These interviews are always popular, so let’s have a chat with another investor from the UK early-stage world.

In this case, it’s Carbon13, which bills itself as “the Venture Builder for the Climate Emergency.”

But how can climate-focused tech startups thrive in a world when Trump and other populists around the world are putting fossil fuels back on the agenda? I talked to Carbon13’s Sara Jones to find out…

Also, If you’re going to be at SXSW London today, stop me and say hi if you see me - I’ll be hanging around the East London ‘campus’ for as much of the day as possible.

– Martin

How Carbon13 is adapting to the changing environment for climate startups

Who is Sara Jones?

Sara Jones has been involved with climate-focused venture builder Carbon13 since its early days in 2020 and now serves as its head of marketing.

With a background in marketing roles in and around the startup world, she initially was brought on to attract startups to Carbon13’s first cohort.

Five years on, the company’s portfolio includes the likes of BravelyCultured, Future Greens, and GreenPixie, all of whom we have previously profiled in PreSeed Now.

Jones says at least 1,200 founders have gone through Carbon13 programmes so far. With founders taking part having an average age of 36, this is a typically more experienced cohort than at many accelerators or venture builders.

Carbon13 has invested in around 84 startups so far. Last year it won a Growth Investor Award for investing in women. Jones says 60-65% of its portfolio startups have at least one female founder.

The company currently has programmes running in Cambridge and Berlin.

“We're doing what we said that we would do at the beginning, which is not just create investable, scalable, commercial ventures, but those that genuinely do actually move the needle on emissions.,” says Jones.

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

MB = Martin SFP Bryant, SJ = Sara Jones

MB: So tell me what Carbon13 is all about…

SJ: Carbon 13 supports and invests in startups that address challenges to Earth's vital systems.

So if you think of the planetary boundaries, which you may have heard of, we are wanting to work with startups that can fight challenges to all of those.

Initially, that meant quite a strong focus on decarbonisation and carbon removal and avoidance, because it's fairly easily quantifiable in terms of emissions, and it's quite a tangible target to go for. But also we're very much interested in water resource, microplastics, circularity, biodiversity, nature, etc, and also adaptation.

MB: VC investing is very much driven by trends, and environmentally-focused startups are perhaps less ‘hot’ than they were a few years ago. What's the market like for climate related startups at the moment?

SJ: We've seen a slowdown in VC, and it all starts at the very top. Because it's a difficult environment for IPOs, that reduces liquidity for VCs to then turn around and invest down the ladder. Climate Tech has been fairly resilient through that, and if anything, has experienced one of the smaller drops when compared to some other industries at the moment.

We're seeing it evolve and mature, and the need for the startup to have a genuine commercial case is stronger than ever. You've got to be solving a real problem for industry in order to survive. And that's just a key principle of any startup.

A couple of things which are in climate’s favour to do with recent trends, however, is AI reducing moats for software plays, and therefore a slight movement from VCs to looking at IP-based startups and hard tech. And a lot of those are climate, and that benefits a lot of climate tech startups.

So when I think of ours, which are hard tech or IP led, we have a lot of biotech. Because essentially, companies are looking at alternate ways to make materials and chemicals, or they're looking at ways to reduce energy costs, and those are all climate things, right?

If we look at MatNex, their AI platform has discovered a permanent magnet free of rare earth materials, just as Trump's tariffs on China, where 90% of rare earths come, from are coming into effect. And of course, the US-Ukraine deal was balanced on the mineral rights for rare earths in Ukraine.

So suddenly that's a geopolitical startup, where a way for a way for a company to reduce reliance on turbulence between US and China relations is to use a magnet which doesn't require rare earths from China, and suddenly there's a geopolitical element there. And as the market for battery technology and wind turbines, etc, grows, there's just a bigger demand for rare earths. So why wouldn't you try to find an alternative? It's just about finding alternatives for people.

Infyos is a platform for managing suppliers, particularly for batteries and energy storage batteries and that kind of technology. One electric vehicle maker can have 10,000 suppliers and often have no idea where what all of their risks are in that supply chain.

So you're seeing supply chain resilience become a trend that corporates and investors are really interested in, and half the time, resilience of the supply chain is actually linked to doing something in a better environmental way at the same time.

For example, how do you make sure that your products have not been used with slave labour, or they're not illegally mined, or that they’re the right price? But if you can then get the recycled version of that, that can often be more reliable and more flexible. So all of a sudden, recycling startups, which are climate startups, suddenly look more attractive.

I would also say that climate tech can be very non-obvious. None of those startups that I've just mentioned are going to walk up to you and say ‘Hi, I'm a climate tech company and I do this’, they're just going to say ‘I do this’.

One of our most recent investments is a legal AI platform. And yet, that's also a climate company, because in particular they're focusing on ESG, governance, and litigation for corporates.

So I would say that what people think of as climate tech is a horizontal, and there are a lot of things that come under that umbrella, which people may not understand. We don't just do direct air capture, carbon offsets, or alternative protein. It can be quite indirect as to what counts as climate tech, but which can still have a serious impact on emissions by millions and millions of tonnes.

If you're new to climate tech, you might be surprised just how broad a term that is, and it's not weakening that term for it to be so broad. It's actually showing that if you apply this lens, there's significant innovation in every industry out there, and sometimes to find that innovation, you need to apply a new lens. And that's what our founders have done, and that lens has happened to be climate.

MB: There’s a political movement at the moment, particularly in the US, to disregard climate goals as ‘woke’, and to bring back investment in fossil fuels based on the argument that economic growth is more important.

How do climate-focused startups flourish in this seemingly hostile environment?

SJ: The joke at the start of the year was you pick a noun and then stick ‘security’ after it, and that's the rebranding. So suddenly it's not ‘alternative protein’, it's ‘food security’, or it's ‘energy security’ because if you've got really great onshore wind, you then need less oil to be shipped from somewhere else.

And so there are pressures on every industry which just so happen to align with climate. And that is: how do you reduce energy, and how do you get more raw resources to process and sell?

Recycling or retrofitting to reduce energy costs are still urgent solutions that need to happen, whether you believe in climate change or not.

We're seeing a lot of biotech and synthetic chemicals as a way to produce at scale much needed chemicals, which otherwise the supply chain is too fragile for:

• That might be the creation of chemicals within the pharmaceutical industry or the cosmetic industry. One of our startups, Deep Blue BioTech, is using synthetic biology to achieve that.

• Differential Bio in Germany are also using biology for synthetic ways of making materials.

• One of our recent investments, Demeter Bio, is using an extract from black soldier flies to transform food waste into synthetic materials for packaging. We have a huge problem with food waste and what we do with it. Whether you believe in climate change or not, if somebody can say ‘you've got food waste which is now a cost to get rid of, and we can now turn into something you can sell for money, that's going to be attractive’.

• There's a shift that's already happened from blast furnaces to electric arc furnaces for making steel. There's a byproduct from that process at the moment which is worthless, and Cocoon is able to go to steel producers and say ‘we can turn that material into something which is worth a lot of money and sell it to the cement industry’. And they are working with steel factories in America with no mention of climate whatsoever. It's literally just a good deal for them.

There is a whole wave of people who are deeply motivated to make the world a better place, and a lot of that is climate. And those people have not gone away, and nor have they lost enthusiasm for the problem. Enough people know that climate change is real and incredibly deadly if we don't deal with it… and the motivation of people to do climate-impactful startups is actually as strong as ever, and they can operate regardless of what the heads of state have to say about it.

What business likes is a consistent direction of travel, and it does not like change and uncertainty and that has been brought at the moment by the current geopolitical situation, and that will hurt everything, including climate for sure. But some people are worried that we'll start to see a significant fall in climate solutions. But I'm saying that on the ground, people are as motivated as ever. A lot of people's enthusiasm and commitment is still undimmed, and where there's a will, there's a way.

We might have seen a drop, therefore, in some of the bandwagon people who jumped on it because it was a trend; people who are trying to find some quick wins, trying to just do a playbook that has been done before but sticking climate on it, or trying to force cryptocurrency in there in some way.

And it doesn't matter if those all get brushed to the side. Then we can actually get on with proper work to actually make really important solutions that our countries need in terms of the energy, the buildings, the materials, the chemicals, the clothes that we wear, the food that we eat, and the air that we breathe.

MB: Finally, what can we expect to see from Carbon13 in the coming months?

SJ: We will have some more invested startups to announce; there's a whole clutch coming quite soon. We have other venture builder and accelerator programmes ongoing right at this moment. There are about 150 people in Cambridge and Berlin working on startups at the moment, and we'll be investing in those in the autumn.

Then on the other side, in terms of investors, we have our Climate Innovation Showcase coming up in July, which is where we bring investors and the startups together.

And we’ll be building our investor community even further with angels and venture capital firms, as well as family offices, growing the investor community.

Back on Thursday

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