Cylib wants to own EV battery recycling in Europe
A surge of battery recycling startups have emerged in Europe in a bid to tap into the next big opportunity in the EV market: battery waste. Among them is Cylib,…
How Clean Energy Ventures avoided the pandemic bubble and raised a $305M fund
Climate tech couldn’t escape the frothiness that engulfed the startup world earlier in the decade. For both founders or venture capitalists, it was tempting to raise money. Interest rates were…
Faircado raises $3M to nudge people to buy pre-owned goods
Thrift shopping is always a gamble. That cool shirt could wash out sooner than later, and there’s no knowing where those rugged jeans have been. Sure, some stores or websites…
Redwood Materials is partnering with Ultium Cells to recycle GM’s EV battery scrap
Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup founded by former Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, will be recycling production scrap for batteries going into General Motors electric vehicles. The company announced Thursday…
Porsche Ventures invests in battery startup South 8 to boost cold-weather EV performance
All cars suffer when the mercury drops, but electric vehicles suffer more than most as heaters draw more power and batteries charge more slowly as the liquid electrolyte inside thickens.…
Special mud helps XGS Energy get more power out of geothermal wells
Young geothermal energy wells can be like budding prodigies, each brimming with potential to outshine their peers. But like people, most decline with age. In California, for example, the amount…
Bill Gates-backed wind startup AirLoom is raising $12M, filings reveal
It started with a drawing on a napkin. Now AirLoom Energy is raising $12.7 million in fresh funding, TechCrunch has learned. The funding came from 21 investors, according to a…
ETF Partners raises €285M for climate startups that will be effective quickly — not 20 years down the road
While many climate investors focus their efforts on breakthrough, deep-tech solutions, Patrick Sheehan at ETF Partners has other ideas. “I’ve actually got nothing against carbon capture and storage, apart from…
Pitch Deck Teardown: Goodcarbon’s $5.5M seed deck
Carbon credits (and the trading thereof) is big business, but it can be needlessly complicated to get those resolved. Goodcarbon just raised a €5.25 million (around $5.5 million) round to…
Forget EVs: Why Bedrock Materials is targeting gas-powered cars for its first sodium-ion batteries
Spencer Gore has a battery startup. But he doesn’t want his batteries to end up in electric vehicles, at least not yet. “There are a lot of interesting downmarket segments…
Spoor uses AI to save birds from wind turbines
Wind is the largest source of renewable energy in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but wind farms come with an environmental cost as wind turbines can…
Quilt heat pump sports sleek design from veterans of Apple, Tesla and Nest
Heating and air conditioning is usually pretty boring stuff, performed by appliance-like boxes with uninspired designs, from sheet metal outdoor units to cheap plastic indoor mini-splits. Not Quilt. The heat…
Berlin-based trawa raises €10M to use AI to make buying renewable energy easier for SMEs
The brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 took businesses that depended on oil and gas energy by surprise. Suddenly, renewable energy became crucial to survival. But how…
Paris-based VC firm Blisce launches climate tech fund with a target of $160M
Blisce has become the latest VC firm to launch a fund dedicated to climate tech, for which it plans to raise as much as €150 million (about $162 million). The…
Alora Baby aims to push baby gear away from the ‘landfill economy’
Fast consumption and waste generation run rampant in all industries, but it’s particularly true around baby equipment. Tiny humans get big fast, and parents might be nervous to buy used…
Tesla’s profitable Supercharger network is in limbo after Musk axed the entire team
At the start of the year, Tesla’s Supercharger team was tasked with the impossible. “We were on an exponential path,” a former team member told TechCrunch, adding that the new…
Daloopa trains AI to automate financial analysts’ workflows
Thomas Li was working at Point72, the hedge fund founded by notorious investor Steve Cohen, when he realized that the financial industry relies heavily on manual data entry processes that…
After a $20M Series A funding, Germany’s Insempra plans eco-friendly lipid production
Lipids are fatty, waxy or oily compounds that, for instance, typically come in the form of fats and oils. As a result they are heavily used in the production of…
Electricity Maps calculates the carbon intensity of electricity consumption to optimize usage at scale
If you’re an electricity nerd, chances are you’ve already spent quite a few hours looking at Electricity Maps and its mesmerizing export flow animations. This open-source data visualization project has…
How to choose a deep tech startup program
Plenty of founders have a difficult decision to make early in their journey: where to set up shop. For deep tech founders, the decision is complicated by the fact that…
Climate tech investment roars back with an $8.1B start to 2024
Climate tech startups raised $8.1 billion in the first quarter, near record amounts of money that suggest 2023’s quiet close might have been more of a blip than the sign…
Walmart heir Lukas Walton’s Builders Vision puts S2G on a path to independence
S2G Ventures is graduating today, so to speak. The climate tech investment firm has been living under Builders Vision, an umbrella organization for Walmart heir Lukas Walton’s philanthropic and investment…
Productive solar technologies draw investors as global off-grid solar sector funding slumps
Productive Use of Renewable Energy (PURE) technologies, especially those in the solar irrigation and cold chain segment, saw increased investor interest last year, despite a 43% funding slump recorded in…
The ‘valley of death’ for climate lies between early-stage funding and scaling up
Jonathan Strimling faced a dilemma. His company had spent nine years working on chemical processes that could turn old cardboard boxes into high-quality building insulation. The good news was the…
Green search engine Ecosia launches a cross-platform browser
Ecosia, the search engine that funds tree-planting initiatives with a portion of its search ad profits, has launched a new cross-platform browser to grow its online footprint. The new browser,…
Texture makes a bid to become the world’s go-to platform of the energy transition
Platform is a word that gets tossed around a lot in technology circles, so much so that it’s often misused. But here’s the basic business school definition: A platform is…
Bringing down sky scrapers’ sky-high carbon footprint with Joselyn Lai from Bedrock
Keeping homes and offices at just the right temperature requires a lot of energy. Buildings generate about a third of the carbon pollution in the U.S., most of which comes…
Here are the 30+ startups showcasing at HAX’s May 1 Demo Day
A few weeks back, TechCrunch ventured out to New Jersey to pay an early visit to HAX’s Newark offices. As much as I complained about the 90-minute commute in from…
General Galactic emerges from stealth to make methane from carbon dioxide
Plenty of products benefit from tight integration, where companies design and sometimes build key components of a product in-house: Apple and its custom microprocessors and Tesla and its Superchargers are…
Quilt rides heat pump heat wave with hefty $33M Series A
Heat pumps are having a bit of a moment. They outsold gas furnaces for the second year running, and homeowners who install them are eligible for thousands in incentives under…