Greentown Boston Climatetech Summit 2024 Zeroes in on Scale

74 startups. 675 audience members, and 553 more virtual attendees, 40 speakers, 67 investors, and 130 corporate leaders.

That’s Greentown Boston’s 2024 Climatetech Summit by the numbers, but the event was about the people: the startup founders with their groundbreaking solutions, and the ecosystem players who can help them succeed at scale.

The summit featured a speaking program with top climate champions, including a keynote from Amazon’s Chief Sustainability Officer Kara Hurst, and a startup showcase that offered attendees the chance to network with our incredible Greentown Boston startups.

Key themes of the day included:

The importance of scalability—from the viability of technologies, to necessary project-development skills and financing, to corporates having crucial scaling capabilities
The public sector’s potential for de-risking novel technologies when equity financing is insufficient, including for very early-stage startups and first-of-a-kind (FOAK) projects
The critical role of collaboration in scaling novel climate technologies—spanning startups, corporates, investors, the public sector, and more
The space for climate hope that’s rooted in demonstrable action and progress

Check out details of the summit below!

Greentown Boston’s Climatetech Summit kicked off with opening remarks from Rewiring America’s Social Media Creator Dan McCollister—the event’s emcee—Greentown’s Senior Vice President of Marketing + Communications Julia Travaglini, and Somerville Mayor Katjana Ballantyne. Travaglini celebrated Greentown startups’ critical work, major milestones, and growth, emphasizing the importance of the audience forming connections with the entrepreneurs to help advance their climate solutions. Mayor Ballantyne spoke about decarbonization efforts on both the personal and city-wide scale, noting the City of Somerville’s Climate Forward 2024 action plan and the expansion of its office of sustainability and environment.

“Incubators like Greentown Labs are essential,” she said. “They create opportunities for innovators to engineer the future. They’re helping to drive the workforce transition that will allow these [technologies to be deployed] at scale. Working together, we can respond to the urgent demands of climate change while ensuring equity and justice remain at the core of everything we do.”

From there, TIME’s Chief Climate Officer Shyla Raghav showcased insights from the TIME 100 Climate List and the Americas Top Greentech Companies 2024, highlighting the most impactful sectors and companies driving innovation in the climatetech space—including Form Energy, Nth Cycle, and many other Greentown members.

The keynote fireside chat with Amazon’s Chief Sustainability Officer Kara Hurst, moderated by Raghav, explored how Greentown Terawatt Partner Amazon identifies, pilots, and scales climatetech solutions. They discussed the importance of private-public partnerships, the sustainability potential of companies with major scale, and Amazon’s Climate Pledge and associated $2B fund that has made 32 investments to date.

“[We wanted] to bring our size and our scale to bear on the crisis of our generation,” Hurst said. “When we move with our speed and size and scale, we really can effect change.”

Next up was the first set of lightning pitches from Greentown startups, introduced by Greentown’s COO Joubin Hatamzadeh:

Capro-X, a startup whose bioprocess produces sustainable biochemicals out of food waste on-site at food-production plants, creating alternatives to palm-oil chemicals with multiple applications.
Cellsense, which transforms algae and cellulose into compostable beads that eliminate microplastics in the design and cosmetic industries.
change:WATER Labs, which is developing a low-cost, compact, waterless toilet for non-sewered households and communities.
Glimpse, which develops X-ray-powered, quality-management solutions for batteries.
Monaire, a startup whose tech-enabled HVAC and refrigeration-management service reduces HVAC energy use and repair costs while preventing downtime and food waste.
Teknobuilt, a construction-technology company offering an AI platform to help all aspects of program management and execution for workflow automation, collaborative manual tasks, and siloed systems.

The next segment featured Greentown Terawatt Partner and Climatetech Summit Champion GE Vernova’s CEO Scott Strazik and Heatmap News’ Senior Reporter Jael Holzman for a conversation on tech scalability, turning talk into action, and pragmatic optimism.

“We don’t have time for hobbies—these [technologies] need to be built at scale,” Strazik said.

“Heated Questions: Founder Edition” adopted a game-show style to spotlight two Greentown startup founders—Active Surfaces CEO Shiv Bhakta and AeroShield Materials CEO Elise Strobach—and the ups and downs of their journeys to commercialization, in conversation with McCollister. They covered how they’d explain their tech to a first-grader, the hardest thing about being a CEO, and the importance of being part of a community of founders.

The next panel, “Government as a Partner for Climatetech Startup Growth,” dove into how government entities can be a mission-critical partner in a startup’s development and go-to-market efforts, with a goal of demystifying government funding, programs, and partnerships for early-stage startups.

Speakers included:

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Jeff Marootian
The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s Director of Tech-to-Market Programs Leslie Nash
ARPA-E’s Technology-to-Market Advisor Christian Vandervort
Elemental Impact’s Portfolio Innovation Manager Annie Dillon
Stepwise’s Co-founder and CEO Jane Chen — a Greentown member
Activate’s Director of Government Relations Elizabeth Kennedy (moderator)

The second group of startup lightning pitches featured:

EcoForge, a building-material technology startup developing affordable, high-performance building materials from local agricultural residues, replacing energy-intensive, fossil-based materials.
frakktal, which is developing a biobased-polymer process to upend polyvinyl chloride (PVC) overuse, especially in the built environment.
Ivys Energy Solutions, a company whose SimpleFuel product is an on-site hydrogen generation and dispensing appliance that uses water and electricity to produce high-purity, fuel-cell-grade hydrogen.
M2X Energy, which is an end-to-end developer of a modular, transportable gas-to-liquids system to economically produce low-carbon methanol from stranded gas.
NONA Technologies, an MIT spinout commercializing novel electrochemical water-treatment technology, resulting in portable, light, and reliable seawater desalination systems.
Sweetch Energy, whose INOD® technology produces large-scale, permanent, 100 percent clean electricity from osmotic power.

Next up was “What the FOAK: Navigating the Capital Stack in Climatetech.” This panel traversed the intricacies of a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) project funding—which is crucial for climatetech startups aiming to scale their novel innovations—examining this significant funding gap and strategies for bridging it.

Speakers included:

Planeteer Venture Partner Hannah Friedman
Eden Co-founder and CEO Paris Smalls — a Greentown member
Spring Lane Capital Associate Katherine St. James
V1 Climate Solutions CEO Deanna Zhang (moderator)

The final group of Greentown startup pitches featured:

7Analytics, a startup developing superior, high-precision predictive models for floods, enhancing urban resilience to climate change.
Atacama Biomaterials, an MIT spinout developing regenerative plastics that can be made cost-effectively from diverse, local biomass, powered by robotics and AI.
Carbon To Stone, which takes carbon dioxide from air or point sources and combines it with alkaline industrial residues to convert the carbon dioxide into solid carbonates, while recovering energy-critical metals and materials from the residues.
florrent, which is creating the next generation of high-energy-density supercapacitors from biomass grown regeneratively by BIPOC farmers.
EVident Battery, a startup developing comprehensive and non-destructive inspection solutions for electric vehicle battery packs to address the challenges in evaluating the health conditions and financial value of EVs.
Return To Vendor, which is a fashion-materials company that converts recycled ocean nets into nylon for its primary feedstock, then adds proprietary chemistries to replicate the performance of a wide variety of polymer yarns, hardware, and adhesives.

From there, GE Vernova President, Ventures and Incubation Limor Spector discussed the global growth in electricity demand and the importance of startup-corporate collaboration in the energy transition, including how startups can engage with GE Vernova.

Greentown’s Senior Vice President of Partnerships Aisling Carlson closed out the speaking portion, encouraging attendees to form meaningful connections during the afternoon’s networking opportunities.

After a lunch break came one of our favorite parts of the Climatetech Summit: the Startup Showcase, an opportunity for attendees to speak directly with our climatetech entrepreneurs, see their technologies in the prototyping lab, and make valuable connections. Learn about our startups innovating across the key greenhouse-gas-emitting sectors—agriculture, buildings, electricity, manufacturing, and transportation—and on resiliency and adaptation.

The Greentown Boston Climatetech Summit 2024 wrapped up with an impactful evening of networking that forged connections to accelerate the deployment of climatetech solutions. We’d like to send a huge thank you to the speakers, sponsors, and all attendees who joined us for this year’s event!