🌄 9 startups bets, kicking off our quest to find & invest in the next Tesla! 🌊
Discover more from The Adaptive Economy Newsletter by Atlas Capital
🌄 9 startups bets, kicking off our quest to find & invest in the next Tesla! 🌊
Tesla is the first climate tech company valued at $1 trillion, but Blackrock CEO thinks it won’t be the last.... We too, come bet with us on the next green unicorn.
Last year, Tesla became the first new company in tech’s climate era™ to surpass a $1 trillion market cap. The achievement puts Tesla in the rarefied company of Apple, Microsoft, Saudi Aramco, Amazon, and Alphabet as businesses that are worth $1 trillion.
In fact, Tesla is just the first in a long line of multi-billion or trillion-dollar businesses built to help humanity mitigate or adapt to climate change. And with Atlas, we have a mission for you: to seize this opportunity and share the returns with you, if you accept it!
💸The next 1000 startups will be green tech
“It is my belief that the next 1,000 unicorns — companies that have a market valuation over a billion dollars — won’t be a search engine, won’t be a media company, they’ll be businesses developing green hydrogen, green agriculture, green steel, and green cement,” said Larry Fink, the CEO and Chairman of Blackrock, sees addressing climate change as massive potential for new businesses.
Climate change is a business opportunity, Fink said, because addressing it will require that virtually every segment of the industry will have to be reinvented.
“Getting to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 is going to require a revolution in the production of everything we produce, and a revolution in everything we consume. The process of creating fuel, food, and construction materials, with all the needs that we have as humanity, it all has to be reinvented,” Fink said. “And that’s going to require a large amount of investment, a large amount of ingenuity, and a large amount of innovation.”
When Blackrock CEO says something like this, the world follows. And this is precisely what happened since this talk if you read my last blog post, with $40b invested in 2021, Greentech is just blowing up!
“There will be, you know, Microsoft, Google, Amazon-type companies that come out of this space,” Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder, told the virtual audience of the SOSV climate tech summit last year.
Larry Fink is not alone in his thinking. Earlier this year, Andrew Beebe of Obvious Ventures laid out the case for this next wave of green tech-focused businesses calling it the “climate decade”.
“The decarbonization of the global economy is a transformation on par with the digitization of the economy before it,” Beebe wrote.
So where will these trillion-dollar businesses be built? Well, we got a better picture now as we started to invest in what we think could be some of them!
🌊 Unveiling the first companies joining our Green Tech portfolio
Since the inception of our project, Atlas Society, back in February 2021, we stayed under the radar, researching, writing, interviewing experts, building our team, and actually putting down some money to work to materialize this great vision of building an Adaptive Economy through the Atlas Ecosystem.
And here it is! This first portfolio version (I would say V0.5) of our Adaptive Economy: During the past few quarters, we did invest in several startups under our Atlas syndicate… Atlas city already started to materialize, even before the official closing of our VC fund:
Designing a virtual Carbon Zero Island / City - why? We believe the first step in shaping a carbon zero world is to show that these green tech companies (1) exist and are available out there (2) bring better returns than other investments opportunities (3) are perfectly timed with the local market demand… through their cities.
Hence we designed Pala, a virtual Island where we gather our portfolio companies pushing the boundaries of where we live and how we make it sustainable.
To show that these solutions exist (point 2), on Pala, Atlas Capital will showcase our portfolio company’s products that could potentially enable cities to turn carbon zero. This is how The Adaptive Economy should take shape: with a virtual implementation of solutions combined to serve every aspect of a city, from hosting its population sustainably with Carbon-0 houses, to powering it with Clean Energy, to feeding its people through Regenerative Agritech, and even enabling its citizens to make a living in the age of the 4th industrial revolution through Remote Work.
Hence this first batch of investments we made illustrate our investment strategy:
Now let’s zoom in on a few of our investment decisions, sharing with you why we were excited about these deals…
🥇Some highlights of our portfolio
Market Opportunity
The urban retrofitting market is one of the fastest-growing sustainability technology markets, with the investment growing from $20 billion in 2015 to $70 billion in 2019. 39% of Global Greenhouse Gases (GHG) Emission comes from the Building Sector (28% from operations, 11% from materials & construction). ⅔ of the existing buildings are expected to remain standing until 2060, but they will also require retrofitting soon due to the high carbon footprint they currently have. Offices, the first entry market of Zauben, have also been paying more attention to the well-being and productivity of their employees, and building retrofitting is the method to improve those areas with carbon zero cooling & air cleaning. The urban technology market is ripe with opportunities and the need for innovations if the world is going to become carbon neutral.
Why did we invest in them?
Zauben, based in Chicago, revolutionizes how air cooling can be incorporated into offices & living spaces. Their invention, Model Z, won Time’s The Best Inventions of 2020 by New York Times. Furthermore, like a mobile aircon, the wall is movable, unlike any other living wall. Currently, Zauben has world-renowned customers, such as Google, JLL, CBRE, and Nike. In the future, we can expect Zauben to come up with an even more revolutionary product that will change how houses cooling is being done.
Market Opportunity
Fashion is responsible for 8% of global emissions. Specifically, huge growth in the industry is expected in the ethical fashion market as consumers become more aware of the long pollution trail of the fashion industry. Furthermore, more clothes are being discarded annually (an average American discards 68 pounds of clothes per year). With the encroaching deadline for carbon neutrality and the increasing pressure to reduce waste, the fashion industry is poised for a green revolution.
Why did we invest in them?
A New York-based company, The Canvas Global is a leading authority in the ethical fashion market. They have created different marketplaces around the world as well as an ethical fashion community that helps lower the barriers of entry for independent brands. Since its incorporation, it has united, accelerated, and distributed more than 180 fashion brands. Its mission also aligns with Atlas Capital’s mission as it is recognized by the UN as a sustainable fashion startup leader. In the future, the Canvas Global plans to expand into the EU and SEA region, where a huge amount of fashion manufacturing is currently based, hence we see here a large potential to contribute to decarbonizing the fashion industry.
Market Opportunity
With 30 million retired battery packs by 2030, knowing that 80% of battery capacity is unused when replaced, knowing that the precious metals of any batteries are often worth more than silver or gold… Posh Robotics could become a leader in automating industrial EV batteries waste management while enabling the EV industry to have a circular usage of its most important component: batteries.
Why did we invest in them?
Well, let’s keep this simple: Do you know the story of how Rockefeller got really big? While everybody is betting on EVs (the new gold rush), who will be providing the batteries powering this industry (the pickaxes)? Well when everybody wants EVs, I personally wanna own the batteries production infrastructures.
Co-invest with us
Interested to invest with me & our co-investors? Let’s have an online chat together!