Climate - YC connection in a nutshell
ClimateTech is one of those categories where you always see the boldest companies in YC, for eg. hydrogen-powered commercial aircraft or wind-powered maritime freight.
ClimateTech had its best showing in the YC W22 batch with 7%, but since then, it hasn’t been able to breach the 5% mark, as the sector heats up in 2023, it is expected to make a significant portion of YC batches.
As the EVs pick up in developed and some developing countries, some of the battery-focused startups coming out of YC might be the biggest winners of this decade.
Founders - Penelope Jones & Jin Pan
Byterat is a data platform for battery engineers that lets them manage all their battery testing data in one place. We directly integrate with lab hardware, pull data into one dashboard, and have built-in predictive analyses, including degradation forecasting.
Founders - Abdullah Al-Zandani & Max Kazakov
Coperniq is the first digital platform for solar construction and maintenance phases. They replace hacky workarounds in salesforce, paper, and excel with an industry-specific application for the underserved energy workforce.
Main benefits of Coperniq to customers:
Cost-cutting center: Our platform cuts up to 25% of soft costs, allowing contractors to deploy more projects faster, with fewer human resources
Recurring revenue center: Through hardware integrations, we increase service capacity, simplify maintenance, and maximize their customer lifetime (25 years) value.
Founders - Bailey Da Costa, Joseph Oorebeek & Arpan Rau
The shipping industry uses more than 300 million tons of fossil fuels every year. Fuel represents roughly half the cost of operating a modern cargo ship, in addition to causing about 3% of total global greenhouse emissions and 60,000 pollution-related deaths per year. Contemporary steamship lines have no viable plan to decarbonize.
In the last twenty years, rising fuel costs and weather forecasting advances have made wind-powered vessels once again the most economical way to move maritime freight. OutSail Shipping will operate a shipping line with built-in-house vessels based on modern, rigid lifting surfaces and battery-electric technology.
Founder - Jack O'Grady
Keeling Labs helps grid-scale battery operators adapt to constant changes in the grid with energy management software that automatically adjusts its behavior to maximize revenue.
Founders - Bob Criner & Stuart Johnstone
Stralis Aircraft are on a mission to be the world’s leading emission-free aircraft company. We design high-performance, low-operating-cost hydrogen electric aircraft that can be built at scale.
Their launch product is a 15-seat hydrogen electric retrofit of the Beech 1900D aircraft that can fly 800 km and enters service in 2026. Their flagship product, the SA-1 clean-sheet aircraft, will enter service in 2030, carrying 50 passengers 3,000 km with a cost per seat less than a Boeing 737.
Stralis Aircraft’s first product
Founders - Andrew Hoskins & Thomas Stephens
Upfront helps merchants that sell clean energy products by turning billions of dollars of rebates into dramatically lower prices at checkout. Instead of filling out paperwork and waiting 6 months for a check, our software instantly applies rebates and manages the settlement in the background.
Founders - Tomás Campos, Domingo García-Huidobro & Pedro Saratscheff
Ruuf offers no-money-down installations that generate free money for homeowners from day one. The company is digitalizing the whole process of going solar. Instead of using traditional forms and leaving them up to customers to fill them, Ruuf uses technology to take all that burden off our customers' plates. Ruuf only asks for an address and offers free instant quotes.
Founders - Saba Fazeli & Brice Klein
At Momentum Foods they are adding meat back into plant-based meat to finally make it more affordable and indistinguishable from actual meat.
Founders - Chris Mui
Electric Air combines modern heat pump technology with air quality management to bring homeowners the best heating and cooling experience while saving them money. They also streamline the purchase, finance, and installation process with a direct-to-consumer online sales funnel.