40+ Climate VC Predictions

Hey There,

What are the top VC's in climate and food excited by in 2023? 

To answer exactly that - we asked 40+ VC's for their predictions and put them into two essentials reads to kick off the year: 

🌎 Top Climate Tech Predictions of 2023

🌾 Top Food Tech Predictions of 2023

The entries include everything from decarbonized materials (e.g. Paebble) to carbon capture (e.g. Carbominer), molecular farming (e.g. Bright Biotech) to scale-up infrastructure (e.g. Ark Biotech). 

Thanks to all the investors who shared their insights with us, and RIP to your inboxes in the coming days/weeks.

 👀 Going Private 

Several of you have emailed in asking “where’s the deal flow gone?” and why we've taken down our investment portal.. 

Truth is - after 2 years of writing these newsletters and $100M+ of VC / Startup intro's, we've grown to a point where it just doesn't make sense to share deal flow widely with the now 1k+ readers here.

Instead we've moved it all over to HackCapital, accessible only to a group of angels and family offices investing through us (you can apply to invest here), and with a handful of VC's who we regularly exchange deal flow with.

If you're a VC that wants to get looped in - just reply to this email with 1-2 companies you're looking at today.

💬 Quick Reads

🥩 Where's the beef? One of the steaks pictured below is in fact, not steak. At least not made with animal meat. Instead, it's plant based and made with a proprietary fiber spinning technology by Berlin based Project Eaden - can you guess which it is?

The team that got started just 1 year ago believe they've cracked the code for producing whole cuts of plant-based meat alternatives and just this week announced an additional $2.3 million in funding (totalling $10.8 million raised) in a round led by CREANDUM and joined by Atlantic Food Labs and Magnetic.

As for which is the plant vs the animal based, I still have no idea - but Timo Meyer should have the answer.

🏭 To build in-house, or not to build in-house? 

New Age Meats (raised over $32M+) is walking away from their 90% built production facility, Oatly announced they recently sold off much of their facilities in Utah and Texas and news broke today that Remilk ($131M+ raised) has scrapped their plans to set up factory in Denmark. 

The thing about FoodTech is that companies in this space need to actually make food at some point - and that's an expensive, operationally complex thing to do - even more so when you're building and running the facilities yourself.

It brings up an important discussion of when should companies look to outsource vs build in-house? One things for sure - it's a good time to be building outsourced infrastructure for scale up e.g. Synonym ($6.3M raised), Planetary ($8.1M raised), Liberation Labs ($20M raised).

🤖 AI is transforming the digital world. In this essay, Elliot Hershberg (investor/writer at Not Boring) examines why we've seen such a divergence between digital and physical AI progress—and why biology has been such a notable exception.

Companies to watch here include Bioraptor ($3M Raised + a HackCapital Portfolio Co.) and Invert Bio (Backed by YC). 

🍄 The Future is Fungi - We're only just scraping the surface of mushrooms potential in western diets. Countries in APAC have been way ahead of the fungi curve and today China produces an insane amount of mushrooms (see chart below). 

I'm bullish we'll see mushroom consumption grow significantly in Europe and US (just check out this delicious mushroom burger here) and with rise in demand, production capacity will have to increase significantly too.

Companies to watch here include Berlin-based Tupu and SF-based Hedgehog - both working on versions of automated, high scale mushroom production and both happen to be HackCapital portfolio co's too (I told you we're bullish).

📈 Can only go up? Climate Tech funding now makes up 30% of all venture capital, per data from PwC and Pitchbook. According to ClimateTech VC, investors are sitting on nearly $300b of dry powder fuelled by a noticeable uptick in LP interest in Climate funding, and an ever crowding market of Climate VC's. 

I have some scepticism that interest will stay this way in the coming months (let's dig into that another time), but overall it feels like a good time to be investing into climate startups at all stages given the maturity of the investment landscape - from ideation to exit.

💡 Deep Dives

🍌 Reducing Food Waste in Supply Chains - Excessive food waste costs the grocery industry $50B in lost profits annually. In the EU, food waste is estimated to have an associated market value of €130B. 

Inefficiencies along the food lifecycle contribute to food loss - but enhanced supply chain management, inventory, and storage, enabled by technology, can help grocers sell more than they throw out.

In our latest deep dive, we look at the 30+ companies working to reduce food waste at the point of sale.

👋 Meet IRL

📆 Connect with your local Founders and Funders network at our 2 upcoming FoodHack Meetups in Dubai (25th January) and Amsterdam (2nd February), plus our very first ClimateHack meetup in Zurich (3rd February) - let's meet IRL then! 

📣 Speaker Recommendations: We're looking for the best Climate speakers for the next HackSummit in May. Have a recommendation? Please drop it here. (and no sorry - we're not looking for more VC's right now)

😅 Bit of Fun

Egg prices have more than tripled in some states in the US over the last year (though they are now starting to come down after record high's in December)l

The silver lining is a rare moment of amazing egg meme's lately: 

Thanks for reading and let me know what you really thought

😁 Love It 😐 Meh 😕 Hate it

Arman Anatürk Co-Founder & CEO @FoodHack (HackCapital)

Disclaimer: ‍Investing in startups and early stage businesses involves risks, including illiquidity, lack of dividends, loss of investment and dilution. This communication is intended for experienced investors, with sufficient experience and knowledge to understand the processes and risks involved. Do your DD, make your own decisions, invest aware, your capital is at risk.