March Week 4, 2025: Welcome to our ongoing blog series, where we spotlight the most promising climate tech startups. Each week, we feature five companies and add them to our running list of innovative companies driving solutions across sectors with the highest potential for greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions.
These sectors are as follows:
Why did we decide to focus on the five specific sectors?
These sectors present immense opportunities for innovation as well as addressing critical challenges related to GHG emissions. By narrowing our focus to these areas, we can better align our mission with impactful solutions and support founders who are driving meaningful change.
By spotlighting these startups, we aim to support founders by providing them with networking and exposure opportunities that can help them scale and finance their solutions.
Do not hesitate to join our collective movement by requesting your membership.
With care,
Guillaume and the SBC TEAM
Energy
1. Withthegrid
Founded: 2016 – Utrech, NL
Founder: Paul Mignot
Elevator Pitch: Withthegrid provides real-time monitoring and control technology to make energy infrastructure smarter, more flexible, and ready for a renewable future. Their platform helps grid operators and asset owners digitize operations, optimize asset performance, and unlock grid flexibility at scale.
Problem they solve: Energy infrastructure is aging and increasingly under strain as renewable energy adoption grows. Grid operators struggle with visibility into critical infrastructure, while asset owners need better tools to manage and control distributed energy resources like batteries, solar, and EV chargers. Without digitization and automation, it’s hard to manage reliability and flexibility.
Impact: Withthegrid accelerates the transition to a resilient, decarbonized energy system by enabling infrastructure to integrate and manage renewable energy more efficiently. Their solutions help reduce emissions, prevent energy waste, and ensure more flexible and responsive power grids that support higher shares of clean electricity.
Stage: Series A.
Interested in Withthegrid?
To learn more about their technology or get in touch, see here.
Food, Agriculture & Land Use
2. Gigacrop
Founded: 2018 – Barcelona, ESP
Founder: Chris Eiben
Elevator Pitch: GigaCrop is reinventing photosynthesis by engineering seeds with enhanced efficiency, enabling plants to grow faster and more abundantly. Their breakthrough biotech targets key enzymatic bottlenecks to unlock unprecedented productivity in agriculture—powering the future of food, fiber, and fuel.
Problem they solve: Global demand for agricultural output is skyrocketing, but traditional farming methods and current plant biology can’t scale fast enough to meet the needs of a growing population and expanding biomanufacturing industries. Photosynthesis, though fundamental, remains inefficient due to natural limitations in plant enzymes.
Impact: By dramatically increasing crop yields on the same land footprint, GigaCrop’s technology reduces pressure on natural ecosystems, lowers the need for deforestation, and maximizes resource efficiency. This innovation supports climate-smart agriculture by enabling more sustainable food, fuel, and materials production from plant-based systems.
Stage: Series A.
Interested in GigaCrop?
If you are interested in learning more, see here.
Industry
3. Tereform
Founded: 2022 – Denver, CO, USA
Leadership: Kevin Sullivan
Elevator Pitch: Tereform is decarbonizing chemical manufacturing by transforming textile waste into high-purity chemical building blocks through novel molecular recycling. Their technology enables true textile-to-textile circularity—turning end-of-life fabrics into the very materials needed to create new ones, without relying on fossil fuels.
Problem they solve: The fashion and textile industry generates 92 million metric tons of waste annually, with less than 1% being recycled. Most waste ends up in landfills or incinerators due to the lack of effective recycling methods that can separate and repurpose complex fabric blends. Current solutions fail to recover pure inputs necessary for circular production.
Impact: Tereform’s molecular recycling significantly lowers greenhouse gas emissions by replacing virgin petroleum-based inputs with recycled chemical components. By enabling closed-loop textile manufacturing, the company drastically reduces textile waste, conserves resources, and supports a more sustainable future for fashion and chemical industries alike.
Stage: Seed.
Want to learn more about Tereform?
To learn more about their technology or get in touch see here.
Energy
4. Glimpse
Founded: 2023 – Sommerville, MA, USA
Founders: Eric Moch
Elevator Pitch: Glimpse is building the world’s most powerful battery quality monitoring platform, combining real-time insights, collaborative tools, and digital records to ensure the reliability of battery production at gigawatt-hour scale. Their advanced use of X-ray computed tomography (CT) enables early detection of latent defects—bringing unprecedented transparency and accountability to battery manufacturing.
Problem they solve: Battery defects—like dents, overhangs, or internal tears—are often invisible to standard testing methods, and when undetected, can lead to safety issues, reduced performance, and massive recalls. Traditional quality control systems lack the speed, scale, and visibility needed for modern battery production lines.
Impact: By improving battery reliability and reducing waste from defective products, Glimpse enhances the overall sustainability of battery manufacturing. Their technology helps minimize costly production errors, prevent safety hazards, and extend the lifecycle of battery-powered products—crucial in the global push toward clean energy and electrification.
Industry
5. C1 Green Chemicals
Founded: 2022 – Berlin, DE
Founder: Christian Vollmann
Elevator Pitch: C1 Green Chemicals is reinventing chemical production through quantum-chemistry innovation. Its proprietary methanol catalysis technology enables the production of green methanol from non-fossil feedstocks—creating a faster, more scalable path toward sustainable chemical manufacturing and alternative fuels.
Problem they solve: Traditional methanol production relies on fossil fuels and century-old processes, contributing heavily to global CO₂ emissions. C1 addresses this with a fundamentally new, efficient catalytic method that breaks away from the fossil-based model, unlocking access to green methanol at scale.
Impact: Green methanol has the potential to reduce global CO₂ emissions by several gigatons annually. C1’s breakthrough catalysis technology enables this shift by supporting the defossilization of the chemical industry and helping decarbonize hard-to-abate sectors like shipping—targeting a $200B/year market by 2050
Stage: Seed.
Interested in C1 Green Chemicals?
If you are interested in learning more, see here.
Do you know of other startups we should include in our Startups to Watch Series? Submit to our list!
How do these startups fit in with all the others we have looked at?
Check out our running list of the 400+ climate tech startups to watch we have featured.
