GreenTech

Wind is the largest source of renewable energy in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but wind farms come with an environmental cost as wind turbines can wreak havoc on bird populations. Meet Spoor, the startup using AI to help wind farms mitigate that risk. Spoor is a software that uses machine

Spencer Gore has a battery startup. But he doesn’t want his batteries to end up in electric vehicles, at least not yet.  “There are a lot of interesting downmarket segments of automotive that are underserved today that are faster to get into than, say, the traction battery in EVs,” he told TechCrunch. Take the traditional

Heating and air conditioning is usually pretty boring stuff, performed by appliance-like boxes with uninspired designs, from sheet metal outdoor units to cheap plastic indoor mini-splits. Not Quilt. The heat pump startup unveiled its first products on Wednesday, and they sport the sort of sleek and intuitive designs you’d expect from veterans of Apple, Nest,

Nicholas Johnson founded a company because he lost a bet. Johnson was having dinner with some investors in Lyt, a road congestion management company he had co-founded. As the dinner conversation meandered, it settled on EV charging and how best to bring it to multi-family housing. Apartment dwellers who own EVs are often left with

The brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 took businesses that depended on oil and gas energy by surprise. Suddenly, renewable energy became crucial to survival. But how best to buy it? That was the germination of the idea behind trawa, a Berlin-based renewable energy supplier that recently raised €10 million in a seed

Blisce has become the latest VC firm to launch a fund dedicated to climate tech, for which it plans to raise as much as €150 million (about $162 million). The firm is hiring investor Pierre-Edouard Berion to lead the fund, and Lucie Basch, the co-founder of Too Good To Go, is going to support the

Fast consumption and waste generation run rampant in all industries, but it’s particularly true around baby equipment. Tiny humans get big fast, and parents might be nervous to buy used items (“Is that high chair really sanitized?”) and are often too stressed out to think about what to do with the equipment the little tyke

At the start of the year, Tesla’s Supercharger team was tasked with the impossible. “We were on an exponential path,” a former team member told TechCrunch, adding that the new targets were “super-duper crazy.” Despite the bottlenecks that such expectations can create, “every time they upped the metric, we met it.” Then, one day in

Climate tech startups raised $8.1 billion in the first quarter, near record amounts of money that suggest 2023’s quiet close might have been more of a blip than the sign of a protracted downturn. The figure, contained in a new report from PitchBook, shows that climate tech hasn’t succumbed to the same slowdown that has

S2G Ventures is graduating today, so to speak. The climate tech investment firm has been living under Builders Vision, an umbrella organization for Walmart heir Lukas Walton’s philanthropic and investment activities, for the past three years. Walton was S2G’s sole limited partner. Now the organization is bringing others on board. Walton started S2G in 2014

Productive Use of Renewable Energy (PURE) technologies, especially those in the solar irrigation and cold chain segment, saw increased investor interest last year, despite a 43% funding slump recorded in the global off-grid solar sector. The global association for the off-grid solar energy industry, GOGLA, says PURE technologies raised $65 million in 2023, double the

Jonathan Strimling faced a dilemma. His company had spent nine years working on chemical processes that could turn old cardboard boxes into high-quality building insulation. The good news was the team had finally cracked it: CleanFiber’s technology pumped out insulation — really good insulation. It had fewer contaminants and produced less dust than other cellulose

Platform is a word that gets tossed around a lot in technology circles, so much so that it’s often misused. But here’s the basic business school definition: A platform is a company or business model that creates more value for participants than it captures for itself. Consider that some of the most successful companies in

Usually, when something starts to rot, it gets pitched in the trash. But Joanne Rodriguez wants to turn the concept of rot on its head by growing fungus on trash to turn it into something better. “We train mushrooms to eat trash and create renewable, bio-based raw materials,” she told TechCrunch. Rodriguez is the founder