But the stakes are too high to be cynical, climate entrepreneurs and investors have said.
“There’s a bigger battle to fight,” said Elisa Jagerson, an investor at Wildcat Venture Partners. “Everything else feels like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”
That was not always so. When Julia Collins presented her climate tech start-up to investors in 2019, she dedicated the first slide of her presentation to a dramatic declaration of the climate emergency. She had founded Planet FWD, a software provider that helps companies manage their climate impact, and Moonshot, a snack food company that uses regenerative ingredients, local suppliers and recycled packaging.
“I had to spend a lot of time on the courts to get people on the learning curve,” she said.
That has changed since climate change and extreme weather events became impossible to escape. “We’re well past the point where we need to prove climate change or that it’s a big market,” said Ms Collins, who is no longer using the dramatic slide in her sales pitches.
Some of the new climate start-ups are already increasing in value, at least on paper, fueled by the flood of money. Josh Felser, an investor at Climatic, a venture capital firm, said the 11 climate companies he and a partner have backed over the past two years are now worth two and a half times what they were at higher valuations because of other investors money invested.
“It’s not because we’re that good,” he said. “That’s because the market is so hot.”
The founders said business is booming because potential customers are facing greater outside pressure to go green, urging them to spend money on things like emissions trackers and carbon offsets. Infogrid, a start-up that provides tools to make buildings run more efficiently and use energy more efficiently, has previously struggled to sell its products to customers, said William Cowell de Gruchy, the company’s CEO.
“Now they’re saying, ‘We have to do this. Our shareholders make us. Our boardroom makes us. The regulators make us that way,” he said.
