There are thousands of venture-backed climate tech companies in North America.
Of those, 50 are best-positioned to get their technologies to deployment and scale by 2050, according to a new report by Congruent Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. These are the companies they defined as most likely to have a meaningful impact on greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a hopeful and healthy number, according to Joshua Posamentier, one of the report’s authors and Congruent’s managing partner and co-founder.
“When we set up to look at this, it wasn’t clear that there would be so many, and so many that were actually making real deployment or showing clear signs that they were going to get deployed,” he told Latitude Media. “This is way different than it was seven years ago.”
Another surprise: the dominance of hardware companies on the list. Roughly 95% of the start-ups can be defined as hardware companies, albeit with major software components.
“They’re touching the real world,” Posamentier said. “That’s pretty surprising, especially given how venture capital over the last 20 years has oriented more and more toward software. It feels like a little bit of return to the roots of venture in Silicon Valley.”
Breaking down the companies
The companies have been around for an average of seven years and have raised an average of $374 million. Some on the list have as little as $5 million in funding; some have over $2 billion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, over a third of the companies are located in California, with the rest distributed evenly across North America.
They’re distributed across four themes: manufacturing (18 companies), energy (13), building and mobility (10), and food and agriculture (9). The report buckets carbon removal companies — such as the bio-oil sequestration company Charm Industrial — in the manufacturing section.
The focus of the report, Posamentier said, is on technologies that are either being deployed already or do not require major behavioral changes to be deployed.
Among the 13 energy start-ups, for example, Weavegrid and Camus Energy focus on the complex but achievable goal of optimizing the existing grid.
With $29 million in funding, Camus uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to offer utility customers a hub for real-time grid visibility, day-ahead forecasting, and distribution system planning insights. The company is already working with the Vermont Electric Cooperative, for instance, to create an integrated platform with data from sources like advanced metering and electric vehicle charging. In early 2024, the company added a $10 million extension to its Series A funding round, bringing its funding to just over $25 million.
Similarly, WeaveGrid, with $50 million in total funding, is working with Southern Company’s subsidiaries Alabama Power and Georgia Power to pilot an AI-fueled managed charging platform that should help the grid sustain load growth predictions.
Meanwhile, other big names on the list have raised nine figures and are well on their way to deploying significant infrastructure.
For instance, enhanced geothermal startup Fervo Energy represents the promise of geothermal power, which has been getting renewed attention from venture capitalists in the past months. Fervo has raised a total of $421 million in funding, and told Latitude Media earlier this year that it was moving toward project-level finance; just this week, the company announced a $100 million bridge loan to support its new project in Utah. In June, Fervo signed a first-of-a-kind deal with Google, which involved a new rate structure dubbed the “clean transition tariff.”
And in the energy storage space, Form Energy has $928 million in funding and is building its first factory for iron-air batteries that could provide 100 hours of energy storage.
Finally, nuclear technologies feature prominently on the list, with four companies on the list — Helion Energy, TerraPower, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and Avalanche — that together boast a whopping $3.6 billion in funding. The appearance of fusion in this collection reflects venture capital’s willingness to bet on the promising but unproven technology. But together, the four paint a picture of cleantech’s renewed interest in nuclear in light of a growing need for clean firm power.
