Climate Tech is being built where you least expect it

The places where some of the most impactful climate technologies are being built, and the location of the customers buying and deploying them are not what you would expect.

Take AtmosZero which we recently invested into. It’s based in Fort Collins, CO, a town of 170,000 an hour’s drive North of Denver. The location is linked to co-founder Todd’s parallel role as a Professor at Colorado State University and in whose lab the underlying technology got founded. The first customer for AtmosZero’s drop-in industrial heating solution is a local brewery of Fat Tire beer fame.

If you happen to browse CarbonCure’s (HQ location: Hallifax, Nova Scotia) website to find a cement producer client you might wonder at the heavy concentration of sites in Georgia injecting CO2 intro concrete:

Many of these sites are owned by Thomas Concrete who has been a CarbonCure customer since 2018 (!). CarbonCure sells it’s solution on an ROI basis: “use us and your costs will be lower…. oh and by the way you also produce greener concrete.” CarbonCure now has customers all across the globe including Central America and Africa.

Then there is Aeroseal, one of the most impactful companies in the 2150 portfolio, headquatered in Miamitown, OH (pop: 1,391… yes one thousand three hundred and ninety one). The technology, acquired by Carrier and then spun out, has been deployed globally to increase energy efficiency of buildings by ±40%.

The list continues (and this is just from our small portfolio): BlueFrontier manufactures it’s hyper-efficient cooling systems in Boca Raton, FL. BioMason conjures its mix of bacteria and gravel to make bricks and pavers in Durham, NC. Nodes & Links tunes it’s AI models out of its engineering hub in Cyprus. Vammo modifies electric scooters to have swappable batteries in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Luxwall cooks up its energy-efficient windows in Ypsilante, MI.

And yes, we have portfolio companies in San Francisco, Stockholm, New York, Boston and London, more traditional tech hubs. But the point I was trying to make is that Climate Tech is broadly geographically dispersed in where “stuff” is being made and its customers (the beer makers, construction companies, fast food chains, departments of transportation, mining companies, mall operators, homeowners in remote German villages) are dispersed just as broadly. These companies hire thousands of workers today and have already impacted millions of people.

We need to build, scale, deploy thousands of solutions, all at once, all at scale… and it’s surprising to discover where some of these early solutions are being built and deployed.

#LFG