Elon Musk said Thursday via a tweet that he will donate $100 million toward a prize for the best carbon capture technology. Musk, who recently surpassed Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest person, didn’t provide any more details except to add in an accompanying tweet the “details will come next week.” Updated: A…
Category: Technology
Late last year, Solugen, a startup using synthetic biology to take hydrocarbons out of the chemicals industry, decided against pursuing a new round of funding that would have valued the company at over $1 billion, TechCrunch has learned. Instead, the Houston-based bio-manufacturing company raised an internal round of roughly $30 million from existing investors and…
In the world of annual refresh cycles, there’s always been a big question mark around what to do with all of the old tech we too readily abandon. There are a number of options for disposing and recycling these objects that often contain rare earth and sometimes harmful material. The concept of upcycling has also…
Zack Parisa and Max Nova, the co-founders of the carbon offset company SilviaTerra, have spent the last decade working on a way to democratize access to revenue-generating carbon offsets. As forestry credits become a big, booming business on the back of multibillion-dollar commitments from some of the world’s biggest companies to decarbonize their businesses, the…
Coral reefs all over the world are struggling to survive, with millions of people and billions of dollars in business that rely on them at risk — on top of the fundamental tragedy of losing such a crucial ecosystem. Coral Vita aims to modernize both coral restoration techniques and the economy surrounding them, and has…
There’s no denying that 2020 has been the year of the special purpose acquisition company. Since the beginning of the year, 219 SPACs have raised $73 billion, according to widely reported market research from Goldman Sachs. That’s a 462% jump from 2019 and more than traditional public offerings raised by about $6 billion. By some…
Andreas Pursian, Markus Gilles and Jonas Brandau, the three co-founders of Klima, an app focused on helping consumers understand and offset their carbon emissions, first found entrepreneurial success at Hyper. The mobile magazine publishing toolkit they developed was sold to Mic in 2017, but it was only the most recent success in a string of…
Sanchali Pal first woke up to the world’s climate crisis after watching the 2008 documentary Food Inc. The Princeton undergraduate saw the film in 2011, and it started her on the journey that would lead her to launch Joro, the Sequoia-backed startup that monitors consumer spending to offer tips on how to offset and reduce…
Swell Energy, an installer and manager of residential renewable energy, energy efficiency and storage technologies, is raising $450 million to finance the construction of four virtual power plants representing a massive amount of energy storage capacity paired with solar power generation. It’s a sign of the distributed nature of renewable energy development and a transition…
Planet FWD, the climate-friendly food startup founded by Zume co-founder Julia Collins, is today launching its first product, Moonshot Snacks. The climate-friendly snack is carbon neutral, organic, kosher, plant-based, non-GMO and has no sugar added. The crackers come in three flavors: sourdough sea salt, rosemary garlic and tomato basil. A box of crackers costs $5.99. Planet…