Planes, cane, and water-mobiles: Investible backs eight startups in $100 million Climate Tech funding round

Early-stage investment capital firm Investible has announced the first eight sustainable startups to receive investment from its $100 million Climate Tech Fund.

First announced in 2021, the early-stage venture capital fund, with offices in Sydney and Singapore, aims to invest in startups which are “creating high-growth technology enabled companies with a positive climate impact.”

While this is the third fund launched by Investible, it is the first one that is focused on a specified sector. According to Investible, it’s looking to invest in a total of 50 early-stage tech companies that will contribute to mitigating the impact of climate change.

“We have already reviewed over 1,500 pitches, in a sector which has seen $19b deployed in the first half of 2022, globally. As climate change is a global challenge, so too will be the solutions,” Patrick Sieb, Investible’s Co-Head of Climate Tech, said in a statement.

In a blog post, Investible also revealed that the Climate Tech Fund currently has over $30 million in commitments. The firm also plans to continue to raise capital into 2023. It was also recently certified by the Responsible Investment Association (RIAA).

While Investible announced investments in Digital Harvest and Spotship back in June, it has now revealed six more businesses it is investing in.

Meet the Investible startups

Kite Magnetics develops new technology to bring EV planes to life. The company is working with a new magnetic material construction with patented nanocrystalline. The idea is for this to allow for smaller and lighter electric motors, “enabling small to medium-sized aircraft to fly further, carry more and emit less.”

CIM is an award-winning analytics platform that gathers data points from buildings that are then run through more than 8,000 algorithms to optimise and make them more sustainable.

These data come from a range of sources, including Building Management Systems, electricity feeds, lifts, people counters, IoT sensors and more. Importantly, it can do this will little to no hardware installation.

New Zealand-based ZeroJet is helping to decarbonise the boating industry with its electric jet propulsion system. Originally used for electric jetboards, the system is now targeting small boats that have traditionally run on petrol.

In addition to being sustainable, the electric jet propulsion system is said to be quieter, more efficient and safer.

Digital Harvest is an AgTech platform that provides data-driven solutions to the agriculture industry. According to Investible, it “provides accurate harvesting forecasts, increasing yield and reducing excess usage of water and fertilisers, particularly for multi-year crops like sugarcane.”

It has achieved this through a ‘digital twin’ model that farmers can use to optimise multi-year harvest cycles. It combines satellite imagery, local weather information and data from each farmer to develop a machine learning and biophysical model that can predict yield.

Xylo Systems is a female-founded cloud-based platform to connect, track and manage wildlife conservation projects. It offers users a secure cloud environment to aggregate and analyse biodiversity data in the system. It also utilises AI forecasting tools to tracks changes to an ecosystem as well as offers report curation.

Emmi is a carbon risk advisory startup for companies looking to understand their financial emissions.