Starshot, a climate technology fund, was founded by Sam Levac-Levey and Jeremy Brewer.
Lora Kolodny for CNBC
Childhood friends Jeremy Brewer and Sam Levac-Levey launched their first clean energy startup in 2018. Six years later, they’re launching a new venture fund to invest in tech companies climate neglected by their peers.
Brewer, who worked at Google And Facebook, and Levac-Levey, who did mechanical engineering at Tesla and SpaceX, are co-founders of Starshot Capital. The company just raised $35 million to invest in early-stage startups that the two friends say have the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in polluting industries beyond energy and transport.
“What really pushed us to start this fund was the release of a lot of data on the climate crisis and the funding gaps,” Brewer said in an interview.
Starshot intends to support startups working in the food and agriculture, industrial, manufacturing and construction sectors.
According to PwC’s 2023 State of Climate Technology Study, more than 70% of investments were dedicated to energy and mobility. These two sectors include wind and solar power, as well as electric cars, planes and other vehicles.
But Brewer said those sectors only account for about 27% of global carbon emissions. Starshot sees opportunities to invest in industries that emit enormous amounts of greenhouse gases and consume abundant natural resources.
Gaps also remain within some industries that have attracted funding. For example, in food and agriculture, around 40% of climate technology funding over the past two years has gone to “alternative proteins”, while less than 5% has gone to solutions to reduce or replacing nitrogen-based fertilizers, Brewer said.
Overuse of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in agriculture results in nitrogen oxide emissions and can cause surface and ground water pollution. It can also increase the amount of algae growing on the surface of natural water resources. This can lead to reduced oxygen in the water, killing fish or other marine species and organisms.
Brewer said Starshot is looking to invest in companies that offer “gigaton-scale solutions that can increase profitability and revenue for their customers.”
Brewer and Levac-Levey attended high school together in Montreal. They joined forces in 2018 to begin work on a clean energy startup called H2Ohm, which aimed to capture and use energy generated by the superpressure of water flowing through gravity-fed pipes.
They entered a climate technology accelerator in Canada called Creative Destruction Lab, where they worked for months to perfect their plan. However, as they dug deeper into market and product research, they realized the business wasn’t going to work.
The duo still had to present something at their demo day in front of prominent early-stage investors.
“We ended up presenting to over 100 investors reasons why they should not invest in our company,” Levac-Levey told CNBC. The response was surprising.
Brewer recalled a warm reaction, with people in the audience coming up to them to chat. One of them was a potential investor.
“He said, ‘Look, if you want to shut this whole thing down, can I hire you to figure out why all my other investments are going to fail?'” Brewer said. “So we did this.”
During the pandemic, Brewer and Levac-Levey also began creating an online network for former employees of large technology and industrial companies wanting to redirect their careers to work on solving climate problems.
They are two of eight founders of Work on Climate, which has now grown into an online community with tens of thousands of members on Slack. The group produces a climate careers newsletter and hosts dozens of online and in-person events each year to help grow the green workforce. Brewer is board chair of Work on Climate and Levac-Levey is vice chair.
Brewer said the group sees an influx of new members whenever there are waves of significant layoffs, particularly in the technology and auto industries. With recent job cuts at Tesla and Google, Starshot partners expect climate tech startups to find talent more easily and new companies to be created soon.
“People increasingly want their work to be aligned with their values, and at the same time there is a growing awareness of the challenge we face with the climate crisis,” Brewer said.
Levac-Levey told CNBC that Starshot is particularly interested in companies working to reduce the negative environmental impacts of food and agriculture, industries and the “built environment,” ranging from hospitals to homes and offices to airports and other facilities.
The company has supported entrepreneurs in the production of green hydrogen, such as at Ecolectro. The company has also backed Mojave, a company focused on air conditioner efficiency, and Harvest, a startup that makes heat pumps more efficient and useful in homes by adding thermal energy storage alongside them.
Brewer and Levac-Levey are based in the Bay Area. The company also hired Zoe Samuel, co-creator of Alphabet’s Employee Climate Community, and Nicholas Gould, a PhD in chemical engineering who previously worked on decarbonizing industrial processes at Air Products.
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