AlleyCorp / Deep Tech | August Newsletter
AlleyCorp / Deep Tech | August Newsletter
August 2024 | climate + robotics = moving in the right direction
Hello friends,
Don’t fear the prophets of doom - the tech wizards are on the job!1
Another hot summer is here - wildfire season is back - and heat records are being set worldwide. I am literally writing this surrounded by wildfire haze in the northeast. The media tells us climate change is a problem. They are not wrong. Like many of you, we worry about the state of the world and the scope of the challenge. 🔥🌡️
Yet here we are, feeling positive about the future! Why? Because of robotics and deep tech and modern day wizards tackling these challenges, turning sci-fi ideas into sci-fact realities. 🤖 🍃
We dig into all of this below.
Enjoy,
( don’t miss the footnote at the end on The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles Mann )
Three quick things first:
Three quick things before we dig into climate:
Aescape was featured in the New York Times and is hiring a Vice President, Robotics - if you know great folks who might be a fit - reach out
Brannon released his Deep Tech Pitch Playbook series - let him know what you think of his new career as a robo-fluencer
Koop has launched SOC 2 compliance automation - startups often hit contractual requirements to show SOC 2 or ISO 27001 compliance - and Koop’s platform takes care of it for them
Back to climate and deep tech:
Today’s tech wizards are focusing on energy and the climate
Changing the world is hard.
When I joined Google Research in 2012, I was excited to work with a team called RE<C aiming to get renewables cheaper than coal. That team was soon shuttered - turns out costs had to be 10x cheaper to make a difference, and we didn't see how we could help make that happen.
This stuck with me - change is hard, and shiny tech isn’t always enough.
And yet here we are a decade later installing orders of magnitude more solar panels every year. Great people keep running at this problem, and there are glimmers of hope for those following along.
Enter the climate wizards.
A third of our robotics companies are tackling climate change. This is the result of chasing the best businesses and founders in the robotics space. These are great businesses delivering high value creation through sci-fi technology with bright futures ahead.
We are proud to back these founders, and excited to see their businesses grow sustainably and profitably in the face of a world that needs their solutions more each year. One example - Glacier - has been in the news thanks to their investment from and partnership with Amazon:
Four of our companies are directly tackling climate change:
Civ Robotics has deployed at over 100 solar farms where their autonomous surveying robots enable developers to deliver renewable energy faster.
Earth Force delivers precision fuel treatments at landscape scale reducing wildfire risk through healthier forests.
Glacier is transitioning the world to circular manufacturing using AI-powered data and robotics that help recyclers and producers track and recover more value from our waste.
Renovate Robotics automates roofing with a goal to deploy residential solar at scale and speed adoption of renewable energy.
The tech world is paying attention.
Climate is a topic at every conference and event. Wherever we go, we meet folks thinking about this.
Abe moderated a panel at Robotics Invest on The Critical Role of Robotics in Climate Tech earlier this summer. Fellow panelists Duncan Turner of SOSV, Frank Kjerstein of Reblade, and Rebecca Hu of Glacier were inspiring. Our friend Patrick Meier of The Climate Robotics Network summarized the discussion well here.
Brannon joined Helen Greiner of iRobot, Andrew Gollach of SOSV, and Emilie Delecker of ClimateHack at the Climate Robotics Summit 2024 for a panel on Climate Robotics and Pathways to Commercialization.
The high level takeaway from these conversations? A lot is going right, and there is plenty more to do. Panelists and audiences were cautiously optimistic.
Progress comes from many sources.
Most robotics companies have a climate story. Robots drive efficiency which drives reduced kWh per unit of output. Warehouse and delivery automation reduce CO2 per delivered package.
Three more examples from our portfolio illustrate this point - you might not consider these climate companies per se, but they are absolutely part of the solution!
ARIX inspects energy infrastructure pipes for corrosion - preventing pollution and downtime while protecting people from falls at height.
dolaGon is developing autonomous off road utility vehicles - and is seeing strong customer interest from wind and solar farms.
Koop is underwriting the autonomy space - a critical unlock to scaling all of the companies listed above!
Beyond our own companies, we meet so many inspiring founders solving big problems in climate, from Augustus Doricko at Rainmaker (making it rain, literally!) to Casey Handmer at Terraform Industries (turning sunlight and air into natural gas!) to Isaiah Taylor at Valar Atomics (delivering the new atomic age).
If only a fraction of the founders tackling these problems succeed, many of our climate challenges will be reduced. We already see CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP dropping, while growth in renewables and EVs has the IEA predicting CO2 emissions peaking sooner than expected.
Smart thinkers are paying attention.
We’re not the experts here, and many smarter folks have spilled more ink than we have on the topic.
We’ve enjoyed speaking with Amy Feldman about climate, and highly recommend her Current Climate Newsletter. This week Amy writes about the state of EVs with a detour into Amish communities picking up e-bikes, a feature by Rebecca Hu of Glacier, and a broader set of topics including water, wildfires, geoengineering and more. The drumbeat is one of progress.
On a recent walk with our friend Bill Clerico we discussed the shift in focus from mitigation to adaptation. For those who don’t know Bill (and you should!) he is focusing on solving forest fire challenges at Convective Capital. Bill’s take is below:
“I have been thinking a lot about the shift of climate capital from CO2 emission mitigation to resilience & adaptation. Today, overall climate capital is about 90% mitigation, 7% adaptation and 3% both - but I am much more focused on adaptation as we see the effects of climate change on the world not in a distant future but today. Disasters like wildfires, storms, drought and floods are already at all-time highs (the US has 7x more billion-dollar disasters per year now than we did in the 1980s) and they will only accelerate under any climate scenario. The time for investment in resilience & adaptation is now.”
We are in full agreement with Bill and are eager to hear from founders building in this direction as well as capital allocators and stakeholders across industry and government thinking about this. The trends are better than they were - but adaptation is more important than ever.
We know there are other great thinkers out there - send us your favorites and we’ll feature them in upcoming posts.
Changing the world is hard, but we can do it.
Great people are working on the problems. Malthus and the prophets of doom were wrong last time around - because innovators found solutions to serious problems. We are hopeful this will play out again with climate - in large part because we see the sheer amount of human talent aiming at making this true, and because science is a strong-link problem - meaning one or two as yet-unknown innovations could change everything.2
( there are now *two* awesome footnotes for you all the way down )
Monthly book recos
Abe’s pick | Superabundance
The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet
Why I recommend: “a great counterpoint read to doomer fears of the future - Tupy’s book explains how the time-costs of *everything* are coming down, all the time. We might not know how this will happen, but it’s a safe bet that these trends will continue. We are headed for not just abundance, but super abundance!” More at www.superabundance.com.
Brannon’s pick | The Innovators
How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Why I recommend: “I consider this book a must read for anyone researching, building, or investing in deep tech today. I found it to be a relevant, entertaining, and detailed - yet still fast moving - overview of the history of computing. Moreover, I appreciated Isaacson’s thesis that collaboration is what drives technology forward in major leaps, rather than the isolated genius. I agree with this and in general I believe scientific innovation should be even more collaborative!”
Thanks for reading
We appreciate your time, and you’ll hear from us next in September. We’ll be in NYC for Climate Week if you’re around - reach out if you are. Let us know what you think, send in suggestions for topics, and always, always reach out if you’re building in deep tech. Thanks for reading and keep building!
Enjoy,
AlleyCorp / Deep Tech team (Abe & Brannon)
~ 🤖 📈
A postscript on CAPEX financing | A common theme we hear from deep tech founders is a need for CAPEX financing partners. If this is something that you need, we’d love to hear about it. We have a number of friends who can help with this including folks at Cardinal Robotics, Camber Road, J.P. Morgan, Perl Street and Silicon Valley Bank.A footnote on Wizards, Prophets & Malthus | If you haven’t read it - read The Wizard and the Prophet, by Charles Mann. tl;dr: prophets predict doom based on accurate analysis of negative trends - Malthus as a classic example, but prophets mistakenly assume we will not solve the negative trends via technological progress. Whereas the tech wizards Just Do It and solve the problem.
A sidebar to the footnote - don’t give up | Did you know Malthus’ entire family line died off because they bought too fully into the visions of doom?
A footnote on Science being a strong link problem | Read the article if you haven’t. We’ll write more about this in future newsletters - but this means that one or two as-yet unknown science discoveries and related technology innovations can change the world positively! This is how Borlaug unlocked the green revolution. Who is today’s Borlaug? We don’t know yet!