Activate Updates: April 2024

This Month's Features

How Does Community Support Innovators?
Introducing Activate’s Science on A Mission Podcast
Dispatch from SF Climate Week

Plus

Activate Fellow wins
Ecosystem news
Job opportunities

Breaking Ground: How Does Community Support Innovators?

By Jill Fuss, Managing Director of the Activate Berkeley Community

Without a community to back them up, founders are much less likely to succeed. This can negatively impact everything from their mental health to technical development. I’ve experienced the community aspect of Activate from two perspectives: first, as a fellow in Cohort 2018 in the Activate Berkeley Community and then as its managing director.

When I was a fellow, Activate had one location, and I was one of only 13 fellows in my cohort. Now, four more geographic communities and several cohorts later, Activate is still known for its supportive network and close-knit feeling. Community is one of the top benefits that Activate Fellows cite.

Learn More

**Introducing Science on a Mission: A Podcast by Activate**

We’re proud to announce the launch of Science on a Mission, dedicated to illuminating the journey of deep-tech innovations and innovators from lab to marketplace. This new podcast aims to demystify the path to commercialization for deep-tech innovation, provide the deep-tech community with the wisdom to navigate the complexities of commercializing breakthrough technologies, and explore the terrain around science entrepreneurship, hard-tech commercialization, and science leadership.=

In our first episode, recorded live at SXSW, Molly Wood, Founder and CEO of Molly Wood Media, talks to Activate CEO Cyrus Wadia, Opera Bioscience Co-Founder Julie Ming Liang (Cohort 2023), and Terra Watts Co-Founder Kaitlyn Suarez (Cohort 2023) about how the urgent need for climate solutions has ignited a surge in innovation.

Listen to episode one

Activate at San Francisco Climate Week

Last week at SF Climate Week, we engaged deeply with the hard-tech community right in our own backyard. It was great to see this event reach peak impact, with thousands of the most impactful scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and others convening around today’s most important topics. Each session not only provided insights but also strengthened our community in advancing climate solutions together. We’re energized by the partnerships and ideas that emerged and are excited to continue driving change.

Thank you to our event participants, partners, and community for making this week not just successful, but inspirational.

Keep Reading

Found Energy (Peter Godart, Cohort 2022) announced the close of its $12M Seed round, which included investments from KOMPAS VC, Munich Re Ventures, Good Growth Capital, the Autodesk Foundation, J-Impact, GiTV, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, and Glenfield Partners LTD. The company will use this funding to advance its aluminum-thermal power system that continuously generates carbon-free industrial heat, hydrogen, and alumina trihydrate on-site from various aluminum feedstocks.

Pulsenics (Essam Elshawi and Mariam Awara, Cohort 2022) is leading the HYER consortium, a three-year Canada-Germany collaborative initiative that will set new benchmarks for determining the most effective ways to dynamically operate electrolyzers and serve Canada’s strategic goal to become a major green hydrogen producer and exporter.

Activate has been chosen as a finalist for the Department of Energy’s Direct Air Capture EPIC Prize, which sponsors incubator teams that provide creative and impactful solutions and programs that support entrepreneurs and innovators in the direct air capture space. With this funding, Activate will layer new, targeted direct air capture programming into the Activate Fellowship to support three to five new direct air capture startups yearly, including direct recruitment of diverse direct air capture founders leveraging generative artificial intelligence and natural language modeling.

IN OUR ECOSYSTEM
Upcoming events, relevant opportunities, and what we're reading.

Upcoming Events

The Industry Growth Forum, hosted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, will take place in Denver from May 1-3. The conference will convene over 200 industry experts, investors, and startups working to advance clean-tech innovation. Use code CP10 to get 10 percent off registration.
The Global Synthetic Biology Conference (SynBioBeta) brings together engineers, investors, innovators, and entrepreneurs across a broad base of industries and company sizes, who are committed to using biology to build a better world. The conference will take place May 6-9 in San Jose, CA.
Activate is excited to be an official partner of CarbonUnbound USA, a leadership summit happening May 21-23 in New York City. Our partnership and the summit will focus on achieving a collective mission: one gigaton of carbon removed from Earth's atmosphere. Tickets are available now.
Activate will be at the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in Houston, TX from May 22-24! If you’ll be at the summit, connect with us at the Technology Showcase Booth #1200. On Thursday, May 23, please join us at our ARPA-E reception, a vibrant gathering for leaders, innovators, and visionaries in the energy community.

Relevant Opportunities

Village Capital, in partnership with Dream.org and with support from Salesforce, has launched Dream Climate Tech Launchpad 2024. This equity-free, milestone-based accelerator program will support ten Black & Latinx-led startups building climate-tech solutions in the following verticals: energy, the built environment, and electric transportation & infrastructure. Applications are open until April 30.
The Biomimicry Institute’s Ray of Hope Accelerator provides $15K in non-dilutive funding and over $50K in in-kind services, including tailored coaching, investor introductions, a four-day nature retreat, and comprehensive training materials. Applications close May 3.
The Urban Future Prize Competition aims to find the brightest climate-tech startups with the most promising solutions to climate change. They will award two winners with $50K cash prizes and bring them into the coveted ACRE Incubator. Applications are open now through May 1.
The NSF Engines program encourages regional teams of innovators and ecosystem builders from industry, higher education, nonprofit, tribal nations, and state and local governments interested in catalyzing and fostering technology translation and development to form regional coalitions and submit proposals aimed at building innovation ecosystems across the United States. Each NSF Engine can receive up to $160M. Letters of intent are due June 18.

Activate Voices

Activate CEO Cyrus Wadia was featured in an article from GreenBiz about ways to improve the corporate-startup handoff. “If we want to move slow [on decarbonization], it's working just fine, but we don’t have time. If we factor in the time horizon, the incentives to move at the pace we need are 100% broken,” he explained. The article also highlighted Activate’s Simple Partnership Agreement (SiPA), which streamlines handoff bottlenecks with startups and corporates.
MIT Technology Review featured Nili Persits (Dottir Labs, Cohort 2023) and her low-cost Raman spectroscopy systems that allow instant chemical analysis.
The DOE announced $28M in funding to 13 projects across nine states to advance zero-process-emission ironmaking and ultra-low life cycle emissions steelmaking, with Limelight Steel (Olivia Dippo and Andy Zhao, Cohort 2022) as one of the awardees.
Fervo Energy (Tim Latimer and Jack Norbeck, Cohort 2018) has been announced as one of six companies supporting the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, and U.S. Navy at seven geothermal installations around the country. Fervo will explore enhanced geothermal systems potential at Naval Air Station Fallon in Nevada.
Thalo Labs (Brendan Hermalyn, Cohort 2021) was featured in an Architectural Digest story about innovations transforming carbon waste. “We’ve created a platform that works with buildings to help reduce the size of emissions coming out of buildings,” said Hermalyn.
URBAN-X penned a feature on Garrett Boudinot and Vycarb (Cohort 2022), describing how the company builds distributive systems that measure, remove, and store CO2 using water.

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