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FoodTech and ClimateTech startups around the world are harnessing innovation to tackle the planet's most pressing environmental challenges. From sustainable agriculture and renewable energy solutions to carbon capture technologies, they’re driving tangible impact and paving the way towards a more sustainable future.
Taking to the stage at the HackSummit in Lausanne this June 13-14th are 60 Founders behind some of the most game-changing startups, coming to share actionable advice, crucial learnings and inspire fellow entrepreneurs.
Apply today for your pass and join these Founders, plus hundreds of Climate builders, capital allocators, LPs and operators who will be at the annual HackSummit. Save 20% on your pass with code CLIMATEFOUNDER.
Let’s meet the 60 Founders:
AgTech
🇺🇸 Adrian Ferrero, Co-Founder & CEO, Biome Makers
Latest Funding: Grant, $1.6 million (also raised Series B $15 million a year before this)
What: Decoding soil biology to optimise farming practices and improve soil health.
🇸🇪 Andrew Lala, CEO, Ignitia
Latest Funding: Series A, $4.2 million
What: Leveraging AI to develop actionable climate and weather intelligence, with a focus on supporting smallholder farms in low- and middle-income countries.
🇸🇬 David Chen, CEO, AgriG8
Latest Funding: Undisclosed
What: Operating a platform for agricultural fintech that aims to close the financing gap for smallholder farmers.
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Biodiversity
🇩🇪 Sonja Stuchtey, Founder, The Landbanking Group
Latest Funding: Seed, $11 million
What: Allowing businesses, investors and individuals to manage their Nature Equity assets, to become nature-positive, comply with legislation, and protect against nature risks.
🇨🇭Ulrike Pfreundt, Co-Founder & CEO, rrreefs
Latest Funding: Pre-Seed, CHF 420,000
What: Regenerating degraded coral reefs with modular reef structures.
🇬🇧 Zoë Balmforth, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Pivotal
Latest Funding: Seed, £4.5 million
What: Developing a biodiversity measurement platform which includes supply chain measurement, regulatory compliance and biodiversity and carbon credit markets.
🇺🇬 David Gonahasa, Co-Founder, The Naturalist
Latest Funding: Undisclosed
What: Seeking to increase global awareness of Mountain Gorillas by leveraging technology to generate non-trekking revenues towards Gorilla conservation.
🇺🇸 Topher White, Founder and CEO, Rainforest Connection (RFCx)
Latest Funding: Grant, $500K
What: Enabling global partners, governments, corporations, scientists and ecologists to truly understand impacts on ecosystems and guide conservation management.
🇨🇭Frederic Fournier, CEO and Co-Founder, Open Forest Protocol
Latest Funding: Pre-Seed, €3.8M
What: Creating a scalable, on-chain platform that allows forest projects of any size, from around the world, to Measure, Report, and Verify (MRV) their forestation data.
🇬🇧 Daniel Watson, Co-Founder & CEO, SafetyNet Technologies
Latest Funding: Later-stage VC, £1.8 million
What: Making practical Precision Fishing tools to help make commercial fishing more predictable, profitable and sustainable.
🇨🇭 David Lunsford, CEO, Stream Ocean
Latest Funding: Unfunded to date
What: Creating an AI-powered end-to-end solution for real-time marine life monitoring.
🇰🇪 Gautam Shah, Founder, Internet of Elephant
Latest Funding: Undisclosed
What: Creating the first-ever game based on real wildlife data, to revolutionise how conservation is supported.
🇬🇧 Harry Grocott, CEO and Co-Founder, Treeconomy
Latest Funding: Undisclosed
What: Using technology to more accurately calculate carbon capture in trees and forests, and making the right thing ecologically the most profitable choice.
🇨🇭Jürg Germann, Co-Founder, Inverto
Latest Funding: CHF 150,000 from Venture Kick
What: Connecting wetland restoration to corporate funding through high integrity data.
🇨🇭Tim Duehrkoop, CEO, XILVA
Latest Funding: Pre-Seed, €1.6 million
What: Building a global digital marketplace to connect capital to forests, at scale.
🇬🇧 Toby Parkes, Co-Founder & CEO, Rhizocore Technologies
Latest Funding: Seed, £3.5 million
What: Producing locally-adapted mycorrhizal fungi to accelerate woodland regeneration, improve forest productivity, and increase natural capital benefits.
🇨🇭Yohan Hadji, Co-Founder, R2Home
Latest Funding: Over CHF 70,000 from grants and competitions
What: Developing a fully autonomous paragliding robot that navigates to a precise landing point to make payloads such as radiosondes recoverable and thus reusable.
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Carbon
🇨🇱 Catalina Urrejola, CTO, Ceibo
Latest Funding: Series B, $30 million
What: Developing a technology which involves a chemical leaching of primary sulphides to extract copper, using less water than conventional copper extraction methods.
🇺🇸 Marty Odlin, Co-Founder & CEO, Running Tide
Latest Funding: Series B, $54 million
What: Rebalancing the natural carbon cycle and deacidifying the ocean.
🇩🇪 Ana Teresa Fuzzo de Lima, Director for Nature and Climate Science, Recarb
What: Offering the world’s first rating on ecosystem resilience to reverse biodiversity loss.
🇩🇪 Maximilian Webers, Co-Founder and CEO, COLIPI
Latest Funding: Seed, €1.8 million
What: Transforming renewable carbon into their signature product, Climate Oil, an eco-friendly alternative to traditional vegetable oils.
🇩🇪 Lubomila Jordanova, Co-Founder & CEO, Plan A
Latest Funding: Series B, $27 million
What: Building science-based digital tools for carbon accounting, ESG ratings, and decarbonisation.
🇩🇪 Felix Harteneck, Co-Founder & CEO, InPlanet
Latest Funding: Seed, €5.6 million
What: Removing gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere while regenerating soils in the tropics, by enabling farmers to replace chemicals with natural rock powders from local mines.
🇬🇧 Jim Mann, Founder & CEO, UNDO
Latest Funding: £9.6 million, plus £800,000 from carbon removal purchaser Stripe
What: Using enhanced rock weathering to spread volcanic rock dust on farms and capture carbon in the soil.
🇩🇪 René Hass, Co-Founder & CEO, NeoCarbon
Latest Funding: Seed, €3.2 million
What: Retrofitting existing cooling towers to capture carbon directly from the atmosphere, at scale.
🇫🇷 Vassily Carantino, Co-Founder & CEO, CarbonFarm
Latest Funding: Seed, €2.5 million
What: Decarbonising rice farming through satellite-verified carbon credits.
Energy
🇺🇸 Lauren Salz, Co-Founder & CEO, Sealed
Latest Funding: Series B, $30 million
What: Designing, managing, and financing home weatherisation and electrification projects.
🇺🇸 Ramya Swaminathan, CEO, Malta
Latest Funding: Undisclosed
What: Providing grid-scale energy storage with its cost-effective Thermo-Electric Energy Storage technology.
🇸🇪 Konrad Bergström, Founder, X Shore
Latest Funding: Series B, €8.5 million
What: Creating high performance all-electric powered boats.
🇳🇱 Casper Peeters, CEO, E-magy
Latest Funding: Series A, €20.5 million
What: Creating a revolutionary silicon dominant anode material for lithium-ion batteries that delivers 40% higher energy density.
🇿🇼 Leroy T Nyangani, Co-Founder & CEO, NeedEnergy
Latest Funding: Angel, undisclosed
What: Developing an AI-based platform which allows users to manage grids based on distributed energy resources, monitor energy and power consumption, generate energy, analyse data, and more.
🇩🇪 Ole Schaumberg, Co-Founder, montamo
Latest Funding: Pre-Seed, €2.1 million
What: Addressing the shortage of skilled workers in the green energy transition by offering specialised training to individuals from migrant backgrounds.
Food
🇦🇺 Ann Limley, Founder & Technical Lead, PivotEat
Latest Funding: Undisclosed, secured funding from Better Bite Ventures in October 2023
What: Developing a novel process to improve the structure and scalability of plant-based whole-cut meat alternatives.
🇮🇱 Hadar Ekhoiz Razmovich, Co-Founder & CEO, MEALA
Latest Funding: €400,000 from EIT Food in May 2023 and Pre-Seed, $1.9M in Feb 2023
What: Developing new ingredients and processes designed to replace methyl cellulose and hydrocolloids in meat, egg, dairy, and fish alternatives.
🇬🇧 Jasmin Hume, Founder & CEO, Shiru
Latest Funding: Series A, $17 million
What: Using machine learning and bioinformatics to mine databases of plants to identify proteins with specific functional qualities.
🇮🇱 Gregory Belt, CEO, Innovopro
Latest Funding: Series B
What: Developing plant based food products from chickpea in various categories such as dairy and meat alternatives.
🇬🇧 Russ Tucker, Founder, Twig Bio
Latest Funding: Pre-Seed, £3 million
What: Using AI and robotics to find sustainable replacements for environmentally harmful ingredients.
🇺🇸 Maria Cho, Co-Founder & CEO, Triplebar
Latest Funding: Series A, $20 million
What: Creating a high-throughput screening platform that combines microfluidics and hyperspeed testing with AI and machine learning to develop biomanufacturing platforms for microbial or animal cells.
🇺🇸 Maricel Saenz, Co-Founder, Minus Coffee
Latest Funding: Seed
What: Using a fermentation process and ingredients such as chicory root, dates and lentils to precisely replicate the taste and aroma of cold brew coffee, without coffee beans.
🇲🇽 Marissa Cuevas Flores, Founder & CEO, MicroTERRA
Latest Funding: Seed
What: Creating plant-based functional ingredients for the food industry, including Flora, an ingredient extracted from duckweed which enhances sweetness perception.
🇸🇬Stéphane Chen, Founder & CEO, Another Food
Latest Funding: Undisclosed
What: Developing sustainable food made from plant cells, starting with coffee via plant cell culture.
🇦🇺James Petrie, CEO, Nourish Ingredients
Latest Funding: Series A, $28.6 million
What: Creating animalic fats to make plant proteins delicious by combining breakthrough science with a focus on the most potent fat molecules found in nature.
🇩🇪 Jan Wilmking, Co-Founder & Managing Director, Project Eaden
Latest Funding: Seed, €10.1 million
What: Producing edible plant-based protein fibers that mimic the texture and appearance of animal-based meats.
🇮🇳 Bharath Bakaraju, Founder, Phyx44 Labs
Latest Funding: Seed, $1.2 million
What: Using precision fermentation to create whey and casein proteins as well as fatty acids found in dairy.
🇨🇭 Christoph Jenny, Co-Founder & CEO, Planted
Latest Funding: Series B, $71.7 million
What: Producing clean-label, whole-cut meat alternatives from proteins such as pea, oat, and sunflower, using a novel bio structuring approach.
🇨🇭 David Brandes, Founder & CEO, Planetary
Latest Funding: Seed, $8.1 million
What: Providing industrial-scale upstream and downstream manufacturing opportunities for both biomass and precision fermentation.
🇳🇱 David Klingen, Co-Founder & CEO, Northern Wonder
Latest Funding: Pre-Seed, $1.06 million
What: Using a combination of non-tropical ingredients to make a “deforestation-free” coffee alternative.
🇬🇧 Ed Steele, Co-Founder, Hoxton Farms
Latest Funding: Series A, £20 million
What: Growing cruelty-free, sustainable animal fats – without the animals – to combine with plant protein.
🇦🇹 Gregor Tegl, Founder & CEO, Arkeon Biotechnologies
Latest Funding: Seed, €10.5 million
What: Converting CO2 into functional, carbon-negative ingredients for food.
🇸🇬 Jon Ho, Co-Founder & CEO, Allium Bio
Latest Funding: $50,000 from Better Bite Ventures’ First Bite Initiative
What: Co-culturing strains of microalgae and mycelium to create ingredients that improve the taste and performance of plant-based products.
🇸🇬 Mihir Pershad, Founder & CEO, Umami Bioworks
Latest Funding: Seed, $2.4 million
What: Combining breakthroughs in genomics, stem cell biology and machine learning to create the next generation of cultivated seafood production.
🇺🇸 Mark Warner, Co-Founder & CEO, Liberation Labs
Latest Funding: Convertible Note, $10 million
What: Developing a global network of fit-for-purpose precision fermentation facilities for novel protein companies.
Materials
🇬🇧 Elizabeth Gilligan, CEO, Material Evolution
Latest Funding: Series A, £15 million
What: Decarbonising the cement industry with its low-carbon cement, which Material Evolution says has an 85% lower carbon-footprint than normal Portland cement.
🇺🇸 Ginger Krieg Dosier, Co-Founder & Board Member, Biomason
Latest Funding: Series C, $65 million
What: Using biology to build calcium carbonate biocement, with enzymatic processes from microorganisms replacing the need for high energy, eliminating direct emissions.
🇬🇧 Insiya Jafferjee, Co-Founder & CEO, The Shellworks
Latest Funding: Seed, £5 million
What: Making sustainable alternatives to plastic packaging from upcycled waste, that are compostable and a non-polluting fertiliser at their end of life.
🇸🇪 Marta Sjögren, Co-Founder & CEO, Paebbl
Latest Funding: Seed, €8 million
What: Utilising CO2 to make new construction materials through an accelerated mineralisation technique.
🇨🇱 Andres Mitnik, Co-Founder & CEO, Strong By Form
Latest Funding: Seed, $5.2 million
What: Developing sustainable, ultralight, high-performance timber-based biocomposites to replace steel, aluminium, and concrete.
🇫🇷 Fabien Koutchekian, Co-Founder & CEO, GenoMines
Latest Funding: Seed, $5.2 million
What: Creating genetically enhanced plants to mine metals around the globe, with the aim of becoming the first carbon-negative mining group.
🇬🇧 Jacob Nathan, Co-Founder & CEO, Epoch Biodesign
Latest Funding: Seed, $11 million
What: Designing and scaling the first enzymes capable of transforming plastics into low-carbon, circular chemicals.
🇰🇪 Kidus Asfaw, Co-Founder & CEO, Kubik, Inc.
Latest Funding: Seed, $5.2 million
What: Turning hard-to-recycle plastic waste into low-cost, low-carbon, interlocking building materials.
🇫🇷 Nicolas Cruaud, Co-Founder, Néolithe
Latest Funding: Series C, €60 million
What: Deploying a patented fossilisation process which turns non-recyclable waste into mineral aggregates for use in the construction industry.
All these featured Founders (plus 100s more) will be in attendance alongside a highly curated group of fellow ClimateTech investors and operators.
If you’re a Founder looking to meet the Partners and LPs of ClimateTech Funds, then come and meet yout next invesor at the HackSummit this June in Lausanne.
Apply today for one of the limited Founder Tickets, and use code CLIMATEFOUNDER for 20% off your pass by EOD Sunday 5th May.