Eric Adamson

Check out my recent post on why President Trump is the forcing function for us to solve the “Missing Middle” and catch the industrial Tsunami of onshoring coming to the US!

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Excited to announce our investment in Alta Resource Technologies alongside Leonardo Banchik (Voyager Ventures) with participation from Orion Resource Partners, Overture Ventures, and WovenEarth Ventures. Rare earths are critical in products from magnets to ceramics and it's important for the US to develop its own supply chain. While the US has some of the best rare earth resources, separating them has historically proven expensive and environmentally unfriendly. Alta through it's computationally designed and optimized proteins allows the US to bring back rare earth production with a cleaner, lower capex, and lower opex solution - and that's just the beginning. Congrats to Nathan Ratledge and the entire Alta team. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gbGnAJn3

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We (Climate VC) need to stop making excuses for the growth trajectories of our companies There’s a reason why Matthew Stotts and I chose the venture capital asset class to focus on - it has to GROW fast. And there are a lot of fast-growing, money-making opportunity areas with huge problems that could benefit from highly motivated well-funded and skilled teams looking to build a large company. If you need to make an excuse or caveat for any of the statements in the previous paragraph, you’re in the wrong asset class The good thing about VC is it grows fast and BIG. The clock is ticking on our biggest problem areas - let’s get to work!

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Excellent blog post on the realities of Climate & VC. While these are "tough times for the transition," there are also many opportunities. Significant capital will continue to flow, with Corporate VCs playing a larger role in financing this transition. Through this process, they will strengthen their LP positions in funds tackling climate challenges. I receive weekly calls from large Holding & Corporate VCs seeking introductions to Climate / Energy / Infra VC Funds. When I ask about their target sub-verticals within Climate / Energy, they often mention that they default to focusing on specific regions due to limited resources and coverage. In other words, rather than evaluating whether a DACH VC is better positioned for solar or grid-tech compared to a Nordic or US VC, they simply pursue whichever regions they can access—a haphazard approach at best. I always advise LPs to evaluate VCs within their operating market context. Since sourcing is crucial in venture capital, Holding Cos. and Family Offices should carefully assess a VC's location, regulatory context, and market environment before investing and building a portfolio of Funds. I've heard "I wish I had discovered this VC / region sooner" far too many times... * At ComposeVC's Built World Fund, we do not invest in Climatetech or Energytech directly, only as it relates to our Built World thesis.

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A SAFE and convertible note had a baby and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati was the midwife- out popped the D-SAFE! 👶🏽🎉 A new #climatetech funding instrument was announced by Elemental Excelerator last week. One of the company’s main goals is to support smaller, up and coming companies during the awkward “Scale Gap” phase between #VC funding and natural growth. It’s called the #DSAFE (Development Simple Agreement for Future Equity) and it aims to aid the process by giving companies a small amount of cash to overcome initial risks and expenses during the developmental stages of a product launch or company. How does it work? D-SAFE has a redemption clause meaning companies can choose to have their payments offered as a loan or convert to equity at the investor’s discretion. Funders and companies will have clear communication and expectations about where the money is going and how it will be applied to either the company or the projects at hand. Financiers and companies will work together with more #transparency, and that’s a great boon for #startups and VC alike. As of this month, Elemental has already invested using D-SAFE in eight different companies, including Dimensional Energy and Origen — both companies investing in innovative and out-of-the-box solutions to environmental issues! Seems like a win-win on the surface. What do you all think about the D-SAFE? Alfredo Coppola Momoka Ueda Tim Wagner Stephen D. Torres Olya Irzak Natsuho Toyama Noriya Tarutani Shin Ogawa

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Data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) illustrates the current "readiness" of #ClimateTechs + their potential impact on carbon reduction. As shown, many techs are at an early stage of being able to have a material impact. Concerningly, some tech funds recently returned capital back to investors recently + closed their funds - citing inability to fund capital intensive techs, found in areas like ClimateTech. This in part may be contributing to the $2 trillion shortfall in ClimateTech, that Deloitte estimates. What this may mean for the future? - The migration of LPs to global, super VC funds within ClimateTech, given the large capital pools needed to fund tech development - Greater specialization from smaller funds, energizing more niche elements of the ClimateTech market - but also altering their / LP's risk profile - A greater role to be played by debt financing in funding growth entities at an earlier stage - impacting cashflow dynamics Will be an interesting space to watch moving forward. We at The Proptech Connection are constantly working with all parts of the Proptech ecosystem. From the leading LPs, funds, techs and adopters in market, providing an independent view. Reach out to us today to find out how we can help. #InvestorTrends #Strategy #Global Ivo van Breukelen Stuart Daun Kiki C. Ethan Ward

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🚨 🚘 An exciting day here at 8090 Industries as we ‘roll out’ our latest investment in ENSO - 2023 Earthshot Prize Finalist, to revolutionize a stagnant industry undergoing the largest shift since its inception, with no solution in place, an aging workforce, lacking ingenuity and a business model out of touch with the dynamic needs of its customers - TIRES. World, meet Gunnlaugur Erlendsson, the industrialist pioneering a new dawn for the tire industry. But first, a quick history lesson: __________________________ In 1898, Franklin "Frank" Seiberling, jobless, with a wife and three children, borrowed $3,500 for a down payment from his brother-in-law, to purchase an old strawboard factory in Ohio, to open a rubber company. A science and history nut, he named it after Charles Goodyear, the pioneer of vulcanization, the main method of how rubber was produced. Over the next decade, they brought mechanization and technology to the cumbersome and time-consuming process of hand building tires — enabling one man to produce 60 tires in ten hours as opposed to five tires built by hand in a day. His Seiberling State machine revolutionized tire building and led to an explosion in tire production output. By 1907 - it caught the attention of Henry Ford who purchased 1,200 sets of tires for the Model T. And as they say, the rest is history. By 1913 - Over half the tires made in the U.S. were manufactured on Seiberling’s machines. By 1916 - The The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company became the largest tire producer in the world. _____________________ Today much has changed. @Goodyear is no longer the largest tire producer and tire manufacturers no longer own the direct relationship to fleets. That capitalistic, swashbuckling energy and entrepreneurial spirit that built Goodyear and pioneered the tire industry is in short supply, just when it needs it most as a global transition towards EVs compels the greatest growth opportunity for the tire industry in over a century. Led by Gunnlaugur Erlendsson, Enso produces tires perfectly fit for a world increasing run on EVs - that are tailored to endure the heavy weight and torque, last longer, cheaper and increase range by more than 10% today while bringing circularity to the supply chain and data through owning the direct relationship with fleets.  Don’t just take our word for it, some of the largest fleets in the world from Amazon to city cab fleets in Europe are already running on Enso tires and this is just the beginning. 👀 Stay tuned. Much to come! cc Kerem Ozmen Wes Mendenhall Filip Vurdelja Haluk Sabanci Dincer Grant Brown Ishan Meswani Garuth A. Andrew Irwin #climatetech #decarbonization

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Imagine going bankrupt because your customers want to buy *too much* of your product. This happens more often than you’d think in Climate Tech. (A short treatise on how companies are managing cash crunches in the energy transition). https://lnkd.in/gX-gVYP6 #ClimateFinance #CliFi #WorkingCapital #Climate #EnergyFinance #StartupFinance

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It’s so obvious what’s happening. Lines companies and regulators need to get out of the way (and react much faster than they are) to let the flow accelerate. https://lnkd.in/g9k-z-v7

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I recently saw this metric from Carta’s 1Q24 VC Fund Report, which is very concerning. DPI... is nowhere to be found in earlier vintages that probably should start showing DPI. Funding early-stage projects is great, but ultimately, these venture dollars need to exit their investments and pay back their limited partners. That’s where the metric Distributed to Paid-In Capital (DPI) comes in. While managing a fund, we get interim measures during the life of the fund (e.g. IRR, MOIC), but ultimately, “you can’t eat IRR.” If you want to build a lasting venture capital organization, you need to start showing DPI for your fund. Keep in mind that this is traditional VC data from Carta, and is not strictly crypto venture. Crypto venture tends to get liquidity earlier (tokens) and things tend to go parabolic sooner (faster, more unicorns) - but I’d wager that the data here is somewhat similar for Crypto VCs… Not as much DPI as there should be from these earlier vintages. Read the full article, as well as a recap of all the crypto fundraising rounds for August, here: https://lnkd.in/g3eVJ-iF

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Sometimes I just become despondent with how people think about CO2. Although I welcome the good intentions of "leveling the playing field" for CO2 removal, IMO this VERY lucrative newly introduce Bennet & Murkowski bill would suck all the oxygen out of the room for many/most nature-based solutions which are the one class of options that have real affordably scalable potential. Unwittingly, my first reaction to this proposal is it will make the silly things so lucrative that the real things can never happen. Although it has several "issues" upon my first read, first and foremost is the 1000+ year "permanence" - a well-intended and seemingly obvious but misguided goal IMO. Those that follow me have heard it before, but at some point we must get it of our mind that the goal should be to lock up mean, evil carbon away forever in a deep dark vault like gold in Fort Knox, and replace it with the goal of accumulating more and more carbon as it is put to work in enabling all life on Earth. Let me state it clearly again - permanence of a molecule is actually the wrong goal. Not that it works this way (even in the inhaling and exhaling of life), but if all CO2 left its storage every night and returned each morning, it would be no different than if it stayed inside all night. Actually staying put doesn't matter. What matters right now is that we shift the total balance from the atmosphere to the lithosphere and biosphere - the latter meaning all life. I wish I could keep my attention on just helping real carbon removal happen instead of thinking about how I might game such a system, but here we are... I sometimes feel like Don Quixote, but I sleep well knowing that with physics and thermodynamics on my side, my cause is just. But IMO, we may all end up dead if we don't learn to understand this. My bigger near-term worry now is that it may just get harder for real solutions to compete with lucrative incentives for (many, but not all) fantasies. And some of these fantasies will even make the underlying problem worse (e.g. perverse incentives to remove biomass that could actually help life capture even more carbon). Ugh. h/t: David Lawrence for bringing my attention to this new bill.

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Who doesn't love a good top 50 list?! Very excited to launch Congruent Ventures and SVB's inaugural 50 by 2050, focused on identifying the companies with the highest potential to drive carbon reduction over the next 25 years. I'm 100% certain that we've missed some amazing companies. I'm also 100% certain the companies on the list are awesome. Sadly, by our own methodology many or our incredible companies at Congruent didn't make the list (but suppose that is as it should be). Check out the report below. Live / interactive list here: https://lnkd.in/dYgCfEv8 Tim De Chant TechCrunch coverage here: https://lnkd.in/dkUJm_Sn The Congruent/SVB team collaboration was awesome Dan Baldi Eliza Cushman Marianne Wu Joshua Posamentier!

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Manufacturing and the use of traditional fertilizer accounts for 5-7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Founders Nicolas Pinkowski, Joshua McEnaney, Jay Schwalbe and the Nitricity team utilize air, water, and clean energy to make fertilizer that has a meaningful impact on climate change. Nitricity’s breakthrough technology decarbonizes the production, distribution, and application of nitrogen fertilizers. Change Forces invested in Nitricity to help decarbonize an essential industry, create jobs, and deliver an economical and sustainable solution to farmers and communities. Watch Nitricity’s journey to support local communities and promote a more resilient food system, part of “Reinventing Tomorrow,” presented by Change Forces and Pique Action. https://lnkd.in/epPA6G43

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I congratulate Aepnus Technology, a deep-tech startup, for raising $8M to commercialize its National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research work to develop an electrochemical platform to improve circularity and reduce emissions in battery supply chain chemicals, enabling GHG emissions reduction by an expected 3 gigatons by 2050. I congratulate Rhonda Shrader, Executive Director of UC Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship & NSF I-Corps Bay Area. She is an inspiring instructor; I am so fortunate to be in her class during the Summer 24 #Icorps Cohort. I am an Industry Mentor (IM) to Professor Ratnesh Kumar and Professor Shawana Tabassum, PhD who are inventors of plasmonic metamaterial-based gas sensing technology, based on NSF-funded research. It offers an order-of-magnitude lower-cost alternative to techniques like gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and Fourier Transform Infra-Red (FTIR). The technology helps with environmental compliance for GHG emissions in agriculture and manufacturing, Condition Monitoring of gases produced during process control in manufacturing plants, and monitoring of gases in Transformers (HW used in utilities - not the ones for implementing attention 😀). If you're interested in turning your NSF-funded research into a real-world product or service, consider the #Icorps program. It provides intense customer discovery training, where you'll interview 100+ potential customers in just seven weeks. This might sound grueling, but it's an invaluable experience. Remember, in startups, the founder is often the first salesperson. Understanding your customers' needs early on is crucial for success.

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Grid, schmid, indeed! Much rightful rage directed at Centerpoint here in Houston over the past week, and I wonder if its CEO may last the week? But after the big Texas grid freeze failure of 2021, I decided to put in my own solar+battery system so that it never happened again. It sailed through the blackout with ease - wouldn't have even known we lost power except for the notification sent to my phone by my SPAN smart panel. My desktop computer didn't see the slightest hiccup. Now our own outage only lasted ~12 hours, so wasn't able to give every aspect the full stress test, but approach sunset on the first day w 94% in my battery when the power came back on, and am confident based on prior experience in managing these 2x Tesla Energy batteries, that we would have been fine. Wouldn't have cranked the 2 A/C's as hard as usual during the night, but am confident would have made it to sunrise (and next recharge cycle) just fine. In an island of darkness, our home also became refuge for family, and for that I am doubly grateful. The future of energy is not only electric, but more decentralized. The rapidly declining cost of batteries, and a bit more improvement in software, will make such options accessible for many more people. And then, they too, will never have to go through the pain of an extended outage again! https://lnkd.in/d2ssrphd

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Very excited to be digging further into how we can accelerate the scaling of our decarbonization efforts with data insights from our past (cleantech 1.0) with Caleb Cunningham and Deanna Zhang! See our latest post in our series below. We are looking forward to collaborating with anyone else interested in these topics.

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WE DID IT! After 2 years of pushing through the biggest downturn in VC in decades, Matthew Stotts 🌐 and I made it to the finish line with Fund I! We couldn't have done this without One Small Planet (Will Peterffy and Jack Wielebinski 🙏), Regen Network and Regen Foundation (Austin Wade Smith Gregory Landua and Will Szal), and a dozen other family offices and angels who believed that we can build a nature-positive economy utilizing our eye for software and our history as founders from day 1 A shout out goes to all of our founders (only four announced today, but watch this space - there are multitudes!) who trusted us enough to give us a spot on their cap table for this 10-15 year journey. This is the best job in the world, and it's because we get to work with people like you who have weird ideas in the best possible way. Using Bitcoin as anchor base load to decarbonize residential housing in America's most expensive energy market? Make every complex supply chain legible to machines so we can find and eliminate deforestation in commodity supply chains? Build deeply liquid environmental asset markets to price ecosystem services, on a blockchain, that no one needs to know is a blockchain? I'm so excited to get to work on this stuff for the next 10-15 years minimum, and to see what we can accelerate with our tiny fund in the next 5-6 years as we approach 2030 Onward! https://lnkd.in/gy3B-DFe

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📢 Some big news this week that marks another pivotal step in the evolution of carbon markets… The Biden administration, led by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, will be unveiling the first broad US government guidelines on the use of carbon credits as part of decarbonization strategies. It’s a much needed step that will promote high-integrity carbon markets, and boost corporate confidence in using carbon credits. The Bloomberg article's sources suggest the upcoming framework will align with the government’s stance that: “voluntary carbon markets have a role in reaching net zero, as long as they promote high-integrity emissions reductions and channel meaningful amounts of capital into nature-based projects today as well as carbon-removal technologies in the future.” And that is the key. There is no silver bullet for the climate crisis. Whatever the critics may say about carbon credits, more transparency, clarity and official endorsement on their use will serve to unlock billions of much needed corporate dollars for carbon projects. Couple this news with recent initiatives by major tech companies like the Symbiosis Coalition of Google, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce and we’re starting to stride in the right direction. Read more and sign up for the live stream: https://lnkd.in/ddDRA8yd #carbonmarkets #carboncredits #naturalcapital #climateaction #breakingnews

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