July 30, 2024 in Europe, Climate Innovation & Adaptation
One cannot overstate the fact that we truly need climatetech solutions in every industry, sector, and country. However, some sectors do not have the same climatetech adoption and integrations as others. The Greentech Europe initiative is working on tackling that inequality by supporting diverse-led startups, enabling the green transition across all sectors.
In this blog post, we highlight three standout startups and their visionary founders who are making significant strides in climate change technology. We focus on sectors that have received little attention and are often overlooked by mainstream press outlets.
Gordana Ilic, former Head of Decarbonisation and Energy Transition Innovation at Maersk, and her co-founder Maximilian Schroer identified a significant gap in immediately available resources and actionable steps to enable the transition to greener shipping.
“We realized that it takes over 100 people on a given team trying to solve decarbonization and de-risk the process for a single large company. Meanwhile, the rest of the industry was dominated by SMEs that didn’t even have the knowledge or access to the resources to deduct the best pathway to understand the regulations, never mind decarbonizing efficiently.”
International shipping is responsible for almost 3% of worldwide greenhouse gasses (GHG). With the maritime industry responsible for transporting at least than 90% of world commerce, there is increasing pressure on the sector to reduce its carbon footprint swiftly. In January 2025, the EU’s FuelEU Maritime regulation will enter into force, promoting the use of renewable, low-carbon fuels and clean energy technologies for ships. BetterSea will empower companies in this crucial transition by helping them navigate the complex compliance process end-to-end.
Ilic and Schroer established BetterSea in Lisbon to offer comprehensive decarbonization solutions to these underserved businesses. The company is building a “one-stop-shop to maritime decarbonization,” starting with reducing costs of regulatory compliance by ~85% to help even the SMEs of the industry further navigate the technical, fuel, and financial complexities of the transition. Today, from assessment to strategy to execution to financing and monetization, BetterSea delivers a comprehensive suite of modular software solutions APIs to support maritime stakeholders.
The vision behind BetterSea is to expedite the maritime industry’s shift toward sustainability by focusing on the context of the data, simplifying decision-making, and reducing implementation barriers. “We believe that solutions like ours can help the industry move faster by cutting off process inefficiencies and stakeholder complexities,” says Ilic. BetterSea’s holistic 4-step approach fosters a faster, cost-efficient, and overall more effective transition to greener shipping.
As the two ex-Maersk leaders forge a path for maritime companies toward decarbonization, just across the channel, another climatetech is focused on agriculture. It is lowering the barriers to acceptance with a parallel mission – bringing global warming mitigation to every industry.
Lambda Energy is run from Cambridge in the UK and supports growers by reducing energy bills. Anyone can see how the promise of “lowering costs” would get at least a look-in on the operations team of any company, and Lambda does this by utilizing a plentiful resource most months of the year: sunlight. Instead of artificial lighting in greenhouses, Lambda helps farmers convert unused sunlight into light used for photosynthesis to achieve higher crop yields.
Lambda is led by Monica Saavedra and is based on Cambridge University’s campus – an important collaboration for the startup. Saavedra explains how Lambda’s innovative approach leverages photochemistry to enhance agricultural sustainability: “Our journey took us deep into photochemistry to engineer a novel molecule that would be durable, low-cost, non-toxic, and have similar properties to those quantum dots we used previously.” If this sounds like science fiction to you, a layman’s explanation is that Saavedra broke ground with an active paint that converts damaging UV light into useful red light. The result? Increased food production without additional electricity.
By reducing the need for artificial lighting in greenhouses, Lambda Energy’s solution not only boosts crop yields but also minimizes energy consumption and carbon emissions for its users. This already sounds like a no-brainer, but Saavedra emphasizes the financial benefits for growers who adopt this climatetech. “A grower would earn GDP 35K per year per acre more than they would have prior to using our active spray coating.” This significant increase in revenue is accompanied by a 25% reduction in lighting energy bills, making it an attractive option for growers looking to enhance their profitability while adopting sustainable practices.
Having spotlit climate change tech startups caring for us all from the sea and the land, our third climatetech is engaged in a technology that has existed since 1832 but has been remarkably slow to penetrate the day-to-day of our private transport systems.
Germany is home to VoltVogel, which realized that asking people to sit and wait while their vehicle charged was an enormous barrier to switching from fossil fuels and gas stations for refueling vehicles to clean energy. VoltVogel separates electric vehicle (EV) charging from parking, bringing the charging station autonomously to vehicles, using a charging-as-a-service model to increase access.
Katharine Shapcott, CTO and Co-Founder of VoltVogel, explains the company’s ambitious mission: “We’re here to revolutionize the charging experience and electrify everything sustainably.” These bold words from VoltVogel are fed by Shapcott’s observation of inefficiencies in public EV charging infrastructure, perhaps inspired by her understanding of our brains and behavior gauged in a former life at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience. To increase adoption, Shapcott proposed mobile solutions to supplement static charging stations.
Almost every person who has considered an EV has evaluated the fear that the vehicle might not have sufficient energy storage or access to recharging to cover the road distance needed to reach its intended destination, especially in a world with few electric charging stations. To assuage this perfectly normal fear, VoltVogel’s approach directly tackles the common psychological barrier called “range anxiety” as well as the perceived inconvenience compared to traditional fueling, making EV adoption a more seamless and stress-free part of daily life.
So how does it work? VoltVogel’s innovative solution enhances accessibility by deploying mobile charging units to the vehicle rather than requiring the vehicle to find a charger. This is especially useful for companies with a large number of electric vehicles, such as electric taxis or rental cars, to charge autonomously from wherever they’re located.
VoltVogel adds another green point by leveraging locally installed solar and excess renewable energy from the grid, making charging as easy as ordering a takeaway, thus enabling more people to participate in and benefit from green energy. “Our goal is to ensure that EV charging infrastructure is not just a network of fixed points, but a dynamic, responsive service that adapts to the needs of users in real-time,” says Shapcott.
For city planners, integrating VoltVogel’s technology into smart city infrastructure will allow mobile charging units to intelligently redistribute power based on real-time demand and grid capacity, further optimizing energy usage and enhancing urban sustainability. This forward-thinking vision more than aligns with global efforts to reduce carbon emissions and promote a cleaner, more sustainable future for all.
The International Energy Agency estimates that by 2050, almost half of the required emissions reductions will call for technologies that are not yet on the market. This shows that we need to continue to support early-stage climatetech innovation across all industries to achieve net zero. “We need innovations in transport, construction, fashion, and every other sector of the economy to achieve lasting change,” says Marta Zaccagnini, Sr. Manager at Village Capital.
Greentech Europe 2024 is an initiative for women-led startups in Europe working on sustainability products, including climatetech. To date, the program has supported more than 130 startups from 24 countries in the region, providing them with training, expert advice, network support, and funding to help them thrive — and, in turn, help close the gender financing and resource gap on the continent. The initiative has successfully channeled a cumulative investment of US 550K into over 50 women-led sustainability startups, reinforcing its commitment to advocate for women-led enterprises. Visit the program page to meet the 2024 cohort and learn more about how your startup can join the upcoming cohort.
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