🍏 Cheese Week: Feta & 401(k)'s
Good Morning
This week, 230 medical journals issued a joint statement - the largest of its kind, ever - saying, “The greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5C and to restore nature,” Axios reports.
While we continue waiting for world leaders to get their acts together… Read on for your weekly inspo about citizen leaders who are taking on climate change in their own ways. We got tree-planting, cheese-making, 401(k)-greening and more.
What We’re Listening to This Week
Podcast: My Climate Journey - Startup Series: Terraformation
Yishan Wong is not a traditional environmentalist. Now, though, he’s the founder of Terraformation, a carbon capture startup that’s helping tree-planting organizations scale. I like how he applies an engineering mindset to solving problems with climate tech. To paraphrase - “we’re at 419ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere now, and need to be at 250ppm. What’s the most efficient way to get there?”
Top Deals of the Week
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6196bb49-0a2c-4ac1-b63b-4911a4d393bf_1390x785.png)
Novi Connect raises $10.3M in Series A led by Greylock (PRN)
The story: This 2-year-old, SF-based startup is scaling sustainable sourcing by building a data-rich sourcing and procurement marketplace for businesses.
Why we’re excited about it: Making a sustainable consumer packaged good is great - I’ve featured many in The Green Bite - and we need to help these companies scale as quickly as possible. Novi Connect is offering a solution that will help streamline the entire sustainable product ecosystem, and that’s really exciting. Relatedly, check out Responsibly, featured later in this piece.
Sphere raises $2M in funding led by Pale Blue Dot (TC)
The story: Sphere is a nine-month-old, Bay Area-based startup that's amplifying a social movement to get 401(k) money out of fossil fuel companies. Threading the needle between their end-customers' conscious desires and their fears of losing their retirement savings will make or break Sphere.
Why we’re excited about it: When people circulate lists of "20 companies responsible for x percent of global emissions" are you invested in them? While these articles posit that systemic change will be needed, is it not the individual responsibility of the top 1% globally (those making over $50,000) to urge systemic change through individual action? These 401k offerings provide smoother avenues for detaching your financial influence from polluters' profits.
Other Deals This Week
Responsibly, an eight-month-old, Copenhagen-based company with an ESG scorecard to help its customers rate and adjust their supply chain partners, has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding. Flash Ventures led the round. (TC)
Accure, a 16-month-old, Aachen, Germany-based maker of battery safety software, has raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Blue Bear Capital. (TEU).
Stockeld Dreamery, a startup aiming to make cheese from legumes, raised a $20 million Series Aled by Northzone and Astanor Ventures (TC)
Juno, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based prop-tech startup that aims to build more sustainable and affordable apartment buildings, has raised $20million in Series A funding co-led by Comcast Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Real Estate Technology Ventures. (TC)
Food sharing app OLIO raised a $43 million Series B led by VNV Global (TC)
Spiber, a 14-year-old, Yamagata, Japan-based developer of plant-based protein polymers that can be spun into animal- and plastic-free fibers for clothing, auto parts and more, just raised $91 million at a $1.2 billion valuation from The Carlyle Group and others. (R).
Solugen, a 5.5-year-old, Houston, Tex.-based startup that's making chemicals from custom enzymes and renewable feedstock and not petroleum, has raised $357 million in funding co-led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, GIC, and Baillie Gifford. (CNBC)
One Actionable Item
Start a green 401(k)
Our friends at Carbon Collective are running a green 401(k) campaign. No, we are not getting paid for this, and no, this is not financial advice, but yes - this is a great company and team! Here’s the landing page. Here are the details in their own words:
We’re trying to get $10m in 401(k)s and IRAs transferred into one of our climate-focused portfolios by September 30th.
We’re making the transfer process as easy as possible, all someone has to do is set up an initial call with us and we’ll take it from there.
For every $10k someone transfers, we’ll send them a welcome bonus of up to $25. We’re starting at $10 per 10k, but the more transfers we get, the higher the bonus. So for a $100k account, that’s $250.
Green Theory
We Have To Do It All
With the devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Ida, and fires continuing to rage in the West, the US is reeling from our lack of preparedness for our acceleration of nature’s destructive power. We mourn the loss of life, the injuries, and the damages to people’s homes. In light of these recent events, it seems an apt week to discuss the two leading survival strategies in the face of climate change: mitigation and adaptation.
Mitigation focuses on the reduction of human impact on the climate: solutions such as renewable energy, electric vehicles, and the like. Adaptation, on the other hand, refers to solutions that help us survive a changing climate: think fire-proofing and construction of sea walls. Although mitigation-centered thinking represents a more positive outlook on our species’ ability to preserve or improve habitability of our planet, adaptation will be crucial for reducing suffering over our next 30 years of locked-in warming.
Here at the Green Bite we focus primarily on private firms working on climate solutions. By and large, they are profit-seeking. While both mitigation and adaptation will be vital to our well being, profit-maximizing firms in the adaptation space do benefit from a rapidly changing climate, and have no incentive to dedicate their profits to solving the upstream problems that lead to their product niches. Because of this moral hazard, adaptation solutions may be better left to communities and governments, though partnerships across the public-private divide could enable faster deployment of lower-cost technologies.
Many portray mitigation as trading the suffering of tomorrow for that of today. Adaptation’s detractors will cite it as defeatist. In deciding where to allocate your time and your resources, make sure to keep both solutions in mind. As we support one another through the decades to come, be wary of companies that profit from our continued degradation of our planet.