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Why Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy and other investors are looking for college founders

TechBrunchBy TechBrunchAugust 3, 20248 Mins Read
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The humble garage is so ingrained in Silicon Valley lore that it's almost a cliché, but that's exactly how Caleb Boyd and Kevin Bush started Molten Industries: in the garage of a Stanford professor's on-campus home, and Kevin Bush rented an apartment.

It had everything they needed: space and, most importantly, power. They hoped to essentially break the backbone of methane, separating hydrogen from carbon without emitting atmosphere-heating carbon dioxide.

“We call it a garage, but it was really just a carport. We plugged in his EV charger, heated the methane pyrolysis reactor up to about 1,000 degrees Celsius, and it started breaking down the methane,” Boyd told TechCrunch.

The professor who lived there was “very kind,” Boyd said. “He was always coming over to visit us and helping us with things and giving us advice.”

While garages are still great places to do fundamental research, it's the next step that becomes problematic: Climate tech companies often face a “valley of death” between lab experiments and the companies they invest in.

Founders have typically had to solve that problem themselves, but increasingly investors are stepping in earlier.

While Boyd and Bush were still in the garage, they were visited by Ashley Grosh, vice president of Breakthrough Energy, a climate tech organization founded by Bill Gates that includes a for-profit venture capital arm and various nonprofit programs. Grosh was representing a program called Breakthrough Energy Discovery, a new division focused on early-stage companies, the company told TechCrunch.

Discovery is an extension of Breakthrough's fellows program, which has been running since 2021. Discovery seeks out promising entrepreneurs who have just graduated or completed a postdoc and offers them grants of up to $500,000, Grosch said. The organization also creates digital resources on common issues and pays for fellows to attend various conferences and meetings.

To date, the Breakthrough Energy Fellows program has supported 42 companies across the full spectrum of climate technology, from cement and hydrogen to agriculture and fusion power. These startups have collectively raised $250 million.

Grosch has been overseeing the program since 2020. “The hypothesis that we've had going into this is that while there is government funding and there are programs like ARPA-E, they're not really in a position to pick winners. They can do the scientific research, but they're not going to actually go out and pick winners and bet on companies,” Grosch told TechCrunch.

Venture capitalists have historically been hesitant to invest in companies they deem too early. “We know what happened with Cleantech 1.0,” she said, referring to the first wave of climate-related investing that peaked about 15 years ago. “People were a little too early. Now they've stepped back and understand where the strike zone is for ventures. But I think what we're seeing is that there's still a lot of scientific discovery to be done.”

For investors who can stomach the early stages, the benefits are clear: they get early access to tomorrow's founders. These investments tend to be higher risk, with lower valuations and smaller checks, so the potential returns can be big.

“The term we use internally on this is 'proto-company,'” Joanna Wolfson, managing partner at Azolla Ventures, told TechCrunch. “It's not a company yet, but if you look closely, you can see it has the potential to be a company.”

Moreover, in climate tech, moving early in the pipeline isn’t just about profit: At Azolla Ventures in particular, finding overlooked companies and opportunities is part of the organization’s mission.

“As time goes on, and as we continue to miss our emissions targets, the crisis deepens,” Wolfson said, “so it becomes even more important that we leave nothing behind.”

Funding basic research: sooner rather than later

For Breakthrough Energy, the application process alone helped identify promising areas of fundamental research that still needed funding.

“We started looking at some of the ideas further upstream and said, 'This is interesting. I'm not yet at the stage of becoming a fellow, but this research could really be useful,'” Grosch said. “We started putting together a list of those applications and started funding some of them as research grants.”

Soon, Grosch and her team realized they needed to get more systematic: Instead of issuing the usual requests for proposals, Breakthrough Energy Discoveries began hosting workshops for researchers with a range of experience, from graduate students to Nobel Prize winners, to identify the most promising and impactful opportunities.

“From there, we'll start launching some research projects,” Grosch said.

Azolla Ventures takes a slightly different approach, hiring what they call “Tech Scout Fellows.”

“We provide funding to graduate students, find interesting projects, and ask them to tell us what they're excited about,” Wolfson says, “because graduate students are the ones that are going to be the most engaged.”

The program is just getting started: So far, Azolla is working with graduate students at Georgia Tech, a research powerhouse that the company felt was being overlooked by venture capitalists.

“If I had to guess how active the venture community is there, I would guess it's less than MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley, unfortunately just because of geography. Georgia Tech is an example of a place where we're experimenting and saying there's an opportunity that's probably being underestimated.”

Even among the usual academic suspects, promising research sometimes gets overlooked or opportunities slip through the cracks. That's why the Collaborative Fund is donating $15 million to Harvard University's Wyss Institute to start a lab to study sustainable materials. Partner Sophie Bakalar says the goal is to identify promising projects and scientists and polish them to a level where they can get funding.

From the lab to the real world: How founders benefit

The Collaborative has been given first access to projects ranging from PFAS detection to tackling air quality issues, where Bakalar, who is also currently a visiting scholar at the Wyss Institute, has a front-row seat. Along the way, Bakalar and the Collaborative are helping founders navigate the valley of death between lab projects and investable startups. Bakalar said he expects the first projects to emerge from the lab within the next two to three months.

Those resources could be useful to the types of founders climate tech investors need, many of whom have spent years racking their brains in labs, and even if they've learned the business side of things through classes, it's a very different experience from running a startup.

“We're still based at the university,” says Mattia Saccoccio, co-founder and CTO of Nitrovolt, which makes sustainable ammonia for fertilizer. “Sometimes we miss the interaction with other companies, companies that are working on climate solutions and deep tech like we are.”

To combat that sense of isolation, Breakthrough Energy divides its fellows into groups and encourages them to stay in touch during and after their tenure, including through a growing alumni network. “We meet regularly with the other founders,” Saccoccio says. “I've found that to be one of the most valuable parts of the program.”

The founders also said they found particularly helpful their access to Breakthrough Energy's business fellows, a mix of people that venture capital firms might consider advisors and operating partners.

“If you need help with intellectual property, you can get help there. If you want to get into the ammonia industry, there are people there who have worked in the industry and can help pave the way,” said Suzanne Zamany Andersen, co-founder and CEO of Nitrovolt.

For Boyd, co-founder of Molten Industries, the business fellows were crucial to the company's development. The company's process produces carbon in addition to hydrogen. Initially, “we thought we'd just bury it in the ground, or in concrete or something,” he says. But as the startup began raising Series A funding, it began looking at other uses, eventually settling on making graphite for lithium-ion batteries.

“The entire Breakthrough Fellows team was incredibly supportive throughout that time and really helped us think through it and the ramifications, pros and cons, but also stay calm,” Boyd said. “As a founder, you want your investor to be a partner that's not going to panic or take control, but will work with you. The Breakthrough Energy Fellows team has been really good about that.”

Ted McElveen, co-founder and CEO of Verne, a company developing new ways to store hydrogen, agreed: “This method helps us go from zero to one – from nothing – to a point where we can say to investors, 'Okay, we've done it. It's real.'”

Crossing the gap from idea to reality is only the first of many challenges that climate tech startups must overcome, and while not all of them will be successful, the odds of success are certainly increasing as investors and their affiliates step in to help fill the gap.



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