Giant Leap's carbon revenue multiple for climate tech
Small Steps Vol 52: A tool for assessing climate potential 🌳 ; the expertise to unlock deep tech impact 🧬 ; and a robotic 5-course meal 🎛️ .
Kick start
🌳 After investing in climate tech businesses since 2016, we analysed Giant Leap’s data and found that on average, our climate tech portfolio directly avoids 1kg of CO2-e emissions for every $1 of revenue generated.
🌏 We see the potential for these companies to reach $100m in revenue, which would mean 100k tonnes of CO2-e emissions avoided per company per year, equivalent to 22k cars off the road or 1.7 million trees planted. And this isn’t even counting their indirect impact generating systematic change in their industries, which could be a substantial multiplier.
🧮 Check out the full analysis on Giant Leap’s carbon revenue multiple and its implications for addressing the climate crisis here.
What we’re thinking about
🧬 Deep tech, or ventures providing solutions to substantial scientific and engineering challenges, is fertile ground for exceptional impact opportunities. Cantos, a US-based impact VC, released their evidence, reporting their frontier investments into hard sciences like biotech and healthtech are generating the best returns across their portfolio at 4.8x invested capital. This includes companies like Twelve, which raised a $57m Series A last year to scale technology that turns CO2 emissions into useful reusable materials, and CATALOG, which raised $35m to scale its DNA-computing platform that can process massive amounts of data sustainably to accelerate health research.
🔬 Cantos’ returns are directly linked to one of the challenges of deep tech investing: venture investors typically underprice or overlook the opportunities because they don’t have the domain expertise to properly assess the technical risk. Promisingly, there are signals that domain expertise is building in Australia, with players like Main Sequence recently backing a UNSW biotech accelerator and Tech23 supporting some outstanding Australian deeptech ventures in genomics, fusion power, and pest detection. After recent successes in the healthcare space, Stephen Diggle also announced the launch of a 1b biotech fund for opportunities in Australia and the UK.
🪙 These domain experts have a unique role to play in building this impactful segment as their due diligence credibility unlocks capital from the broader market. Take the recent example of Baymatob, a medical device company addressing preventable pregnancy complications raising its Series A led by domain experts in the Australian Unity Future Of Health Fund with co-investors such as The Alberts, a generalist impact family office. Meanwhile, Venture Crowd, a generalist crowdfunding platform, launched a healthtech fund in partnership with LuminaX HealthTech Accelerator and Uniseed who can filter for the most technically viable opportunities.
New paths
🧠 Seer is on the hunt for a Patient Support Officer
📮 Sendle is on the lookout for a Product Engineer
🐛 Goterra is seeking a Waste Operations Assistant
💡 Amber is recruiting for a Data Engineer / Analyst
🧾 Future Super is on the lookout for a Senior Financial Accountant
🔥 Check out our Giant Leap Fund jobs board for over 100+ available positions. There’s even more jobs at ethical companies on the global B-Work job board.
Giant leaps
🧠 Seer has joined the Mayo Clinic’s Accelerate program.
🌳 Airtree has featured Perx founder Scott Taylor on their blog.
♻️ Evrnu has released new products with renewable lyocell fibres, made purely from recycled fabric.
🐛 Goterra Founder, Olympia, featured on the AgTech… So What podcast delving into where the sector is heading from here.
👩 HEX has joined the women-led SBE global tech accelerator.
🎙️ Our Partner, Rachel, featured on the Connect To Capital podcast, explaining the questions she always asks founders.
❓ Our Associate, Charlie, did a Q&A with Climate Salad ahead of the Melbourne Climate Tech Showcase this week.
📰 Our Partner, Adam, had his view on the budget aired in The Australian, SmartCompany and StartUp Daily.
🐸 Giant Leap was also mentioned in the AFR as a firm helping solve the issue of bias in venture capital.
For the road
🗺️ A diversity roadmap for Australian investors. This powerful report will hopefully serve as a blueprint for greater inclusion in diversity within funding firms. Check out our partner Adam Milgrom’s summary here.
🤹🏽 Can we bridge the biggest skill gap in history? This post on Square Peg’s blog describes the immense edtech challenge: Despite increasing funds from both government and companies, learning outcomes remain static while the amount we need to learn to keep up with technological change grows.
🪞 Reflections from 20+ Australian healthtech investments. Ben Armstrong of Archangel Ventures is optimistic about increasing capital availability, but realistic about resistance to change, regulations and Australia’s relatively small local market.
💊 The emerging science of microdosing. A review of psychedelics studies since 1955 reports a strong evidence base for their potential to improve mood and mediorate pain. This bodes well for startups like Psylo, an Australian deeptech company developing psilocybin for mental health applications who are gearing up for clinical studies to take the next step to market.
🌲 Find a climate tech VC. Check out this list of all global VCs interested in climate tech (and our complementary database of impact VCs if you’re after those with a broader scope).
👩💻 More women in boardrooms means more action on climate. That’s the finding from a global study by investment research and asset manager Arabesque. It found the most diverse 20% of the world's 1,000 biggest companies were more aligned with a goal of capping global warming at 1.5C. Conversely, the least diverse boards were identified as having the weakest climate strategies.
🚩 Rich lister Terry Snow has launched a “fellowship for social change” program. It’s backing founders that have “lived” the problems they are solving by allocating 8 companies a share of a $1 million pool of funds.
📈 Anyone can be an impact investor. Fintech Bloom has launched its impact investing app, allowing anyone to invest up to $500 (without brokerage fees) into green bonds, stocks, indexes and companies (check out our Associate, Charlie’s review of the business opportunity here).
🎛️ And finally, the hands free five-course experience