder and CSO said “Over the last 2 years we have received thousands of applications to our programmes, selected over 500 founders to join and cofounded over 100 startups with them. This round of investments takes the total to 65 preseed investments in climatetech startups from the Carbon13 funds. This makes us one of the most active investors in the climate tech space.
“For the first time, we’ve invested in ventures from our Berlin-based Venture Builder, and our accelerator the Venture Launchpad. This current group is made up of incredibly strong ventures, who are already executing their plans and successfully raising further funding, so we are very excited to be a part of their story!”
Isabelle Gough, Cercula, a Venture Launchpad alumna commented that Carbon13 is unique because it really allows clean tech companies to focus on their Carbon Case. It’s very rare in an accelerator to be able to deviate from the “growth at all costs” business model and really focus on “what is the tangible impact of my startup”. Carbon13 allowed us the space to do that. I’d say it’s a crash course in building a clean tech startup with very little room to allow you to greenwash. It will put you through the wringer in terms of what tangible impact you’re making and force you to quantify it and make it the most efficient for the planet that we’re living on.
