Six new ventures join Carbon13’s net zero launchpad

Carbon13 has announced new investments into six ventures through its accelerator, the Venture Launchpad.

Each venture receives investment of £120,000, and four of the six teams have at least one female founder.

The ventures are:

- Eslando is a pioneering startup tackling textile waste within the fashion industry. Their innovative solution leverages digital product passports (DPPs) and AI-powered sorting to empower fashion brands and waste management companies to efficiently recover materials at scale.

- Carbon Cell is on a mission to make polystyrene trash a thing of the past, with a patent pending, non-toxic, compostable foam material made from carbon-negative biochar and natural binders.

- Future By Insects combines microalgae and insect production to create a world-first carbon net-negative insect protein for animal feed, tackling the industry’s annual 2.5bn CO2e global emissions and pushing to a greener future.

- Fermtech are a climate biotech company from Oxford meeting the demand for affordable and sustainable protein ingredients. Their novel system converts side streams from the food industry, creating nutritious and flavourful products.

- Anzen Climate Wall is a novel ductless indoor climate control system that performs space heating, cooling, and heat recovery ventilation within a single unit. Their decentralised wall-mounted unit reduces energy bills and improves indoor air quality.

- Remy (formerly Taste Don’t Waste) leverages AI and automation to support busy households in reducing their food waste by 70%, and drastically improves corporate partners’ Scope 3 emissions reporting, commercial strategies, and waste mitigation efforts.

The Venture Launchpad runs in partnership with Barclays Eagle Labs who “provide invaluable support to our ventures”.

All the ventures have an impact goal for greenhouse gas emissions as standard - abatement being the cornerstone of the Carbon13 mission. Emissions reductions are crucial, but these six ventures showcase the importance of looking beyond one single metric of impact.

They tackle other planetary issues which are not captured in a standard life cycle assessment, such as microplastics. A simple target doesn’t illuminate the whole story.

Dr Nicky Dee, CEO and co-founder of Carbon13, said: “All our ventures contribute to net zero, but tracking emissions tells just part of the story. We can see other key benefits such as health from improving air quality and avoiding ecotoxicity and microplastics when discarded. Other companies will prompt new economic pathways as they disrupt the ‘normal’ way of doing things.”