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An Open Letter: Startup Founders Commitment in Response to a Recent Investor Letter

For Reference: An Open Letter: Our Investor Commitment in Response to the Coronavirus

To Our Current and Future Investors,

We are grateful for your unified commitment to the well-being and long-term viability of our cleantech ventures. Your support has played a critical role in helping get our companies to where they are today and your recent gesture has bolstered our resolve to not only survive the crisis, but to emerge from it stronger. Like you, we are prioritizing the health and wellness of our loved ones, our teams, and our neighbors. In concert with these efforts, we’re doing what we can to help meet immediate public health needs by donating gloves, making masks, face covers, offering lab supplies, and identifying opportunities to adjust the primary applications of our technologies to act on COVID-19. Like so many small businesses, we are engaging heavily with our community to find ways to maintain momentum and manage resources through these turbulent times. 

Our resilience is strong. We are driven by the collective goal of transitioning to a clean energy economy and creating a sustainable world for generations to come. While today the coronavirus threatens our present, the climate threat looms much farther into the future. Neither can be ignored.

The personal and economic toll of the COVID-19 pandemic will be staggering. However, the setback to climate action does not have to follow suit if we are able to foster a strong clean energy industry, adopt bold climate policy at the federal level, and rally others to support our work as you have. We’re hoping to receive similar signals of optimism and commitment from our other key partners too—top of mind are our manufacturing and supply chain partners, customers, and grant administrators. Recovery means rebuilding and our companies can help America rebuild for a stronger, more efficient future for all of us.   

Let’s help shift the narrative from an economic recovery to a green economic recovery. Let’s focus on a swift, equitable, restart for the economy while prioritizing decarbonization efforts across the country and world. Let’s work together to get our new solutions to market to support economic and environmental change while enhancing the United States’ competitiveness in the international climate arena. 

As our country’s leaders—state and federal—consider lessons from the current crisis to inform plans for an economic recovery, we know at least one thing is true: now is the time to double down on climate policy.

As our industry’s leaders, we’re asking you to help amplify a clear and coordinated message to policy makers: the cleantech and climate sectors can play a dramatic role in helping our country achieve bold carbon-reduction goals and underscore our country’s commitment to a resilient future.

We, the undersigned, aren’t going anywhere either. We are dedicated to applying every ounce of knowledge, resources, and resolve in continuing the sustainability fight. With your support and that of our vibrant and growing community, we will come out of this—together—more energized than ever before. 

Sincerely,

Onvector, SolarKal, Raise Green, Form Energy, Spare-It, Capital Energy Management, Techstyle Materials, SolarOne, Rise Robotics, Transaera, Packetized Energy, Raptor Maps, CF Technologies, Elios, Jura Bio, VECARIUS, JSG Communications, AeroShield Materials, Transport Phenomena Technologies, QuantAQ, Via Separations, Promethean Power Systems, SomEV, Sparkplug Power, LineVision, Next Rung Technology, GreenChoice, Ivys Energy Solutions, Embue, Helix Power

This letter is open to all cleantech startups. If you’re passionate about the message outlined above and share in the vision for a green economic recovery, please complete this 1-minute survey and the Greentown Labs team will confirm when your company has been added to the letter. 

startup letter