Hi ZCC friends,
As we close one more chapter of our journey and look forward to the year ahead, we wanted to take stock and share some updates from our fund and from our portfolio companies.
2024: Our best bits
Announcing the close of our £20m fund to invest in pre-seed and seed deeptech climate companies across Europe.
NINE new investments - we welcomed new companies to our portfolio with a wide range of technologies, geographies and stages; united by a shared mission to decimate climate emissions in the biggest problem areas through deeptech innovation. Welcome to:
🔥 Aed Energy (UK, pre-seed) - low-cost thermal storage for flexible grids
🏗️ Cambridge Electric Cement (UK, seed) - recycling cement in electric arc furnaces
🏭 Exergy3 (UK, pre-seed) - decarbonised high-temperature industrial heat
🎇 Kairos Carbon (UK, pre-seed) - capturing CO2 from sludgy waste biomass
✈️ TBA (Germany, pre-seed) - e-fuels for less energy
🌊 Stealth (UK, pre-seed) - next generation tidal power generation
Coming soon - announcements on three more new companies.
Portfolio successes - we celebrated many follow-on rounds this year as well as other milestones including key hires, grants and awards won, and scaling production. Some of the highlights:
🔋 Echion (Fund 1) - closing nearly £40M in their series B, and unveiling a new 2,000 tonnes/year production facility.
🔋 Anaphite - closing over £10M in their Series A led by World Fund.
⚡️ Ionate made and independently tested their first full-scale 500kVA hybrid transformers, and now have two pilot projects going into the ground.
🌱 NetZeroNitrogen conducted their first field trials of their biofertiliser in the Philippines, demonstrating an average 30% yield improvement.
🧪⚡️ Two more series As closed - announcements coming soon.
Three companies featured on the Cleantech Group’s 50ToWatch list.
Our first ZCC portfolio day where we bought together all our founders to learn from each other and invited experts about playbooks for scaling up.
Best.Team.Ever - As a team of five we’re really reaping the benefits of our collective expertise and perspectives. We feel so lucky we get to work together, debating theories of change, figuring out technologies, going deep on tech DD topics together, and trying out new restaurants!
Moving forward the conversation - we went to many conferences this year, and got to share our perspectives on stages from Hello Tomorrow to Energy Tech Summit to Carbon Unbound. We published deep dives on subjects ranging from grid tech to wastewater valorisation to steel production. We shared perspectives on everything from the right ingredients for a TEA to advisor agreements to university spin-out terms. And, we used our platform to speak out about gender inequality in VC and the challenges of neurodiversity in investing.
🔮 2025 Forecast: Partly cloudy with a strong chance of breakthroughs
There’s plenty of change on the way this year, and there’s sure to be a few more surprises along the way as well. As we look to 2025, we’re excited about:
💸 Making more investments in frontier technologies: we’re planning to make 4-5 more initial investments from our current fund. We’re keen to hear more about big ideas attacking the emissions problems from enteric methane, fertiliser application, shipping, steel and refrigerants. Some of the solution spaces we’re intrigued by include geothermal energy, industrial transformation, and non-petro carbon supply chains. There’s a lot still to solve!
🙌 Continuing to support our portfolio companies in scaling their world-changing tech: our companies are all growing and we’re expecting many follow-on rounds in the next twelve months - including at least two Series A rounds and six seed rounds. We’ll be doing everything we can to support our companies to secure the best partners for the next stage of their journeys, including making follow-on investments ourselves. Get in touch if you are keen to learn more about any of our portcos.
📈What’s next for ZCC? Watch this space - we’ll be sharing more about our plans when we can.
Thanks for being part of our journey to a zero carbon future. Please do follow us to get updates though the year. If you have questions, ideas, or just want to nerd out about a research topic, you know where to find us.
Until next time,
Team ZCC - Pippa, Alex, Sarah, Chloe, and Max 🚀 🌍
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