Lowercarbon Capital

Great results for Carbon Crusher's Phoenix road rebuild project. Stronger, cheaper roads that retain less heat and remove more carbon? Sounds like the future of roads to us.

Matter Intelligence is on a mission to build the most sophisticated sensor infrastructure to ever study our planet, and has emerged out of stealth this week armed with a $12M seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital, joined by our friends Mark Cuban, Mar Hershenson from Pear VC, Toyota Ventures, and others. I’ve joined the board and am super excited to share our first ever investment in Earth observation, first from the air and soon in space. Matter’s hyperspectral and thermal sensors deliver imagery at extreme sub-meter resolution for thousands of wavelengths of light invisible to human vision, packing ~500X denser data into each pixel than best-in-market today. This will be a foundational data set for the coming geospatial AI wave, and unlocks applications ranging from critical mineral discovery to precision agriculture to emissions detection and more. Beyond commercial use cases, we’re floored by the demand we’re seeing from defense and intelligence institutions. Matter is building critical technology for national security, and there is an underlying urgency here to scale these capabilities before America’s adversaries do. We’re in a new space race and we’re here to win. You could not dream up a better team to build this technology. When we ran references on founders Vishnu Sridhar, Nathan Stein, and Thomas Chrien, we heard phrases like "the very top echelon of NASA engineers" and "godfather of this technology" thrown around. That made me perk up. Vishnu built a sensor for a literal mission to Mars, one where they set records you should ask him about over a beer. Now they're bringing the lessons learned to observing our home planet. I'm so proud to work with this crew, and can't wait for what's to come. Learn more at matter.com. P.S. I love that we have two Shark Tank ABC judges on the cap table here! #tech #climatetech #spacetech #earthobservation #satellites #sensors #hyperspectral #imagery NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Shoutout to Arbor Energy for landing on TIME’s Best Inventions Of 2024 list! Turns out building the cheapest, cleanest baseload power plant is actually rocket science. 

Congrats to Electra and cofounders Sandeep Nijhawan and Quoc Pham! Their clean, renewable-powered ironmaking landed Electra on Time’s Best Inventions of 2024 list. Not surprising since they’re helping clean up one of the world’s dirtiest industries. #greensteel #renewables #climatetech

Congrats to Arbor Energy, Electra, and Mill for making TIME’s Best Inventions Of 2024 list! Carbon-negative energy leveraging rocket science? Clean iron for green steel? A food-waste-fighting trash can? It’s not surprising in the least that these climate game-changers got the nod. https://lnkd.in/ekZTJCpd

Congrats, Electra! We're not surprised your clean iron made from cheap renewables made Time's Best Inventions of 2024 list.

Today’s bonkers pace of technological change is making some pretty wild ideas possible—and profitable. Exhibit A: Genomines, the brain-breaking startup mining critical metals with plants. In our latest blog post, Lowercarbon’s Dr. Christina Chang breaks down how this French mining phenom does it. When self-described metals geek Dr. Chang saw Genomines’ tech, she recognized what no investment plan, market map, or research deep dive could have told her: that this company’s approach to critical metal extraction wasn’t just profitable and planet-friendly, it could very well become the future of mining. See how Genomines is giving traditional mining a run for its money.

Pacific Fusion, a Lowercarbon portfolio company based out of the Bay Area, just came out of stealth with $900M in funding to build a full-scale fusion power facility within a decade. As a chemical engineer and climate tech VC, I’ve seen many step changes in technology cost and performance that few expected. Harnessing the sun on Earth to generate an infinite source of clean power certainly tops the list! The Pacific Fusion team is building off multiple known technological breakthroughs to unlock commercial fusion power by the 2030s. These include:  -> The National Ignition Facility’s repeated demonstration of ignition through inertial confinement over the last 18+ months  -> Advancements in pulsed power engineering from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories -> High-fidelity fusion reaction simulations led by co-founder Leland Ellison -> The wealth of local Silicon Valley talent specialized in material science and mass manufacturing I am incredibly excited to be working with the fantastic team at Pacific Fusion, led by world-renowned scientist Dr. Eric Lander, Google X and ARPA-E technologist Will Regan, pulse power and inertial fusion expert Keith LeChien, and operations guru Carrie von Muench. You can read more about what these founders are building in their letter.

What happens when rocket engineers turn their attention to climate tech? 🚀 In the latest article from Heatmap News, our CEO Brad Hartwig shares how we’re harnessing aerospace technology to meet the growing demand for clean, reliable electricity and permanent carbon removal. Huge thanks to Katie Brigham and the Heatmap team for spotlighting Arbor's efforts to sustainably power the present while erasing emissions of the past. #cleanpower #carbonremoval #CDR #climatetech

As much as I love the French Alps, café culture, and so much more, what really blows me away as a climate tech investor is the country’s engineering talent. Their rigorous math and science education—believe me, it’s tough, I am a disciple of “la filière S” —has given rise to a thriving startup ecosystem. Earlier this year, we led the €5M seed round for Storio Energy with our friends at Bpifrance Digital Venture. Founded by ex-Tesla and Databricks engineers and exited founders, Caroline Le Floch, Gautier Maigret, Jean-Yves Stephan, and Julien Dumazert are tackling the growing need for commercial and industrial energy storage across France and Europe, where energy challenges have reached a critical point, and there is real money to be made maximizing the output of behind-the-meter batteries. The Storio team’s cutting-edge engineering and AI expertise is set to deliver best-in-class results, and they already have their first customers lined up. Storio isn’t our first investment in a French startup—it’s the fifth! But at Lowercarbon, we don’t ascribe to geography-specific investment strategies. We invest where we find the best entrepreneurs with deep domain expertise solving huge global problems. Take Genomines. Their co-founders, Dali Rashid, PhD. and Fabien Koutchekian, are based in Paris, leveraging the plant genomics expertise at Université Paris-Saclay. They’re using plants to harvest metals critical to battery production, and their market is global. Powerhouse Dioxycle is headquartered in Paris and has a team in the Bay Area. These carbon electrolysis geniuses, Sarah Lamaison, PhD and David Wakerley, PhD from Collège de France, Ecole Polytechnique, and Stanford, are turning CO2 into ethylene, a $200B commodity that powers entire industries. Woodoo, founded by acclaimed French architect Timothée Boitouzet, is replacing steel and cement with bio-engineered wood for sustainable construction across continents. Renaissance Fusion, out of Grenoble, is advancing the future of abundant clean energy a stone’s throw from ITER, the world’s largest fusion project. Like I said, we follow talent and massive market opportunity. And there’s a lot of it in France. Read more about those investments here. (For non-French speakers, Google Translate does the trick.) #climatetech #tech #batteries #software #biotech #cleanenergy