Top 10 Moments from 2024

‍Dear Friends and Colleagues,

This marks my sixteenth year in climate venture capital, and I continue to find inspiration and hope in the ecosystem we have all helped to build. I am excited about the founders entering the climate ecosystem, bringing complimentary skills and insights to the climate fight. I am heartened by the growing momentum of climate startups reaching scale, such as Heirloom, Fervo, and KoBold Metals (more below). Most importantly, I am immensely proud of the team we have built at Earthshot Ventures.

As we close out an extraordinary 2024, I want to take a moment to reflect on the strides we have made together. This year, Earthshot Ventures continued its mission to back visionary entrepreneurs tackling some of the most pressing challenges of our time. We have now invested in 24 portfolio companies across energy, mobility, materials, food systems, and industry. We made three new investments this year including Klim, Etched and Ceramic.ai, and doubled down on a few companies we see as breakout successes.

Here are 10 highlights from 2024

1. KoBold Metals closes more than $490m in funding. KoBold has developed a repeatable methodology to discover materials for the energy transition, and in the last year, KoBold has established itself as one of the breakout successes of this era of climate tech. KoBold continues to develop their large copper resource at Mingomba, which contains enough copper to power more than 100 million electric vehicles (not a typo). Earthshot has continued to support KoBold on their growth path and most recently offered an SPV to Earthshot LPs to share access to the opportunity. The KoBold Zambia team is pictured below.

2. Earthshot invested in Etched, a purpose-built AI chip that consumes 93% less energy. Etched is designing AI chips specifically optimized for transformer AI models, which power technologies like ChatGPT. Why does this matter for climate? By designing chips optimized for transformers, Etched chips use 93% less energy. Data centers worldwide currently consume 1-2% of overall power and all signs point to these numbers growing significantly as demand for AI surges. Without substantial advances in renewable energy and energy efficiency, this trend risks undoing much of the great progress we've made on climate in recent years. Etched has the ability to meaningfully bend this curve for the better.  We’re thrilled to support the standout Etched team including - Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen, Mark Ross, and Ajat Hukkoo. 🚀

3. Earthshot invested in Ceramic.ai: Ceramic.ai is building software to enable hyperscalers to improve the efficiency and performance of their models. The software reduces the need for hardware through more efficient architecture. It is expected to save energy through the reduction of bandwidth and memory usage, and will also allow hyperscalers to optimize learning clusters. The software is currently being tested with six major players. Ceramic.ai was founded by Anna Patterson, former VP of Engineering at Google and Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI seed fund.

4. Vaulted Deep raises $32m led by our friends at Prelude Ventures. Vaulted sequesters carbon by burying organic waste and has built the lowest cost, scalable, permanent carbon sequestration solution that’s ready to be deployed today, not a decade from now. This year they signed a $58.3M offtake contract with Frontier, Frontier’s largest purchase commitment to date. Vaulted is registering their credits on the Isometric Registry, ensuring the most rigorous monitoring and transparency in the industry, and was recently featured on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

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 Infrastructure Partners to build the first large-scale waste heat to power project in the United States in a decade. The project will provide electricity to the University of Dayton and cover 100% of the university’s electricity needs while reducing the University's energy carbon footprint by 71%.

6. Mitra Chem wins $100m U.S. Department of Energy award: Mitra Chem is accelerating the battery R&D lifecycle through machine learning, and they are building one of the first commercial lithium iron phosphate (LFP) plants in the United States. General Motors led Mitra Chem’s $60m Series B round earlier in the year, which was in line with their commitment to build a U.S.-focused battery supply chain. Mitra was proud to have been selected by the DOE for funding to scale up its first commercial manufacturing facility in Muskegon, Michigan.

7. Earthshot backs Klim’s $22m Series A. Klim has created a  SaaS solution and marketplace that simplifies the transition to regenerative practices for farmers through the monetization of carbon reductions, giving food companies a scalable solution to decarbonize their supply chains. Over 3,500 farmers are using the platform, cultivating over 700,000 hectares of land, representing over 5% of German farmland. Clients include Nestlé, Kaufland, and Aryzta. We look forward to supporting Robert Gerlach and the Klim team as they grow into new markets with this raise.

8. Dawn, Ramsay, and I rang the bell at Nasdaq alongside our LPs, Tom Steyer and Laurene Powell Jobs, to kick off NY Climate Week in September. It was such an encouraging reminder of the loooong way climate startups have come since I first developed an interest in the market in my college days.

9. Our data driven sourcing engine continues to perform. In 2024, Earthshot sourced over 1,900 companies, and 11 of our investments have come through proactive outreach supported by our data driven sourcing engine. We continue to think that investing in data is a competitive differentiator for Earthshot Ventures, allowing us to see almost everything that moves in this ecosystem.

10. 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 is impossible not to be an optimist when surrounded by a community of inspirational founders, engineers, financiers, missionaries, and even the mercenaries singularly focused on solving one of mankind's greatest challenges. I am excited about the problems we'll solve in 2025. We'll continue to search for the top founders in climate, and are honored to have had the chance to partner with some of the best.

Thank you for being part of the Earthshot journey. We wish you a joyful holiday season. Here’s to 2025!

Onward,

Mike Jackson
Managing Partner
Earthshot Ventures

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