Earthshot Ventures

Check out this excellent interview with Emily Kirsch and Kurt House, CEO and Co-founder of Earthshot Ventures' portfolio company KoBold Metals.

As we close out 2024, I want to celebrate some of the great work in our portfolio this year: 1. KoBold Metals closes over $490m. KoBold has developed a repeatable methodology to discover materials for the energy transition, and has established itself as one of the breakout successes of the era. KoBold continues to develop the copper resource at Mingomba, which contains enough copper to power more than 100 million electric vehicles. 2. Earthshot invested in Etched. Etched designs AI chips optimized for transformer models, which power technologies like ChatGPT. These transformer specific chips use 93% less energy. Without substantial advances in energy efficiency, the growth of AI risks undoing much of the progress we've made on climate in recent years. 3. Earthshot invested in Ceramic. Ceramic builds software to help hyperscalers improve the efficiency and performance of their models, reducing the need for hardware through more efficient architecture. It saves energy through the reduction of bandwidth, memory usage, and the optimization of learning clusters. Ceramic was founded by Anna Patterson, former VP of Engineering at Google and Managing Partner at Google’s AI seed fund. 4. Vaulted Deep raises $32m led by Prelude Ventures. Vaulted sequesters carbon by burying organic waste and has built the lowest cost, scalable, permanent carbon sequestration solution deployed at scale today. This year they signed a $58.3m offtake contract with Frontier, Frontier’s largest purchase to date. 5. Kanin Energy breaks ground on its first project.  Kanin converts waste heat at industrial sites into large-scale, baseload, carbon-free electricity. Kanin announced a partnership with Tallgrass Energy, a division of Blackstone, to build the first large-scale waste heat to power project in the U.S. in a decade. 6. Mitra Chem wins $100m DOE award. Mitra is accelerating the battery R&D lifecycle through machine learning, and they are building one of the first commercial lithium iron phosphate plants in the U.S. General Motors led Mitra’s $60m Series B round earlier in the year, in line with their commitment to build a U.S.-focused battery supply chain. 7. Earthshot backs Klim’s $22m Series A. Klim has built a marketplace that simplifies the transition to regenerative farming through monetizing carbon reductions, creating a scalable solution to decarbonize agricultural supply chains. Over 3,500 farmers use the platform, cultivating over 700,000 hectares, representing over 5% of German farmland. And on a personal note, my wife Caroline and kids (Liam, Avery, and Lilah) remind me every day why I do the work that I do. 🙂 It's impossible not to be an optimist within a community of inspirational founders, engineers, financiers, missionaries, and even the mercenaries singularly focused on solving mankind's greatest challenge. I fully expect some setbacks, but am excited about the problems we'll solve in 2025. May your days be merry and carbon-light!

Congratulations to our portfolio company Vaulted Deep and CEO Julia Reichelstein on your $32m Series A led by Prelude Ventures!

We're happy to share that former Stripe executive, Dan Myers, will be joining the brilliant team at our portfolio company Vibrant Planet as COO. Welcome, Dan!

This climate tech investor and his team have invested in 200+ startups with over $1B in follow-on capital. Here's my EFI (Entrepreneurs for Impact) podcast with him. Episode #178: Mike Jackson, Managing Partner of Earthshot Ventures Earthshot VC is an early-stage venture capital firm backing entrepreneurs making a dent in climate change. Mike is an investor, entrepreneur, board member, and advisor to companies in the clean energy, food & agriculture, buildings, and mobility. He is formerly an Investor in Residence at Elemental Excelerator and Developer in Residence at Generate. 🔗 Links: Earthshot Ventures - https://www.earthshot.vc/ Mike - https://lnkd.in/e6W9Ah8j 🍎 Listen on Apple: https://lnkd.in/epqXpi8w 🟢 Listen on Spotify: https://lnkd.in/e52r_dGS ✔️ Learn about EFI's climate CEO peer groups: https://lnkd.in/ePfQdsp7 Dawn Lippert

Earthshot Ventures invested in Vaulted Deep last year because they have the lowest cost proven technology for high quality permanent CDR that we've seen. Today I'm thrilled to share that Vaulted has signed a $58.3M offtake agreement with the leading CDR buyer, Frontier. This is Frontier's largest offtake to date! While Vaulted only officially became a company last year, they're building off of decades of work. Applying a mature technology originally commercialized in the oilfield space to carbon removal means that Vaulted can reach massive scale in the near term. It also means Vaulted has a CDR approach that's safe, tested, and fully regulated. Congrats to Julia Reichelstein, Omar Abou-Sayed, and the rest of the Vaulted team!