💫 10 Women-Founded Startups to Follow in 2023
Vol 60
This newsletter aims to separate the signal from the noise for making money in all things sustainable transportation: Electrification, mode shift, active and public transit, and mobility aggregation, across both people and goods movement.
This week we have a Deep Dive on the 10 Women-Founded Sustainable Mobility Startups to Follow: The 2023 Edition. We also do a quick “where are they now?” from the same list from Summer 2022.
🌱STARTUP WATCH: Sustainable mobility startups (pre-seed or seed) to keep an eye on
Amber Technologies (California, USA): Extended warranty solution for EV drivers
Alpha Grid (California, USA): EV infrastructure location management software
CommuteSaver (Sweden): Automated CO2 emissions tracker for commuting
Daylight Energy (Texas, USA): Consumer software featuring monetary rewards for home electrification (EV chargers)
Everimpact (France): Real-time CO2 measurement for cities, ships, and industrial applications
OutSail Shipping (California, USA): Containerized sails for cargo ships (see more in Deep Dive)
ProjectK (California, USA): Potassium-ion batteries for automotive applications
Ripple Boats (Norway): Electric leisure boats aiming to the "Tesla of boats"
ShipZero (Germany): CO2 reporting and management platform for industrial supply chains
subdron (Austria): Underwater autonomous drones for infrastructure like ports
💰FUNDING: Capital raises from startups previously featured in Startup Watch
Cycle (formerly Get Henry; Vol 4) raised a $10M Series A from Scania Growth Capital, Founder Collective, Third Sphere, and others
Voltpost (Vol 7) raised a $3.5M seed round from RWE, Climate Capital, and others
Electric Era (Vol 30) raised a $16M round (investors undisclosed)
AmpControl (Vol 39) raised a $10M Series A led by the Westly Group
Haylon (Vol 41) won a $150K grant from the Army Applications Lab
Natrion (Vol 48) raised a $1M seed round (investors undisclosed)
Nelson (Vol 51) raised a 1.2M EUR round primarily from angels
📰QUICK HITS: Notable news from the last two weeks
👩🏽⚖️Government, Policies & Cities
🛳️ Amsterdam is banning cruise ships on environmental concerns. If you’re looking for early market-shaping signals on the decarbonization of aviation and maritime, keep an eye on the Netherlands.
🇳🇴 Stavanger, in Norway, has made public transportation free. The city can only commit to one year of funding to assist lower-income residents.
🚏Manhattan’s Third Avenue is getting a road diet. Two of the five lanes will be converted into a dedicated bus lane and a protected bike lane.
🫠 New Jersey is suing to stop New York’s congestion pricing plan. I’m not sure that the plaintiff accusing the federal government of shoddy oversight is going to pay off.
🏋️♂️ New York state is considering a weight-based registration fee for passenger cars. What started in French-speaking countries focused on parking fees is now spreading to US states.
🛩️ Two US senators have introduced a bill to raise fuel taxes for private jet travel from $0.22 to $1.95 per gallon. Another reason for small jet operators to go electric.
🚁 The US Federal Aviation Administration released an eVTOL (air taxi) plan for large-scale public launch by 2028. The certification pathway for this new vehicle type is slowly getting clearer.
🚂 Amtrak has $75B to spend to expand rail service in the US. Most of the money will require states to apply, ensuring some degree of local support.
🔬Markets & Research
🚥 The Open Mobility Foundation (OMF) has an open survey on whether and how they should engage in the emerging business of curbside charging. The curb continues to be the ultimate mobility battleground in cities.
🛒 Carnegie Mellon has analyzed the climate impact of online grocery delivery. Short answer: It’s more carbon intensive than traditional shopping, but can be made more sustainable with approaches like off-peak delivery times.
🏭 Corporates & Later Stage
📦 UPS avoided a strike by agreeing to meet many of the Teamsters’ demands. One of the key demands was to get in-cabin A/C in new vehicle purchases.
🚛 Alphabet’s Waymo is pausing its trucking business to focus on robotaxis. With Ruth Porat’s new role and her financial discipline, expect to see some autonomous vehicle software licensing deals between Waymo and car companies relatively soon.
👫 The empire strikes back: legacy car makers announced a joint charging network in the US to rival Tesla. This could be a wasted investment unless they’re going to meaningfully and jointly address UI/UX, software handoffs between vehicles, phones, and chargers, billing, and overall system reliability, etc. That tight integration is what makes Tesla’s network so powerful.
🚲 Lyft may be selling its shared mobility business. It’s still not clear how Lyft will differentiate itself strategically vs. Uber.
🚁 Embraer has announced its first eVTOL factory, just outside of São Paulo. Air taxis are getting more and more real every day.
🛴 Privately-held micromobility player Lime continues to burnish its profitability story as it preps for an IPO. Meanwhile, publicly-traded Bird is crowing about not having to get delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.
🤕 In China, VW took an equity stake in Xpeng to get access to EV technology, and its Audi unit inked a deal to get access to SAIC’s EV technology. This would have been unthinkable a few years ago and amounts to one of the world’s biggest car companies admitting its EV technology isn’t state of the art.
🇮🇳 BYD’s proposed $1B EV factory in India was rejected by the government on national security concerns. For a reminder of the geopolitical angle to EVs, see the Deep Dive here.
🐣 Startups & Early Stage
🛫 Hybrid-electric plane manufacturer Ampaire acquired eVTOL maker Talyn. An interesting combination as most emerging manufacturers are either plane or eVTOL, but rarely both.
🇮🇩 Indonesia’s Maka Motors, an electric motorcycle manufacturer, raised a monster $37M seed round. Legacy 2-wheel manufacturers are swiftly switching to electric, so keep an eye out for how Maka differentiates itself from incumbents.
🇦🇹 Micromobility provider Link is now offering riders in Vienna the option to pay a 5 EUR reparking fee (article in German). That’s still significantly cheaper than the municipal fine of 25 EUR for an incorrectly parked e-scooter.
🚴♂️ Speaking of Austria, Gleam Bikes filed for bankruptcy. Their assets and IP are available for purchase.
DEEP DIVE: 10 Women-Founded Sustainable Mobility Startups to Follow: 2023 Edition
The startup world continues to have a huge disconnect between talent and funding. According to Pitchbook’s most recent data for 2023, startups with solely women founders secured only 1.9% of VC funding. Founders of mixed-gender teams snagged 18.1%. That means a whopping 80% of VC investments are going to men-only teams.
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. While the overall funding landscape continues to be a tough one, these 10 startups have continued to prove their fundability. Since being profiled in 2022, for example, BlueDot* raised over $5M from Leap Forward, Y Combinator, Operator Stack Ventures, LACI Impact Fund, and others; and launched their first fleet product with over $2.5M in gross payment volume. ChargerHelp!* raised a $17.5M oversubscribed Series A from Blue Bear, Aligned Climate Capital, LACI Impact Fund, and others. ItsElectric raised a $2.2M pre-Seed round, received sponsorship from Hyundai North America, launched its first pilot (in New York City), and won the 2023 SXSW Innovation Award for Urban Infrastructure.
I decided to refresh the list again, acknowledging the next generation of leaders. To that end, the list below is the 2023 edition of 10 exceptional women-founded companies tackling climate change in a very real way.
Inès Multrier, Nelson (France)
One of the biggest barriers to fleet electrification is figuring out when, precisely, a company can seamlessly transition a car or light commercial vehicle in the fleet from internal combustion engine to electric, without impacting operations or drivers' wellbeing. Nelson believes the best way to do this is via the analysis of existing data, simulating all the eventualities around routing, charge time, and duty cycles. Its software uses data science to help convince and reassure the skeptics who rely more on gut instinct.
Katie Siegel, Flipturn (New York, USA)
Fleets that adopt electric vehicles immediately run into operational challenges involving vehicle range, charging infrastructure, and energy costs. Flipturn, a New York City-based startup, is building the unified control center for EV fleet and charging operations. Flipturn’s software helps fleets improve operating efficiency and visibility, drive down cost per mile, and minimize utility costs.
Precious Turinawe Lema, Easy Matatu (Uganda)
In many emerging markets, informal transportation is the lifeblood of a city, whether by rickshaw, boda boda, colectivo, or jeepney. Whereismytransport launched almost a decade ago, harnessing digital technology to give consumers in emerging markets a rich understanding of their real-time transit options. Easy Matatu is taking that one step further with the other side of the platform: getting would-be matatu drivers access to a van, therefore potentially expanding the pool of options in cities like Kampala.
Friederike Hesse, zero44 (Germany)
Next year, the EU comprehensive Emission Trading System (EU ETS) starts tracking maritime. Such cap-and-trade schemes require immense amounts of robust data covering everything from fleet registration and performance to trading. Zero44 is leveraging Hesse’s deep operational expertise in scaling at a previous venture-backed startup in Germany.
Bailey Da Costa, OutSail Shipping (California, USA)
Putting sails on ships isn’t exactly new. But decarbonizing maritime will require an “all of the above” approach for ocean-going cargo vessels. OutSail is a very clever integration of the existing supply chain with tried-and-true wind power: a sail-in-a-shipping container that can be installed quickly in any port.
The majority of American homeowners use less than 50% of the capacity of their electrical panels. That doesn’t make installing a home EV charger any easier, with a recommended panel upgrade often costing thousands of dollars. Some companies like Span propose managing the incremental electrical load via a new “smart panel”, but what if there was an even simpler solution that allowed you to keep your existing panel and add a software-integrated hardware booster? That’s the kind of solution that could tempt millions of homeowners.
Eloa Guillotin, Beyond Aero (France)
Everyone has a different perspective as to whether aviation decarbonization happens via electric, hydrogen, or sustainable aviation fuel. Beyond Aero’s bet is that both electric and hydrogen will be a part of short-haul aviation. The startup aims to certify a business jet seating up to 8 by 2030, leveraging hydrogen fuel as well as a battery pack for peak power. With a headquarters in Toulouse, look for a lot of Airbus talent who want to take on startup life.
Antje Völker, Dromos (Germany)
Autonomous vehicles continue to scale in cities, albeit at a slower pace than we might have predicted a decade ago. Dromos is betting that the big breakthrough is applying autonomous technology to create driverless Ubers, but instead to rethink public transportation, starting in the UK. By deploying narrow electric and autonomous pods on dedicated road infrastructure, Dromos wants the world to rethink the robotaxi.
Lizzy Kolar and Kaitlin Highstreet, Scope Zero (California, USA)
If you’re in the US, you probably barely remember pensions, which have been effectively replaced by employee-directed 401(k)s. You might remember the introduction of Health Spending Accounts (HSA) in the early 2000s. Both ushered in an era of conscientious employee decision-making about their own benefits.
What if you could use a similar logic as HSAs but for employee transportation decisions? You’d be able to unlock more zero-emissions adoption by employees and provide robust data that would help employers report on their scope 3 emissions.
Palak Jain, Vellex Computing (California, USA)
As more EVs start charging from the grid, there’s concern about how well our aging infrastructure can handle it. Vellex is a grid-simulation company, creating a custom-designed computing chip to optimize grid applications. As the US becomes more concerned about chip sovereignty, Vellex is the kind of domestic know-how that will flourish under the CHIPS Act.
* Disclosure: My former employer LACI has an equity stake in both ChargerHelp! and Bluedot