DTN 003: The New Clean Tech Boom

The Big Picture

Defying gravity, 2022 Climate Tech VC funding totals $70.1B, up 89% on 2021

“2022 was an enormous year for Climate Tech VC. The US invested more Climate Tech VC in 2022 than the entire 2006-2011 Clean Tech 1.0 Boom and at the current pace of investment, by the end of 2023, the US will have invested over $100B in VC since then. Europe’s venture funding into Climate Tech more than doubled in 2022, out investing China for the first time and together with a huge rise in India and around the world, grew 89% globally on 2021’s record.” (Holoniq)

Pairs well with: Marble’s 12 climate tech themes for 2023

Meet Lila, an automated scientist that engineers microbial strains for the industrial production of small molecules

“In this work we describe the design and implementation of a computational system, an Automated Scientist we call Lila, which handles all metabolic engineering design and optimization. Lila specifies the design and re-design of microbial strains in a matter of seconds to minutes. Strains specified by Lila are then built and subsequently phenotyped as part of a largely automated in-house pipeline…in total we created hundreds of thousands of microbial strains capable of overproducing 242 molecules. (bioarXiv)

Pairs well with: this great commentary on Lila and automating scientific discovery over at Codon

The 2022 Battery Report

The most read annual report in the battery industry. “Crowd-sourced from top industry and academia experts, this report seeks to provide a comprehensive and accessible overview of the latest battery research, policy and business landscape.” The bottom line: batteries boomed in 2022 despite macro headwinds. (Volta Foundation)

Quantum computing poses ‘existential risk’ to encryption

“Quantum computing poses an existential risk to the classical computer encryption protocols that enable virtually all digital transactions. Over the next several years, widespread data encryption protocols, such as public key cryptography (PKC) standards like RSA, could become vulnerable. In fact, any classically encrypted communication which could be wiretapped is at risk, potentially already exposed to exfiltration, with the intention of harvesting that data once quantum decryption solutions are viable.” (IBM)