💚 Imagindairy Friends, Yo
(050) And a Full Harvest of other great startup names this week
Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
Battery maker Amprius Technologies agreed to merge with Kensington Capital Acquisition Corp IV at a $939M valuation (RT)
Battery-maker Dragonfly Energy agreed to merge with Chardan NexTech Acquisition 2 Corp. in a $500M deal (BBG)
6k, a nearly seven-year-old, North Andover, Ma.-based outfit that says it has developed technology for producing battery materials faster and with less energy than standard methods, has raised $102 million in Series D funding. Koch Strategic Platforms led the round (BBG)
Optibus, an eight-year-old Tel Aviv-based startup that uses AI to help public transportation agencies plan and operate their networks, raised a $100 million Series D (TC)
SkySpecs, which uses drones and AI to monitor wind turbines, raised an $80M Series D led by Goldman Sachs (TC)
Infinitum Electric, a startup creating sustainable air core motors, raised an $80M Series D led by Riverstone Holdings (BW)
Ambient Photonics, a three-year-old, Mill Valley, Ca.-based developer of photonics energy harvesting tech, has raised $31 million in Series A funding co-led by Amazon and Ecosystem Integrity Fund
UrbanFootprint, a platform enabling better decision-making around infrastructure investments, raised a $25M Series B led by Citi and Social Capital (BW)
Perennial (fka Cloud Agronomics), a four-year-old startup based in Boulder, Co., that has built a platform that verifies carbon verifies insets and offsets for agricultural companies and non-agricultural corporate clients, raised an $18 million round co-led by Temasek and Bloomberg (PR)
Sustain.Life, a platform enabling SMEs to take climate action, raised a $16M seed round led by Tapestry VC and Sustain.Life’s co-founder Mike Hanrahan (BW)
Tractian, a startup developing a product to monitor the status of machines and electrical infrastructure, raised a $15M Series A led by Next47 (TC)
Animal-free milk protein startup Imagindairy raised a $15M seed-extension round led by Target Global (PRN)
HowGood, a 15-year-old startup based in Stone Ridge, N.Y. that helps manufacturers assess the environmental and social impact of their product formulations to make more sustainable supply system decisions, raised $12.5 million led by Titan Grove. The company has raised a total of $24.7 million. Axios Pro has more here.
Solithor, a nine-month-old Belgian startup developing solid-state lithium battery cells and components for the aviation, maritime, space and heavy electric vehicle industries, raised a €10 million seed round led by Imec.xpand (SC)
Landgate, a six-year-old startup based in Denver, Co., that enables prospective purchasers to evaluate the value of a piece of land's energy resources, raised a $10 million Series B round. (A)
UtilityAPI, a startup providing secure, standardized access to utility data, raised a $10M Series A led by Aligned Climate Capital (BW)
Xage, a five-year-old startup based in Palo Alto, Ca., that has created a "zero trust" platform for customers in the energy, defense, utilities, manufacturing, and logistics sectors, raised a $6 million Series B extension from SCF Partners and Overture Climate Fund. (More)
Yo, a three-year-old, Israel-based startup that has developed a plant-based egg alternative, has raised $5 million in seed funding co-led by NFX and Stray Dog Capital (TC)
Full Harvest, a seven-year-old startup based in San Francisco that has created a marketplace for surplus and imperfect produce, raised $5 million in extended Series B funding from Rabobank’s Food & Agri Innovation Fund and JAL Innovation Fund (FBN)
Mission Zero Technologies, a two-year-old startup based in London that uses simple chemistry and off-the-shelf equipment to suck planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the air, raised $5 million in seed funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Anglo American. Carbon Herald has more here.
Green Theory
Fast Fashion
Unless you’re scrolling in the nude, you’re wearing some clothes right now. There’s around a 95% chance any given garment bought in the US was made elsewhere, and with prices on a general trend of decline in recent decades, odds are you paid less for new pieces relative to the same clothes in years past. Have you seen a price tag that’s jaw-droppingly low? Largely brought on by innovations in materials and processes, these cut-rate new prices increasingly relied on plastics such as polyester, which come from fossil fuels, and account for over two-thirds of clothing today. Just as Jevons may have predicted, less expensive clothing led to a glut of purchasing, waste, and hidden costs. Fashion represents somewhere between 4 and 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, and 20% of wastewater. The fashion industry may not have the largest climate impact, and shouldn’t distract from larger issues such as transportation, agriculture, and heating. At the same time, considering more conscious relationships with clothing presents a vital lens through which to consider the materials of everyday life, and the implications of new-age, tech-enabled fashion.
What Are Those?
Once upon a time, clothes were built to last, and reused down to bare scraps, rather than tossed in the trash. Less than 1% of clothing ends up recycled today, but when textiles were hard to come by, and fashion trends moved at the speed of decades, years, or seasons—rather than clicks—people simply owned fewer clothes, and didn’t leach as many microplastics into the ground and water. How to Save a Planet traces the history of how clothes were made, worn, and passed on, up to the modern-day challenge of expansive shopping binges, and virtues of the versatile, durable, lightweight plastic apparel. The episode explains the forces that make thrift shops of the 2020s mixes of time-tested pieces from the 50s-70s and modern athleisure with worn out elastic. No surprise that cutting-edge synthetic textiles of the 80s, that fell apart after 5 washes, wouldn’t make it to the new millennium.
Scrolling to fill a Dumpster
One emerging Chinese tech giant, valued at almost $50B, captures clothing trends and serves up ultra-inexpensive new designs, ultra-fast, with 0 brick-and-mortar stores. The fast fashion in fast fashion isn’t just like the fast in fast food: prepared quickly, with lower quality expectations, and then consumed hastily. Beyond those commonalities, the fashion itself moves with speed: companies preying on runway hits to deliver facsimiles at low cost while buzz is in the air. As Vice News reports, this online retailer reportedly delivers 1000 new designs to their marketplace every day, suggests making purchases a daily habit, and directs a network of on-demand manufacturers to scale up production of any item that gets traction. Ensuring fair working conditions, or taking responsibility for encouraging excessive consumption and waste, seem far from the firm’s top priorities, as they cater to their top demographic: young women around the world, everywhere but China. If you can afford a whole load of plastic-intensive, low-quality clothes, you’re likely to save more money, water, and energy by investing in more durable pieces. While low prices expand immediate options for people with the fewest choices, and their model furthers a new breakthrough in the speed of fashion, this growing company accelerates a resource-intensive global demand for a constant excess in clothing.
You Decide What’s Fashionable
Examining what we buy to wear and how we take care of what we have brings us in touch with our clothing, and slows fashion down. Generally, washing clothes when needed (on cold), and skipping the drying machine, especially for elastics and polyester, both dramatically reduce the climate implications of what we wear, both by saving resources in the moment, and extending the lifetime and quality of what you have, not to mention your bucks. Though personal action to live more sustainably cannot solve the climate crisis alone, in an age of twitch-reactions in mass production at low cost to massive multi-billion-dollar companies, skipping one new fast fashion item might stop a warehouse of hundreds from being manufactured, just get burned or thrown in a landfill.
The Closer
“The heart of a blue whale weighs 400lbs…. you can hear their heartbeat from over 2 miles (3.2km) away.”
I wish someone could just tell me how much jeans are supposed to cost - carbon and cloth and human capital combined. When it comes to “ethical” clothing I never know the line between priced-high-because-labor-and-materials and priced-high-because-it’s-fashion.