Co-founder of a climatech startup – Entrepreneurs & Business experts

Overview

All great stories start somewhere. Carbon13 is looking for those ready to dedicate the next years to building a climate tech startup that reshapes the baseline scenarios driving climate crisis. There’s no time for false starts. Join the programme, find your dream co-founder in just 8 weeks, define your problem space, and tap into the expertise of 400+ domain specialists, carbon experts, and their entrepreneurs in residence. Show that your team is ready to transform entire industries and secure Carbon13\’s initial investment in just 5 months. Apply here. And learn more about Carbon13 here.

Here you will find an overview of our upcoming Q&As.

Carbon13 builds and backs ventures addressing Earth’s critical life support systems. Initially this means addressing the most urgent problem of our time – climate change.

Carbon13 is the Venture Builder for the Climate Emergency. We are laser-focused on supporting founders solving for the climate, and the climate only. To do that, we ask every new founder on our Venture Builder to aim big, to build a solution with the potential to reduce carbon dioxide (or equivalent greenhouse gases) by 10 million tonnes per year – and all our support is designed to help you reach that figure.

Why participating?

We provide a shortcut to meet a lot of great science professionals to be tech co-founders with whom you can create extraordinary climatetech solutions. Climate doesnt have time for false starts, begin your entrepreneurship journey the right way with us, avoid the dead ends or incremental impacts.

We train you deep carbon knowledge that will enable you to build your startup in a way that climate tech VCs will need to invest.

“One of the unique things that we are doing at Carbon13 is we are not expecting our founders to outsource this knowledge, we are very much training all of our founders, so they have access to the latest tools and techniques, so that they can assess their carbon mitigation potential, understand how to communicate it and of course be transparent in how they are measuring it.”

— Carbon13 Co-Founder and Chief Sustainability Officer Dr. Nicky Dee

Apart from nine in-person days in London/Cambridge, you can do the programme from anywhere in the world. The rest of the programme is delivered remotely.

It is very important to us to make clear that you can also be a successful climatetech founder if you have children, care for elderly relatives, do voluntary work or have other obligations. We cant tackle the climate crisis if we dont involve multiple life circumstances on the entrepreneurial path. Our Venture Builder is desgined on that principle.

“There was people from all over the place. All different walks of life, ages, backgrounds and I think this was one of the great things that Carbon13 was able to bring together for me.”

Natalia Dorfman, CEO and co-founder of Kita from cohort 2 in Cambridge.

From Food to Construction to Energy to New Materials to Carbon Capture

Carbon13 is sector agnostic so founders can explore ideas in any emitting industry. We tailor our support accordingly for science-based, deeptech or hardware ventures – whether it\’s support on go-to-market strategy, IP protection, fundraising or team building, you\’ll be accessing a brains trust of hundreds of experts, peers, and partners.

More than 90 ventures launched through the programme and 46 ventures received our pre-seed investment, a total of £5 Mio since 2021. More than two-thirds of these have already secured follow-on funding. Our ventures are working on technologies with great emission-saving potential, such as carbon negative concrete, methane capture, bioplastics, precision fermentation, quantum computing for materials discovery, green ammonia, green hydrogen, biochar or direct air capture. You can view our portfolio of ventures at www.carbonthirteen.com/our-portfolio.

Working on a climate tech idea already?

The VC funding route is currently the faster and often surer route for launching complex projects with a high decarbonisation impact, which is why Carbon13 has been designed to give your venture the best possible entry point into this route. Our support is tailored to science-based startups with the ambition to reduce CO2e emissions by 10 million tonnes per year. If you do not have an idea, you will either be supported to find an idea to develop which can significantly reduce emissions, or join a cofounder/team with strong insights into an emitting industry and together execute the implementation of their validated customer pain points.

How does Carbon13 work?

On Carbon13 you are building a climate tech startup as part of a cohort of 80 founders. Our programme is designed to amplify the work you\’re doing, because the planet doesn\’t have time to waste on theory or incremental ideas. This is what the three phases look like in which the programme is divided.

1. Phase 1: Teaming & Ideation You will meet many inspiring people and finally decide on one or more co-founders to form a team. It is up to you whether you put the idea or the personal connection first.
2. Phase 2: Validation Together with our Domain Experts and your personal Entrepreneur in Residence your team will intensely work on: Team strengthening | Carbon intelligence | Rapid iterations of concepts | Business model forming | Prototype testing | Intellectual property | Customer development | Stakeholder development | Behaviour change | Governance | Venture incorporation
3. Phase 3: Acceleration Your team will use phase 3 to focus on market, product, business model and strategy to prepare the venture for further seed-stage investment. We also help you look at scaling strategies, managing growth pains and developing a funding strategy. We guarantee you many conversations with relevant investors from our network who can’t wait to get to know your venture.

Learn More

We are running a series of webinars available to everyone who would like to learn more about Carbon13 and how to build startups with breakthrough solutions for the climate. Our next one can be found here.

Carbon13 in numbers:

• £14 million investment across 101 ventures since 2021
• £40 million – Carbon13 companies have gone on to raise up-rounds totalling more than £40 million.
• 500 million tonnes – Carbon13’s portfolio is collectively working towards a decarbonisation potential at scale of 500 million tonnes per year.
• +10% of the Carbon13 portfolio is Earthshot nominated, including Kita, Samudra Oceans, Forge Minerals, and Nium
• 40% of our participants hold a PhD
• 90% of each cohort forms a cofounding team within Phase 1