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This is just a quick update to document some of the work happening recently in the bavacade. It has a been a bit of catch as catch can given how busy the last month has been with the Reclaim open conference the and coming virtual event in July. That said, I’ve been sneaking in work here and there in the mornings, and as usual it adds up. I already blogged about the Yie-Ar Kung-fu custom cabinet project, and will be a summer long endeavor, but it’s very exciting. I also documented some of my work a couple of week’s ago testing various parts I bought in the US in the “Arcade Therapy” post, so things are definitely moving along.
More recently I have been testing some spare boards I have, namely a spare Make Trax board as well as spare Super Cobra board. This was also part of my attempt to start organizing all my parts and spares in the basement and get some semblance of order. I find testing and labeling when things worked saves me a ton of time, and some of the metadata on the boxes noted that these boards were questions marks. Also, I was looking to test a Crush Roller board in Make Trax I was sure I’d bought and brought to Italy over, but turns out I am either delusional or simply left it in Fredericksburg. Either way, because I’m obsessed I bought another Crush Roller board I found for a decent price in Germany along with a spare Moon Cresta board. The latter board is for the cocktail cabinet in Zach Davis is minding for me in Portland, Oregon, and I want to install and test the high score save kit on this one before shipping it back once I am in New Orleans next month.
The mint Moon Cresta Cocktail machine in residence at Cast Iron Coding’s HQ
Anyway, back to the spare Make Trax and Super Cobra boards. The Make Trax spare works, but the sound is noisy. It’s as if the sound pot is not working correctly and there it is too loud and scratchy, so will need to track that down a new potentiometer (pot) and see if tracing the audio gives me any insight. This board will be the first real PCB work (besides my botched Stargate repair attempts) I’ve attempted in earnest, and I’m hopeful it’s the start of some basic board work.
Stargate Yellow Screen of Death
If it goes well, the second project will be Super Cobra, which has an issue with the high score save kit. There are weird special characters in the high score save (HSS) kit and free play is not working. When I substituted the original roms—this board has several ROMs removed given they are programmed on the HSS kit—and Z80 chip from the working board the special characters went away. That said, there was then a strange rebooting issue with the game that did not happen with HSS kit in, so I’m going to buy new chips and burn the Super Cobra roms (a first for me). After that, I’ll try to track down the random rebooting issue, which is definitely an issue I can isolate to that board, should be fun!
Shot of Super Cobra with weird special characters in high score
As far as other work, I am making headway on monitor chassis repair. I had the spare Hanterex Polo in Cheyenne sent in for diagnosis given the original is stuck in the US on what’s shaping up to be an almost a 6-month wait, which I’m not thrilled about. I’ll keep pushing on the US repair, but in the meantime if the spare board is fixed here in Italy I can finally get this game back online. If that happens, then I’m just one G07 chassis and one K4600 chassis away from having everything running. I was able to repair the Condor G07 chassis that was dead by doing a cap kit, swapping out a new B+ filter cap as well as a horizontal width coil, and the chassis is working pretty well, but there’s a slight undulating wave that Tommaso tells me is good enough, but it’s annoying me, so I do think I need to replace all the adjustment pots, especially for vertical linearity and vertical hold.
In fact, I was certain I bought spare G07 pots, but I can’t find them for the life of me (part of the quest for order undertaken this week), so I’ve been parting out one of my extra, non-working G07 chassis. I’m also waiting on some 1.25 AMP fuses that should come today to try and get the chassis that came out of Pole Position working again. I think this chassis has either a bad flyback or a bad voltage regulator given there has been a recent cap kit done already. I might also need to swap the B+ filter cap. If that works, it will be put in Robotron, which leaves only the K4600 chassis for Challenger (I put Challenger‘s 4600 into Venture to get that game up and running) to repair. I’m not sure what is up there cause I swapped flyback and there was a recent cap kit, so a bit perplexed, but hopefully we some poking around and testing that will be the final piece of the puzzle. This is where the chorus sings, “Hope springs eternal in the bava heart.”
Cracks in the Make Trax control panel overlay
Cracks in the Make Trax control panel overlay
Finally, I have the Make Trax cabinet totally stripped and with Alberto to add wheels because every game will be on wheels sooner than later in the bavacade. The cabinet, overall, is close to mint save the control panel overlay which cracking. When Tim and I were getting Reclaim Arcade up and running I came across an original control panel overlay for this game and snagged it, it was one of the things that came over with the container so I asked Alberto iof he could remove the old one and add this one, and as he says to everything, “No problem!” He’s the best! He removed the old one, which by all accounts from Tim is a totally nightmare, and got it sanded and cleaned up.
Sanded Make Trax control panel ready for the like-new original overlay
After that, he put on the new overlay and it looks like new! So good. Sometimes those things I bought that I thought “Will I use this” are now almost all in use, and that makes me happy.
Alberto’s work on these cabinets continues to blow my mind, this control panel is, indeed, like new thanks to his craftsmanship
I think the next game to go on wheels will be Elevator Action, so will start taking that one apart, and that will mean 16 of the 30 games in the bavacade will be on wheels, and that means I am have crossed the half-way mark, which is encouraging progress! It also means I will have stripped almost every game down to just the cabinet if I manage to get wells on all of them. That’s pretty awesome.
I’m back from a trip to both Fredericksburg, Virginia for Reclaim Open and after that Long Island, New York for some extended family time. All of that coming off several days in Lisbon, Portugal, so I was feeling the effects of being on the road for a bit. I have a lot to say about Reclaim Open, and that will begin here shortly, but before that I need to ease back onto the blog, so I’ll highlight some of my recent work in the bavacade.
Turns out the arcade work can also do double-duty as a kind of re-entry therapy. My bipolar gets pretty acute when I’m on the road and away from the family for a while. If I’m not mindful my thoughts can begin to spiral. So for this re-entry—before blogging or jumping headlong back into work—I took some time to tinker on a few games. I usually lug a bunch of arcade parts, repaired boards, chassis, etc. back from the US, and this trip was no different.* On top of the random parts, I also retrieved a few game boards I had shipped during my last trip to the US in February (including Sidam’s Condor, Exidy’s Cheyenne, and Nichibutsu’s Moon Cresta). On top of that, I took a few with me from Italy, namely a Moon Patrol bootleg board with sound issues, a Bagman with sprite issues, and my back-up Yie-Ar Kung-fu board. So, in short, a lot of boards to be looked at, and below is the tale of the tape for board repairs:
That’s a fair amount of board work, but as of now there are no bad boards,. This will be a short-lived victory, but I’ll take it.
Next up is monitor chassis repairs. I have two G07 cap kits (Robotron and Condor) I need to do, as well as a K4600 capkit for the Centuri Challenger. After that, the final project is the Hanterx Polo, which has been drawn out way too long, so I’m trying to resolve that sooner than later.
The other work happening has just been some random testing of parts and boards I brought back, such as testing a 15-pin Williams power brick for Make Trax: it works fine. I’ve also been testing boards like Condor (looks and sounds amazing) Bagman (working again and power adjustment fixed the power-induced sprite issue), Dig Dug (works perfectly), and Zach reported back Moon Cresta is all systems go. So Cheyenne, Moon Patrol, and Yie-Ar Kung-fu are the last boards to test, but two out of the three will need to wait until the games are back online. That leaves Moon Patrol, and I’ll be testing that here soon.
This weekend I fell down a repair rabbit hole. I picked up a degaussing coil in the US, and brought it back to add the final touch to Exidy’s Venture (one of my absolute favs) which had a bit of discoloration on the CRT. The degaussing fixed the issue, but soon after the game was freezing and eventually it seemed the monitor was cutting out. When I adjusted voltage the screen came back, but this time with mono-chromatic colors and it was out of sync. Major bummer. I started troubleshooting which lasted deep into Sunday to finally learn the monitor’s fine, but one of the chips that controls the color and sync (chip 13C) needed to have the solder re-flowed. I did that and re-seated everything and the game started working again and looking better than ever. That was a small, but rewarding, win.
It all becomes pretty consuming for me (which is true of most everything I do), but I find that focused attention and tinkering to solve small, elusive problems can be just what the doctor ordered when trying to return to a much needed work/life rhythm. Arcade therapy! But not so much playing the games these days as fixing them which is a really pleasurable, if unexpected, consequence of getting into this hobby.
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*I even found all my Dungeons & Dragons maps and guide books feared lost, but that is a post for another day.
For the last two years, climate tech was on a tear. To be fair, so were a lot of other sectors. But when a slowdown hit tech investing in the middle of last year, climate tech startups bucked the trend and kept racking up the deals.
Now the party might be over, if preliminary data from a new report holds up.
Climate tech deal-making in the first quarter registered $5.7 billion across 279 deals, according to a new PitchBook report. The amount raised was down 36% year over year with 35% fewer deals. That’s certainly suggestive of a correction.
Investors have been keeping a closer eye on their pocketbooks as fears of a recession continue to rumble through the markets. And yet key economic indicators show a striking resilience in the U.S. economy, with strong hiring keeping unemployment low while consumer sentiment remains high. That hasn’t stopped economists and big names on Wall Street from continuing to predict a recession in the coming months. (Certainly not the first time they’ve done that.)
Still, all that noise tends to give investors the jitters. Since no one wants to be left holding the bag, investor sentiment has a way of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you’re a startup squeezed for cash, you’ve undoubtedly heard from your investors, and it may feel like a recession is already here.
Yet climate tech’s resilience has led some to call it the ultimate “recession proof” investment. Is that still true?
Maybe.
Let’s break it down. For one, these are preliminary figures looking at data through March 31. It’s hard to say how many deals closed in the last few days of the quarter that weren’t picked up by this report. It might be billions!
Climate tech tapped the brakes in Q1. Will the slowdown continue? by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
The materials developer formerly known as ELeather has a new name and $18 million in fresh growth funding from some of the world’s fanciest brands.
Now going by Generation Phoenix, the upcycler says its new investors include Coach parent Tapestry, Jaguar Land Rover (via InMotion Ventures) and Dr. Martens, plus lead investor Material Impact and prior investor Hermès.
The 15-year-old firm is based in Peterborough, U.K., and has worked with brands such as Nike and Delta. The upcycler intends to use the new cash to expand “into the luxury fashion and footwear categories,” Gen Phoenix said in a statement. The company claims it has diverted more than 8,000 tons of leather waste from landfills to date.
“Imagine what can happen when waste is no longer wasted,” Gen Phoenix says in an aspirational message on its new website. The upcycler tells TechCrunch that its “feedstock comes directly from tanneries where about 1/3 of a leather hide is typically discarded.” Turning the leather waste into a usable, leather-like product involves shredding and “entangling” it “around a high-performance core using nothing but high pressure water,” the firm said.
Gen Phoenix’s “recycled leather” is not entirely made of recycled materials. A spokesperson for the company tells TechCrunch that its products feature “up to 86% recycled content,” including recycled leather and recycled plastic. Still, the firm’s final product also contains virgin plastic.
Gen Phoenix founder and CEO John Kennedy explaining the company’s leather-like product. Image Credits: Gen Phoenix
Without sharing a specific deadline, a spokesperson for Gen Phoenix said the company aims to “reduce and eliminate virgin materials from their products completely.”
The upcycler is also “commercialising a bio-based coating system and bio-based substitutions for any synthetic materials used in the process,” the spokesperson added. Hopefully, we’ll soon see Gen Phoenix kick virgin materials altogether.
Zooming out: Gen Phoenix’s inclusion of plastics is hardly unusual, even for “sustainable” brands. Fossil fuel–based materials permeate the fashion business. Polyester? Nylon? Elastane? All plastic.
Even the rise of recycled plastic fabrics warrants deep skepticism; the resulting synthetic clothing is rarely recycled, and the microplastics they shed go basically everywhere, including the ocean, mountaintops, the insides of sea critters and even our own bodies. Addressing the industry’s climate and broader environmental toll demands rethinking everything, from how we dye fabrics to killing “fast fashion” altogether.
Gen Phoenix’s upcycled leather woos luxury brand investors by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
It’s estimated that about a third of all food produced worldwide every year, which is approximately 1.3 billion tons, is estimated to be wasted. Aravita, a Brazilian artificial intelligence startup, thinks that supermarkets are the best place to start fixing this problem.
Marco Perlman, co-founder and CEO, started the company with Aline Azevedo and Bruno Schrappe in 2022 to tackle waste in the fourth-largest food producing country in the world where 33 million Brazilians have some type of food insecurity.
Aravita is developing an AI-powered solution for supermarkets that looks at variables, including climate, seasonality, consumer behavior and economic scenario, to manage the purchasing of fresh food — mainly fruits and vegetables — to reduce the instances of surplus items and lost sales due to waste. At the same time, the software increases the availability of items in demand.
“Supermarkets are our target audience because they are a great place to drive the first wedge of data availability,” Perlman told TechCrunch. “They have point-of-sale consumer data, and this is the data that we need to start making the predictions for low-demand forecasting. Unlike other parts of the supply chain, where the data is much harder to get a hold of, eventually we think that this will be digitized.”
Aravita is still in the very early stages: It has a conceptual prototype and started a pilot with a mid-sized supermarket chain near São Paulo and has the first set of algorithms developed. It is also in the process of integrating the first database of historical data into that model.
However, that first pilot didn’t come easy. Perlman recalls that potential customers were initially worried that startups were “having difficulty raising money, hiring and surviving,” and were uncomfortable giving store data to a company without financial resources that could stick around.
Aravita co-founders, Marco Perlman, Aline Azevedo and Bruno Schrappe. Image Credits: Aravita
So the trio started reaching out to investors and was able to secure a $2.5 million investment earlier this year, co-led by Qualcomm Ventures and 17Sigma.
“Fresh food management is highly fragmented and complex,” said Michel Glezer, director of Qualcomm Wireless GmbH and director at Qualcomm Ventures, in a written statement. “Aravita’s solution enables retailers to optimize inventory management, helping increase efficiencies and reduce waste.”
Joining those two firms were Bridge, DGF Investimentos, Alexia Ventures, BigBets, Norte Capital and a group of angel investors, including ClearSale partner and CEO Bernardo Lustosa and Flávio Jansen, former CEO of LocaWeb and Submarino.
Aravita is now in good company among other startups tackling food waste that also recently attracted venture capital, including Divert, which is trying to stop food before it reaches landfills; Diferente, also in Brazil, that is finding places for imperfect produce; and food resale app Recelery. They join other companies like Shelf Engine, Apeel, OLIO, Imperfect Foods, Mori and Phood Solutions.
The next steps are to develop the solution over the next few months and add a second pilot customer, Perlman said. He expects to have product-market fit next year and the ability to “step on the gas to accelerate” Aravita’s business model into other supermarket departments, including baked goods, pastry, cold cuts, fish and meat.
The new capital enables the company to hire additional employees and for future innovation, including inventory management, point-of-sale integration and technology development like AI and computer vision for process automation.
Qualcomm-backed Aravita wants to help Brazilian supermarkets control food waste by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Investors just pumped millions into Irrigreen, a startup vying to quench America’s thirsty lawns with “approximately 50% less water.”
Seed investor Ulu led the $15 million funding round. Two tech investors that are focused on water conservation — Burnt Island and Echo River — also chipped in, among a handful of others.
The San Francisco–based sprinkler startup says it maps lawns to drizzle water precisely where lawn-havers want it, without clumsily soaking walkways and passersby.
Irrigreen’s system tasks users with tracing the contours of their yard, and identifying obstacles, such as footpaths and driveways. The tech sounds somewhat like Roomba’s Keep-Out Zones, yet these sprinklers are stationary; instead of wandering the lawn, the startup says its sprinkler heads adjust the stream to send water where you want it.
Image Credit: Irrigreen
Americans are thirsty mfs: The typical family uses around 320 gallons per day, “about 30 percent of which is devoted to outdoor uses,” the EPA says. Water is already scarce, and droughts exacerbated by climate change make water conservation all the more critical. There are lots of ways to conserve water, and outdoor options include planting native ground cover and installing custom irrigation systems.
In other words, internet-connected sprinklers like Irrigreen’s are not the only way to save water. Still, founder Shane Dyer tells TechCrunch that the startup’s system is cheaper than traditional options “for larger yards (those with 7 or more zones).”
Dyer added, “Our hardware costs more, but the labor to install is 1/3 of a traditional system since there is 80% less heads and trenching and piping.” Regardless, if tech is what gets you jazzed about saving water, then by all means give it a go.
TechCrunch has not tested Irrigreen’s sprinklers. The startup pointed us to a Fresno State study it commissioned, which found that its sprinkler heads used around 40% less water by avoiding “overwatering, overspray, and application rate inaccuracy.” Dyer told TechCrunch that Irrigreen also factors in weather, soil, plant types, and shade to “calculate the minimum water needed for healthy plants.” The startup says these additional factors deliver around 50% water and cost savings in all.
Dyer declined to share Irrigreen’s valuation but said the new cash will go toward “developing next generation sprinkler software, creating next generation cloud watering intelligence, and smartphone app control and reporting features.”
Among the coming software updates, Dyer said Irrigreen will be able to adjust the amount of water it sends to different sections of plants via a single sprinkler head. This could come in handy if, for example, you plopped some thirsty flowers beside some drought-tolerant shrubs.
Irrigreen’s precision sprinklers prevent water waste and wet legs by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
Pity Donald Trump. He spent four years in office tearing up trade agreements and ranting about rewriting old ones, all to little avail. Now, a key U.S. climate law is doing more to change the dynamics of international trade than any blustering and bullying ever did.
The Inflation Reduction Act has been hailed as a win for domestic producers of minerals that are critical to electric vehicles and other hallmarks of the decarbonized economy. The most impactful so far have been the provisions that require a minimum amount of domestic sourcing and processing to be eligible for the $7,500 EV tax credit. That language alone has spurred tens of billions of dollars of investment in the U.S. battery supply chain.
But there’s no way the U.S. can produce all that’s needed — the country simply doesn’t have enough reserves, while China has a lock on many parts of the market. So the law also includes a handy loophole qualifying minerals from countries with which the U.S. has a free trade agreement. The law already qualified “North American” suppliers, and the free trade language opens the door further.
Late on Monday, the door opened a little wider as the U.S. and Japan announced a trade deal encompassing cobalt, graphite, lithium, manganese and nickel, all minerals that are key components of EV batteries. The agreement opens up both markets to new supplies of the minerals, allowing battery manufacturers and automakers to benefit from the IRA’s minerals requirement.
For now, Japan is the only country to successfully negotiate a new agreement in the wake of the IRA, but it probably won’t be the only one. The EU, which has made no secret about its displeasure with the new law, is also in talks with the U.S.
In the seven months or so since the IRA was passed, the global landscape for critical minerals and battery manufacturing has changed rapidly, and a potentially steady stream of new free trade agreements promises to keep things fluid. For founders and investors alike, that injects a fresh dose of uncertainty.
Why startups should care about geopolitical repercussions of US climate law by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
I’ve been pretty busy knocking out my to-do list for the bavacade. I created a long one after returning from the US, and I’ve gotten through most of it, so might be a good time to create a log with work done over the past month or so.
Back of pac-man painted
Pac-man Multi-game HSS Kit
High Score Save Kit for Venture
Cheyenne original ROMs
Big Blue Capacitor (Atari Power Brick)
12V Power Switch for LED Marquee Light in Dig Dug
Still to do:
The pet industry grew rapidly over the past three years as people, stuck at home during the pandemic, decided to add a furry friend to their families. Analysts say this industry, where spending was $118 billion in 2019, isn’t done with big growth and predict it will more than double by 2030 to $277 billion.
This category is very dog-dominated — dog owners spend, on average, $1,480 per year, while an average of $902 is spent annually by cat owners; therefore, there are a lot of dog-focused products, including food.
Some startups in the pet space have tried to give equal footing to both dogs and cats, for example, The Farmer’s Dog, which direct-to-consumer cat food brand Smalls co-founder and CEO Matt Michaelson says is a close competitor. However, there are relatively few that cater just to cats. Smalls is among a small group that includes Cat Person, Ziggy, Made by Nacho and KatKin.
“It became really clear that during the pandemic, adoption was skyrocketing,” Michaelson told TechCrunch. “Cat adoption really outpaced dog adoption, so we expected the category to heat up and that there would be more innovation at this point. However, we’re still really alone in bringing fresh food to the category and to cat parents. That was a surprise to us. We think there’s a continuing manifestation of the cultural bias against cats and toward dogs in the U.S.”
Five years and over four product introductions later, Michaelson and co-founder Calvin Bohn are guiding the company to take matters into its own hands and expand by opening a first-of-its-kind cat café and launching into retail, Michaelson said. This was buoyed by $19 million in Series B funding in a round that closed in mid-2022.
The company has now raised a total of $34 million, which includes a $9 million Series A that TechCrunch covered in 2020. Michaelson didn’t disclose valuation for the most recent round, but did call it an “up round.”
The Series B is led by existing investors Founder Collective, Companion Fund and Left Lane Capital and also includes new investors like Valor Capital, 301 INC, General Mills’ venture capital arm and The Ohio State University’s endowment fund.
In addition to the cat café, which will open in New York in the fall, and retail launch, the new capital enables Smalls to grow its headcount by 25%. The company has 50 people currently.
The brand has doubled year over year in both customers and revenue since 2017, growing to eight figures in sales to feed more than 100,000 cats. Amid all that growth, Smalls also has a path to profitability, Michaelson said.
“We are still a tiny sliver of a $12 billion category,” Michaelson said. “Anyone can advertise on TV or the subway, but only Smalls could open a cat café and it make sense. That’s one example of many things we want to do to build the brand. The other piece is continuing to invest in product innovation. Fresh food is a very fast-growing category, and we think there’s plenty of room in it, but we need to stay one step and two steps ahead of the category to continue to bring healthier food and healthier products to market.”
Fresh funding gives cat food brand Smalls avenue into retail for the first time by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
One fusion startup is betting that a 70-year-old idea can help it leapfrog the competition, so much so that it’s planning to skip the experimental phase and hook its prototype reactor up to the grid.
The decades-old concept, known as a stellarator, is deceptively simple: design a fusion reactor around the quirks of plasma, the superheated particles that fuse and generate power, rather than force the plasma into an artificial box. Easier said than done, of course. Plasma can be fickle, and designing “box” around the fourth state of matter is fiendishly complex.
That’s probably why stellarators spent years in the fusion-equivalent of the desert while the simpler doughnut-shaped tokamak ate everyone’s lunch, and nearly all of their research funding.
But not all of it. Type One Energy is the brainchild of a handful of physicists steeped in the stellarator world. One built the HSX stellarator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, two more performed experiments on it, and a fourth worked on the Wendelstein 7-X reactor, the world’s largest stellarator.
Together, they founded Type One in 2019 and nudged forward their approach to fusion at a steady pace. The company wasn’t in stealth — TechCrunch+ identified it as a promising fusion startup last year — but it was operating on a slim budget.
Fusion startup Type One Energy gets $29M seed round to fast-track its reactor designs by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
One of the main criticisms leveled against ESG investing is that the movement is all talk, no action. The main reason for this is that there simply aren’t enough entrepreneurs providing adequately ESG-aligned investing opportunities. In fact, a third of VCs face difficulties with identifying suitable ESG investment opportunities, even though 97% of them find it important in making investment decisions, driven by the lack of adequate ESG disclosures and excessive costs for gathering and analyzing ESG information.
At the same time, ESG-focused assets under management are projected to increase from $18.4 trillion to $33.9 trillion in the coming years. Whether these figures become reality is increasingly up to entrepreneurs who need to get serious about delivering high-quality ESG data, fast.
There simply aren’t enough entrepreneurs providing adequately ESG-aligned investing opportunities.
Investors have lower levels of confidence in companies that do not collect investment-grade data (shorthand for data that meets high standards of timeliness, accuracy, completeness and auditability), and the majority of investors see unstandardized and poor quality data as their biggest barrier.
Regardless of your market and industry, the best way to get started with delivering investors with high-quality data is to embrace preexisting reporting and disclosure frameworks as early on as possible. There are many frameworks to choose from, including Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), CDP (originally known as the Carbon Disclosure Project) and United Nations Global Compact (UNGC). Although founders may need to carefully consider which framework to prioritize in the beginning, most of the frameworks are complementary in nature and mature firms tend to lean on several of them in their reporting.
For example, the GRI framework examines a company’s influence on the broader economy, environment and society to identify material concerns, while SASB is more tuned to serve the interests of investors who are interested in ESG data that could significantly affect the financial performance of firms in their portfolio. In short, GRI is an ‘inside-out’ framework that examines the company’s impact on the world, while SASB is an ‘outside-in’ framework that looks at the effects of the climate on the company and the risks it faces.
What ends up working best for any given company at any particular time will be down to a number of unique factors, and effective prioritization is key.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) introduced a proposed set of rules concerning mandatory climate disclosures last year. Under the proposed rules, firms who file with the SEC need to disclose a number of data points, including whether climate-related events are likely to push the needle on any of the accounts in its financial statements and what governance structures are in place to mitigate against climate risks. The disclosures envisioned in SEC’s proposal are largely in line with those of the TCFD and Greenhouse Gas Protocol, and if you are gearing up for an IPO, you would do well by ensuring that your ESG data is aligned with these frameworks as a matter of priority.
Investors want best-of-the-best ESG data. Here’s how to give it to them by Jenna Routenberg originally published on TechCrunch
A brown macroalgae native to the Atlantic’s Sargasso Sea is increasingly a menace to coastal ecosystems and communities across the Gulf of Mexico, ever since mats of the normally beneficial seaweed (known as sargassum) exploded in numbers in 2011. This is the backdrop for Carbonwave, which recently raised $5 million to put the hulking algae blooms to good use.
Researchers say farm and sewage runoff is likely driving the now 5,000-mile-wide “Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt.” Climate change may also be playing a role.
There’s no need to run screaming from sargassum, despite the tone of some stories covering the Florida-bound blooms. Still, they pose a threat to coral reefs and tourism-dependent livelihoods alike. When the stuff piles up on beaches, it rots, emitting skunky hydrogen sulfide.
The recent sargassum surges are forcing folks to find creative ways to get rid of it, and already, possible applications run the gamut. Researchers and entrepreneurs aim to turn it into syrup, bricks and even jet fuel. As for Carbonwave, the Boston- and Puerto Rico–based startup is using it in fertilizer, cosmetics and even faux leather.
Backed by ESG-themed investment firms Natixis and Viridios Capital, as well as ocean-focused VC Katapult, Carbonwave says the new cash will help it scale production of its seaweed-based emulsifier for cosmetics. The startup said in a statement that it “has already sold half a ton” of its emulsifier, which it created as an alternative to petroleum-based ingredients. The company also claimed that its sargassum fertilizer “reduces the need of” climate change-driving nitrogen fertilizer.
CEO Geoff Chapin said Carbonwave makes these products through a “proprietary extraction process,” which involves pressing the seaweed and removing the arsenic. The process yields a liquid fertilizer, while the leftover pulp forms the basis for the emulsifier and fake leather. The way Chapin tells it, the company uses “almost every part of the seaweed to make these products.”
Carbonwave is part of a wave of startups vying to turn algae into environmentally friendlier products. For starters, there’s H&M-backed Algiknit (now Keel Labs), which creates textiles; a slew of bioplastics companies, including Loliware and ULUU; and a firm called Umaro, which makes sea-bacon. Seaweed startups often focus on commercializing kelp in one way or another, but a few (like Carbonwave and Seaweed Generation) focus on sargassum.
“We need to put it to good use before it creates more ecological and climate harm,” Carbonwave told TechCrunch.
The startup added that it may up its $5 million Series A with additional funding later on. It has secured at least $12 million to date.
Startup says the seaweed blobbing toward Florida has a silver lining by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
The bavacade Exidy Venture cabinet fully operational
I was beginning to think I would never see this game running. When we bought it for $400 over two years ago, I knew it was going to be a project. It’s a game that doesn’t really come available all too often, and a good condition working cabinet is not only hard to find, but also fairly expensive. The only working example I’ve seen since my childhood was at the Terminal in Nashville, and it was in pretty rough shape and played terribly.
Broken upper-back corner of Exidy Venture cabinet that was fixed by Alberto
The first thing we needed to do was get the cabinet in good condition. The top-back corner of the cabinet was broken, and the back door and lower portion were falling apart—old, deteriorating wood glue was the only material holding this thing together. It was in pretty rough shape; it had been neglected for probably 30+ years, and it showed with dead leaves staining the cabinet floor. Alberto took this one and worked his magic, he sent me a bunch of images of the work as he did it, and I really love to see the process visually….
Once I had it back from Alberto I had to paint the cabinet white. I did the first couple of coats with a matte white, and I still want to do a final coat with glossy, but before I did that I needed to re-assemble the cabinet because the power supply guru Roberto was coming by to bring the re-built (for the second time) original power supply that can’t be easily replaced with a switching power supply given it uses hi and lo +12V and -12V for the sound board, which also helps power the video. This power supply has been a beast, so given Roberto was coming with a fixed unit I was thrilled, but when he arrived he noted that the -5V was not working, so we (royal) added a rectifier bridge for -5V that was pretty cool:
-5V Rectifier for Venture
-5V Rectifier for Venture connected to Ground and -5V from power supply
-5v from rectifier to board
We tried that and the board was now getting -5V, which was a win. But, but, but, for some reason the +5V was not getting to the board cleanly anymore. I was depressed, I really thought we were going to finally cut through this Gordian knot of a game. But despair is not an option, so we re-grouped and re-traced everything again, ensuring the edge connectors were attached correctly (they were), and still no dice for the +5V, although every other voltage was arriving to the boards as expected, so it was at least isolated to +5V.
Venture‘s edge connectors connected correctly
As a last ditch effort we decided to install a switching power supply to get the +5V to the board to see if that will work….and it did, dear reader! It was a moment that had been a long time coming, but bringing a game back from the dead that I’d not seen working since we got it was amazingly rewarding.
Venture Switching Power Supply for +5V
I can now take the -5V rectifier and use the switching power supply for that, but it is pretty cool to see how the rectifier works, that is yet another thing that enthralls me about electricity, all these gadgets to control and temper the flow of energy are truly amazing, and I’m reminded once again it’s always power with these games.
The Venture board I bought worked perfectly and the monitor is gorgeous. I do need to try a cap kit on the K4600 monitor chassis for Venture given it’s not working, so the current chassis is on loan from Galaxian. The other bit is I need to clean-up and possibly re-build the the 8-way joystick. It is a bit of a rat’s nest right now, and it could use some new leafs and general TLC. But, the good news is Venture is on wheels, cleaned-up beautifully, and working a treat!
Swedish company Candela this summer will launch its 30-passenger commercial hydrofoil shuttle, the P-12, the vessel it believes will change the course of motorized water transport. Following its C-7 and C-8 leisure cruisers, Candela has already been making waves with its drive to transition to fossil-free waterways.
“We are now heavy into the process of finalizing the development and putting this ferry into production, which we think is going to be kind of a game changer in public transportation,” said Gustav Hasselskog, Candela’s founder and CEO.
The company raised SEK 210 million (around $20 million) in a round co-led by EQT Ventures and investor duo Joel Eklund (Fosielund Holding AB) and Svante Nilo Bengtsson (Marknadspotential AB), with participation from Ocean Zero LLC and others. This follows its $24 million round from last year.
The P-12 is an electric-powered hydrofoil that effectively flies over the surface of the water on computer-guided underwater wings. It has a range of up to 60 nautical miles at a cruising speed of 27 knots. Being electrically powered makes the P-12 cleaner and greener than traditional diesel-fueled craft, which also makes it cheaper to operate. Candela estimates that the P-12 uses 80% less energy than a traditional vessel.
“It’s a very good thing for the environment. In total, the shipping industry is around 3% of total carbon emissions,” says Hasselskog. However, as well as the benefits of being electric-powered, the P-12 is designed to be low maintenance and with lower service costs.
“We use a low maintenance type of dry drain. We have developed this pod motor, which doesn’t have any gears, any oil or anything; it’s just motors underneath the water,” explains Hasselskog.
If the decision to make a passenger vessel with a maximum capacity of 30 people seems a little unusual, it’s because it is designed for coastal, archipelago or lake-based transport, and how people actually use water transport in these geographies.
“It looks the same in Oslo, in Stockholm, in New York and everywhere: most of these boats are typically 300 passengers. But when you study optimal boat size, especially in Stockholm, Istanbul and in San Francisco, it’s concluded that it’s not the optimal boat size. Seat utilization is typically super low. In Stockholm, it’s 5% over the year,” says Hasselskog. “When you have only 30 passengers, you don’t need more than one staff member on board; otherwise, you need three staff members. If you put that all together, you get a very good cost equation, and that’s why we went with this format. Operators save typically around 40% compared to traditional, large, diesel setups.”
Smaller craft can also be deployed more flexibly, for example, by operating on an on-demand basis rather than on a fixed timetable, and can travel to more remote locations. The company says this format has huge cost-efficiency benefits for operators.
Candela is looking to build on this flexible approach to transport and is currently developing its own software to enable real-time fleet routing.
“The first one we’re going to put in water is for the city of Stockholm,” says Hasselskog. “It’s going to run from a suburb outside of town into the center. If you travel that route today by bus and subway, or by the current boat, it takes 50 minutes. We can do that in 25 minutes, the reason being we don’t create any wake so we have permission to go faster. If we can save commuters’ journey time, that makes a huge difference.”
For Candela and Hasselskog, the future looks like large fleets of small craft that can travel more quickly to more remote locations with greater flexibility. It might be starting in Stockholm, but it estimates that the market is €15 billion in size, and the format has global appeal.
”The next step for us here is to… take a place like Stockholm, where there are, say, 35 big ferries today. We will replace them with 120 of ours,” says Hasselskog. And from there: “It’s a global business that we envision and so far, we are in dialogue with hundreds of customers. They are spread from Hong Kong to Sydney. There are a lot in the Gulf region, in Europe, and we have dialogues in Mexico, Belize, San Francisco, New York.”
The company is taking a big bet that bigger isn’t always better, in the hope that smaller can mean faster, greener and more serviceable.
Foiled again: Candela raises another $20M to set course for the future of ferries by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Green Li-ion says its battery recycling machines are the “size of a small house,” so it’s no wonder the Singapore-based startup needed to top up on funds. It’d only raised about $15 million ahead of its latest cash infusion.
This week, Green Li-ion announced a $20.5 million “pre-Series B” round led by climate-tech investor TRIREC. The startup said other investors, including SOSV and Equinor Ventures (the VC arm of the Norway-owned fossil fuel giant), also chipped in.
The deal boosts Green Li-ion’s post-money valuation to $187 million after just three years, chief executive Leon Farrant told TechCrunch. The startup’s logo is (you guessed it!) a green lion.
The new cash will help the startup scale production of its recycling tech, which the firm says can process “100% of all used lithium batteries” and pop out precursor cathode active material that’ll eventually go into fresh lithium-ion batteries.
Lithium is in high demand and mining the metal wreaks havoc on the environment, making recycling tech a crucial tool in lowering the footprint of things like electric cars and storage for renewable energy.
Image Credits: Green Li-ion
Green Li-ion doesn’t recycle batteries itself; it licenses its tech to battery makers and recyclers, including Aleon and TES (which is owned by SK, the South Korea-based fossil fuel giant). Green Li-ion aims to crank out 50 recycling units per year via two factories — one in Houston, Texas and another in Singapore.
As for that “pre-Series B,” Farrant said the startup has split its Series B into two parts, which encompasses the raise announced this week and another in about nine months. “Due to our relatively low levels of fund raising to date,” the founder added, the startup “needed to draw a line in the sand and establish a valuation increase for the larger portion of the raise.”
Rawr? Green Li-ion recharges with $20.5M to scale its recycling tech by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
Elemental Excelerator, a nonprofit investor in climate-tech startups including BlocPower and ChargerHelp, says it’s “doubling down” in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank‘s collapse.
Elemental intends to pump $43 million more into climate-tech startups — $13 million of which will be set aside for its twelfth accelerator program, beginning in October. The investor hasn’t secured all of the money yet; it is “in the process of raising the funds,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.
In a nod to both the VC slowdown and the run on SVB, Elemental said it intends for the cash to “fill funding gaps” and “accelerate climate solutions with deep community impact.” Climate tech evaded the funding drought of 2022, but the fall of SVB seems to have rattled the sector, given the bank’s longtime work with climate tech startups.
Elemental’s interests are about as broad as climate tech itself — spanning electric vehicles, energy storage, recycling tech, cement decarbonization, seaweed cultivation and composting.
The firm’s funding target represents a step up from prior years. In 2022, it put up $8 million for 17 climate startups, offering them between $300,000 and $600,000 apiece. This time around, Elemental wants to pump between $350,000 and $1 million into up to 20 ventures.
As for the remaining $30 million, Elemental chief executive Dawn Lippert told TechCrunch that the nonprofit will “invest an additional $30 million in catalytic project funding for three to six scale-up projects.” The firm said the startup-run projects must show they’ll have “deep impact,” which it defines as “demonstrable” greenhouse gas cuts and “significant positive community impact.”
Elemental takes equity in exchange for its investments. Lippert told TechCrunch that the nonprofit “invests any upside from these investments into supporting future entrepreneurs.” The non-profit says it has raised $57M to date.
Corrected on March 20 to reflect that Elemental has raised a total of $57M to date.
Elemental aims to pump $43M into climate startups with ‘deep community impact’ by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
Rethink Ventures just announced a €50 million specialist fund focused on mobility, automotive and logistics. With keywords “clean, safe, and digital,” the Munich-based firm is focusing especially on Europe-based startups at the early stage, stretching into Series A financing. LPs include ZF Ventures, Hellmann Worldwide Logistics, KION Group, Berylls and HAVI, as well as the European Investment Fund and a handful of family offices.
“The transportation sector faces significant challenges as the global demand for mobility and logistics continues to grow. With more than 25% of greenhouse gas emissions coming from this sector and additional negative externalities such as congestion and the significant usage of physical space, there is a lot of pressure to rapidly change the way we move people and goods,” says Jens-Philipp Klein, general partner at Rethink. “Our mission is to back early-stage startups that address these challenges and help them scale their technologies and products using our capital, deep expertise and access to a strong network of corporates. Together with all stakeholders in the industry, we aim to foster solutions that eventually will provide clean, digital and safe mobility for everyone.”
The fund says that its top priority is to provide unparalleled support to its portfolio companies while adding long-term value to their corporate partners, creating a mutually beneficial ecosystem that creates a positive impact for all.
The fund’s thesis-driven investment focus is on next-generation vehicle technologies (software defined, autonomously operated, new powertrains), mobility (providing comfortable, safe and affordable mobility for everyone), logistics (digital, automated and sustainable operations) and energy (infrastructure to power a clean, emission-free future of transportation).
The new fund has made three investments to date: Deftpower, an automotive charging platform that enables companies to launch, manage and scale electric charging offerings to their customers; Shipzero, a data-driven platform to measure and reduce CO2 emissions in global freight transportation; and Rydes, a SaaS solution for corporations to foster sustainable employee mobility by giving their employees access to various transport offerings.
Rethink rethinks mobility and logistics with new €50M fund by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Enlarge / Signage outside Silicon Valley Bank headquarters in Santa Clara, California, US, on Thursday, March 9, 2023. SVB Financial Group bonds are plunging alongside its shares after the company moved to shore up capital after losses on its securities portfolio and a slowdown in funding. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Silicon Valley Bank was shuttered by US regulators on Friday after a rush of deposit outflows and a failed effort to raise new capital called into question the future of the tech-focused lender.
With about $209 billion in assets, SVB has become the second-largest bank failure in US history after the 2008 collapse of Washington Mutual, and marks a swift fall from grace for a lender that was valued at more than $44 billion less than 18 months ago.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the US regulator that guarantees bank deposits of up to $250,000, said it was closing SVB and that insured depositors would have access to their funds by Monday.
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups.
This week Darrell and Becca are joined by Matt Rogers, the founder and CEO of Mill, a startup that helps its customers turn their food scraps into farm feed. The former founder of Nest talked about what compelled him to jump back into entrepreneurship after years of investing, why he decided to focus on food waste and how they built the startup’s closed-loop system. Plus, Matt talks about how his days designing the original iPhone influenced his design choices now.
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Talking trash with Matt Rogers from Mill by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch
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