💫 10 Female-Founded Startups to Follow in 2024
Vol 88
This bi-weekly newsletter aims to separate the signal from the noise for making money in sustainable transportation: Electrification, mode shift, active and public transit, and mobility aggregation, across both people and goods movement.
🌱STARTUP WATCH: Sustainable mobility startups (pre-seed or seed) to keep an eye on
Alpen Air (Germany): Carbon-neutral leisure airline
Autonomy Data Services (California, USA): The newest EV subscription startup from serial founder Scott Painter, formed from the ashes of Autonomy
Calcarea (California, USA): Maritime decarbonization via point source carbon capture
Dreamfly Innovations (India): Battery solutions for aviation
EVStar (Kansas, USA): EV charger warranty programs
LIVAQ (Michigan, USA): Manufacturer of electric all-terrain vehicles
Pirl (Maryland, USA): Manufacturer of next-generation EV chargers
Roboteos (California, USA): Dual-axis solar panels for RVs and camper vans
TerraDX Technologies (Canada): AI for finding new mineral deposits for EV batteries and other applications
💰FUNDING: Capital raises from startups previously featured in Startup Watch
BasiGo (Vol 32) secured a $10M debt facility from U.S. International Development Finance Corp
Climatize (Vol 55) raised a $1.8M pre-seed round from Climate Capital, Myriad Ventures, and others
Clearly (Vol 61) raised a $4.3M seed round from Pace Ventures, Nine Realms, Mobilion, Next Gear, and others
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📰QUICK HITS: Notable news from the last two weeks
👩🏽⚖️Government, Policies & Cities
💰 Boston just launched its e-bike voucher program. That’s another city following Denver’s lead.
🌴 Los Angeles plans a 'no car games' for the 2028 Olympic. The 1984 Olympics were largely no car as well, and that was before the LA metro system.
📈 In Q2 of this year, plug-ins (EVs and plug-in hybrids) hit over 25% of new car sales in California while plug-ins reached over 50% of Chinese new car sales in July. EVs are still growing as a market, just not evenly or to the benefit of every automaker.
⏪ US Presidential Candidate Donald Trump is now somewhat supportive of EVs. Elon Musk’s endorsement apparently changed his mind.
🌊 The International Seabed Authority has announced a new leader, dramatically decreasing the likelihood of seabed mining in the short term. The obscure agency’s former leader was excited about mining the ocean floor for metals used in EV batteries.
🤕 Pax Jolie-Pitt, son of Brad and Angelina, was released from the hospital following injuries from an e-bike crash. Pax crashed his bike into a stopped vehicle.
🔬Markets & Research
🛣️ According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, a little under a quarter of urbanized land in the US is dedicated to roadways. Per the researchers, “the country likely has too much land dedicated to urban roads.”
🤖 Researchers think that “shared electric automated mobility” (aka robotaxis) will not scale without an external “shock” like policy or an energy crisis. Until then, private car ownership is predicted to dominate.
🏭 Corporates & Later Stage
✈️ The UK’s Advertising Standards Agency banned a Virgin Airlines ad touting its use of sustainable aviation fuel. The agency objected to the phrase "100% sustainable aviation fuel" given many open issues around quantifying SAF’s environmental benefit.
⚡️Baltimore’s Gas & Electric utility appears to be the first US utility to pay Ford F-150 Lightning drivers to power their homes. We have ~10x as many batteries in EVs as in stationary storage, so it’s time to figure out how to get EVs to help with grid stability.
🥊 The United Auto Workers has filed charges against Elon Musk and Donald Trump, claiming worker intimidation. The lawsuit is based on Musk’s interview with Trump on X (Twitter).
🔌 India’s Exicom purchased the assets of Tritium, the bankrupt EV charger manufacturer. The deal combines Exicom’s strength in Asia with Tritium’s strength in Australia and the US.
🔋 ChargePoint has launched the Omni Port, a charger that automatically deploys the correct plug based on the car’s make and model. A welcome update, but so much more needs to be done to improve the public charging system.
🚲 Ford dipped a toe into e-bikes via a partnership with N+. Many carmakers have dabbled in e-bikes, but few have seen long-term success.
😡 In California, owners of Toyota fuel cell vehicles have launched a class action suit. Owners claim Toyota misled them about the fueling infrastructure, largely funded by the California Energy Commission.
🇲🇽 SAIC, one of China’s largest automakers, announced plans to build an EV factory in Mexico. China’s EVs are coming to the US in short order…
🐣 Startups & Early Stage
↘️ Rivian and Lucid both announced large quarterly losses. Both have a financial savior, for now, in the form of VW and the Saudi Public Investment Fund, respectively.
🚲 CargoB (Startup Watch Vol 81) launched the first e-cargo bike-sharing operation in the US. Just as Citibike is a great way to get people around a city, e-cargo bike sharing is a great way to get kids and groceries around a city.
🛵 Ola Electric Mobility, the Indian maker of e-scooters, raised $733 million in its IPO and then saw shares soar around 20%. A $4.8B valuation for a micromobility manufacturer isn’t too shabby.
🚁 Archer has announced its air taxi flight network for Los Angeles. Whether air taxis are all that sustainable is an open question; many of the sites are already on LA’s metro network.
☀️ Beryl secured funding in the UK to bolster its shared e-bike network with solar-powered charging. Beryl believes the charging solution is better for rural communities, where the lack of density makes battery swap harder.
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DEEP DIVE: 10 Female-Founded Sustainable Mobility Startups to Follow: 2024 Edition
According to Pitchbook’s final data for 2023, founders with mixed-gender teams snagged 27.8% of all VC funding last year, a welcome improvement from 18.1% in 2022. Funding for all female-founded companies still stagnates at the low single digits.
In the summer of 2022, in cooperation with Sarah Barnes from Along for the Ride this newsletter documented 10 Women-Founded Sustainable Mobility Startups to Follow. These 10 startups have continued to prove their fundability. Fettle was acquired by Kwik Fit, a subsidiary of Japanese trading company Itochu. ItsElectric raised a $6.5M seed round led by Failup Ventures and Uber. MightyFly just secured FAA approval to test a drone delivery corridor.
A 2023 edition of an additional 10 companies has proven similarly impressive. Flipturn raised a $4.5M Seed round led by Accel. Nelson raised a 1.2M EUR Seed round. Alas, it wasn’t all wins: Y Combinator-alum OutSail was unable to raise its seed round and went under.
So without further ado, the list below is the 2024 edition of 10 exceptional female-founded companies tackling climate change in a very real way.
Arelys Sosa, DREV (Sweden)
Battery gigafactories are scaling rapidly, but not without challenges. Hazardous metal micro-particles slow production, let valuable resources go to waste, and pose a health risk to staff. As CEO of DREV, Sosa is scaling a dry brush technology and canister design that improves circularity in the process. Sosa isn’t a newcomer to this topic; the engineer was part of the original team at Panasonic Energy at Tesla’s Gigafactory 1.
Khushboo Shrivastava, Coulomb AI (California, USA; India)
Batteries are fickle creatures; finely-tuned software can make all the difference between 240 miles of range on an EV and 275 miles of range. Coulomb offers predictive analytics software to improve performance and battery life. An IIT-Bombay grad, Shrivastava previously worked at General Motors in multiple engineering roles.
Cat Jones, Byway (United Kingdom)
Travel is a lightning rod in climate circles: much of it is for leisure and, in many cases, relies on airplanes, which haven’t really begun to decarbonize. Jones, a physicist with a background in business development and data science, founded Byway in the depths of the pandemic as a travel booking platform that helps people avoid an airplane when they book their next vacation.
Gordana Ilic, Better Sea (Portugal)
Getting ocean-going vessels to decarbonize is notoriously difficult; cost-effective technologies are still nascent and incentives between shippers and carriers can diverge. Better Sea is aiming to be the data platform connecting all players, including the capital markets that are willing to pay for validated reductions in emissions. Dr Ilic, armed with a PhD in chemistry, previously served as Maersk's Head of Decarbonization Innovation Portfolio.
Celine King, GreenIRR (Connecticut, USA)
Heavy-duty trucking shares many of the decarbonization challenges as maritime. GreenIRR is a carbon accounting platform targeting the trucking vertical with automatic measurement of fleet emissions and the ability to generate regulation-compliant emission reports. King founded GreenIRR two years ago, when she was still a university undergraduate studying data science.
Ksenia Duarte, Ex9 (France)
Logistics terminals are far from sexy. They’re the kind of industrial spaces where heavy-duty trucks meet fork-lifts to keep our goods movement system flowing. And that’s exactly where autonomous technology can help improve safety and reduce emissions, especially in the face of ongoing labor shortages. As CEO and co-founder, Duarte leads the business side of the French startup.
Kaitlyn Suarez, Terra Watts (Massachusetts, USA)
Electrons drive the future of the transportation and energy systems, replacing fossil fuels. But electrons have limitations, relying on batteries and wires to be stored and transmitted. But what if you could send power wirelessly safely, consistently, and cheaply? You’d open up wild new possibilities for both transportation and energy. An Activate fellow, Suarez is a PhD making a moonshot bet that could reduce our demand for minerals used in batteries and wires.
Kimberly Moore, Go Together (Washington, D.C., USA)
In the US, only 11% of students walk or bike to school, a proportion that has been falling for decades. And while buses are still being used, the percentage of students that get driven by a parent has skyrocketed. That’s an unfortunate outcome that prioritizes our most highly polluting mode of travel. Moore helps school districts deploy new options, including carpooling networks.
Natasha Kostenuk & Brandy Kinkead, Ayrton Energy (Canada)
Hydrogen is the fuel of the future, and it always will be if we can’t resolve its infrastructure challenges. Today, hydrogen is often transported by pipelines from the point of production to its end use, with significant losses and pipeline corrosion along the way. Kostenuk and Kinkead are helping prove the viability of hydrogen in the transportation system by scaling a liquid organic hydrogen carrier storage technology.
Rujuta Natu, Mantaray Climate (Australia)
When Amazon or Siemens need to take their next step on decarbonization, they hire any number of outside experts to help figure out the cost/benefit of, say, transitioning their fleets to EVs. That approach isn’t feasible for small and medium businesses, who can’t afford to hire McKinsey or Engie Impact. That’s where automated software solutions can come into play. Natu’s Mantaray aims to help small and medium companies find climate-friendly suppliers and the information to meet their emissions goals.
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