At TO VC, we believe that the march towards a market-driven, zero-carbon economy is turning the greatest mistakes of the 20th century into the greatest opportunities of the 21st century. The convergence of technology, science, engineering, creative activism, and government policy will create the largest markets of tomorrow. The most valuable and sustainable companies ever built will be climate-focused, and we will devote all of our resources to empower them on their missions.

Here are the ones we are backing:

EarthOptics

  • EarthOptics is a soil data measurement and mapping company. It creates a digital twin of soil composition so that farmers can know exactly how much carbon they are sequestering and how their soil's fertility is evolving over time.

    Learn More: EarthOptics

  • Lars Dryd (CEO) - Career space scientist and successful entrepreneur building businesses in earth observation

  • Conti Ventures + Rabo Food & Ag Innovation Fund + CNH Industrial + Louis Dreyfus Company Ventures + Leaps By Bayer + S2G

  • Carbon farming is the use of farming practices that improve soil carbon levels. We believe this will be a major component of nature-based solutions for carbon dioxide removal (CDR). The world’s soils are the 2nd largest carbon sink after the ocean, yet only 1% of all carbon credits come from agriculture. oil improves with increasing carbon content, unlike the ocean, which acidifies with carbon. Carbon adds structure to soil, allowing it to retain more water and nutrients, boosting soil fertility. With the advent of soil carbon credits, farmers can get compensated for farming practices that increase the level of carbon in their fields while reaping the benefit of increased soil health and therefore better yields. However,cheap and accurate soil carbon measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) has been the limiting factor for soil carbon credits. EarthOptics makes MRV accurate, scalable, and appropriately priced, allowing millions of acres of farmland to tap into the carbon marketplace. Conversely, carbon offset buyers can finally get the data they need to purchase soil carbon credits with confidence. Solving MRV unlocks latency on both the supply and demand sides of the voluntary carbon marketplace, but too few companies have focused on this key step. We believe that EarthOptics will be the first company to solve MRV for soil carbon at scale thanks to the accuracy and low price points of its maps.

Superbrewed Food

  • Superbrewed produces a first-of-its-kind, high-protein ingredient that boosts the nutrition and improves the carbon intensity of everyday food and beverage products.

    Learn More: Superbrewed Food

  • Bryan Tracy

  • Lockheed Martin Ventures

  • Food and beverage CPG is one the largest markets in the US and is undergoing a major structural shift driven by increasing regulation and changing consumer behavior. Regulatory bodies in the US and EU are banning unsupported marketing claims (ie greenwashing) and are starting to mandate reporting around carbon emissions. Consumers, for their part, are increasingly making purchasing decisions based on health concerns and climate considerations. This dynamic is putting intense pressure on CPG companies to improve their products, starting with better ingredients. Demand for protein has posed a difficult challenge for CPGs: Consumers want more of it, but animal-derived protein is under criticism for climate, supply chain, and animal-welfare reasons, and plant-based protein performs extremely poorly in finished product formulations.


    Within the protein space, microbial proteins are a very compelling category. The rapid bacterial growth rates, feedstock flexibility, and high protein, mineral, and vitamin levels create three core advantages: First, this segment can reach cost levels at scale that only the cheapest plant proteins can reach, yet with far superior functionality. Second, manufacturing scale-up could be much easier than other biotech solutions given the simplicity of the fermentation process for most organisms. Third, the production of fermentation co-products offers multiple revenue streams that add to the bottom line.


    The bacteria is a rich source of protein (85% by dry weight) and has high levels of important vitamins and minerals, making it not just a great source of protein but also a great source of nutrition. Importantly for the Company’s CPG customers, the product has a baseline sensory profile, which makes it an easy ingredient to formulate with that doesn’t adversely affect a product’s taste profile. Additionally, the protein’s natural encapsulation within the bacterial cell means that it doesn’t interact with other ingredients within a formulation, making it easy to physically integrate into food and beverage ingredient matrices. The encapsulation also imparts unique emulsification and texture properties. Together, these characteristics offer food and beverage customers the ability to replace animal protein, emulsifiers, and micronutrient packs in their formulations, delivering a cheaper, better product with a shorter, cleaner ingredients label without having to change their brand guidelines. It also allows them to make backable marketing claims around health and carbon neutrality.

Applied Carbon

  • Applied Carbon turns agricultural waste into a carbon sequestering powerhouse called biochar. The Company's units go into the field and turn biomass into biochar in real time, on the go.

    Learn More: Applied Carbon

  • Jason Aramburu + Morgan Williams - Career biochar researchers

  • Microsoft Innovation Fund + Anglo American Ventures + Congruent Ventures

  • Biochar addresses the weaknesses of both nature-based and industrial-based carbon removal solutions, offering a value proposition that combines the best of both: low-priced, high durability carbon credits with co-benefits. We haven’t seen any commercial solutions on the carbon removal market that bring together these attributes in one product.

    The way biochar is produced today makes it prohibitively expensive: close to 100% of biochar is made in centralized facilities that procure wood waste from biomass power plants. The transportation of lightweight wood waste to these facilities, followed by the transportation of lightweight biochar from these facilities to farms means that transportation represents up to 50% of the cost of biochar delivered to a farm today, which is approximately $400/mt. Manufacturing biochar at a consistent quality, which depends on a consistent feedstock, is a challenge, and the heterogeneity in quality makes it difficult to scale because standardized quality is important for large-scale farmer adoption.

    Applied Carbon is a first-of-its-kind company that solves these issues. Its innovation to produce high-quality biochar from ag waste on-site, continuously, in real-time and tailored to a farm’s specific soil characteristics is a solution that solves the fundamental flaws of price and quality in the biochar market.

Universal Fuel Technologies

  • Universal Fuel Technologies converts a variety of different low-value, renewable feedstocks into drop-in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and chemical products.

    Learn More: Universal Fuel Technologies

  • Alexei Beltyukov + Denys Pchelintsev + Stephen Sims

  • Alchemist Accelerator

  • Aviation is responsible for 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and is the fastest-growing source of GHGs, averaging more than 4% annual growth as people in the developed world travel more often and people in the developing world begin to travel. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) expects a record 4.7B passengers to travel by plane in 2024. And yet, only approximately 10% of the world population has ever taken a plane. As the world economy develops, it is expected that 10B passengers will fly every year by 2050, accounting for a 50% increase in jet fuel consumption, to 520M tons per year in 2050. 


    SAF is a burgeoning space that is widely expected to replace most, if not all, of fossil kerosene by 2050, a $500-600B potential market. It is produced by numerous technology pathways that are dependent on numerous different renewable feedstocks that have varying levels of carbon intensity and therefore have varying levels of compliance- and tax credit- eligibility. In addition, given that it is a drop-in replacement to kerosene fuel at the same time as it is a biofuel (with the exception of e-SAF, which is produced from renewable energy and green hydrogen), the space is seeing huge interest from incumbents spanning the spectrums of scale and industry, from massive oil refiners looking to decarbonize to family-owned ethanol producers seeking new opportunities to counter-balance falling gasoline consumption. As a result, it is an incredibly complex and dynamic market that offers no clarity in terms of who the winners will be. UFT hovers above this.


     The Company is a technology provider that is feedstock- and scale- flexible, which means that it can service all major technical pathways and it can play in all regions of the world (since the region dictates the feedstock availability, and the feedstock dictates the technology). UFT does not suffer from the pathway dependency that all other players face. Through its technology, the Company offers a unique value proposition to each pathway that solves an acute problem that is experienced in that pathway.

OCOchem

  • OCO converts atmospheric or biogenic CO2 into formic acid, a versatile chemical that will play a vital role in the transportation and storage of hydrogen.

    Learn More: OCOchem

  • Todd Brix + Terry Brix - Veteran chemical entrepreneurs

  • INPEX + Halliburton Labs

  • The majority of the world’s chemicals are produced thermochemically from fossil fuel-derived feedstocks, contributing to approximately 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Electrochemistry offers a different process, whereby electricity replaces industrial heat as the energy driving chemical reactions. The multi-decade drop in renewable energy prices has finally made the concept of ‘Power-to-X’ economically competitive in producing certain chemicals in a carbon-neutral way. In addition to using that process to eliminate the need for industrial heat (and avoiding its associated emissions), we can also use CO₂ instead of natural gas or coal as the carbon feedstock, turning waste emissions into valuable carbon-negative products, thus creating a circular carbon economy.

    Because CO₂ is a very stable molecule and requires a lot of energy to transform, there are only a few chemicals today that make economic sense to be produced electrochemically from it. These are mostly C1 chemicals that require few electrons to drive the transformation process. To date, most companies have focused on carbon monoxide (CO) because it is a precursor molecule to many large end-markets.

    Formic acid, however, is the only 2-electron electro-reduction process that can transform CO₂ into a liquid. Unlike CO, formic acid is a liquid organic hydrogen carrier (LOHC). And unlike other LOHCs, such as ammonia or methanol, formic acid is non-corrosive, non-explosive, and therefore much easier to transport. Although formic acid only contains 4.4% of hydrogen, because of its high density of 1.22 g/cm3, its volumetric capacity of hydrogen reaches 53 g H2/L, which is three and a half times as much as compressed hydrogen gas at 350 bar pressure (14.7 g/L). Because of these factors, it is our view that formic acid will play an important role as a LOHC in the hydrogen economy.

Enzinc

  • Enzinc manufactures uniquely structured zinc anodes with unparalleled energy density and cycle life.

    Learn More: Enzinc

  • Michael Burz

  • American Century Investments

  • As global demand for batteries skyrockets, the world needs alternatives to lithium-ion chemistry. The solution lies in an untapped resource: the 400 GWh global lead-acid manufacturing infrastructure. Imagine transforming these existing factories into powerhouses for advanced batteries—without the massive capital investment required to build new facilities. 

    Enzinc is poised to unlock this potential. Its groundbreaking "Enzinc Inside" technology empowers existing battery brands to produce advanced nickel-zinc (NiZn) batteries, tripling their effective output while boosting revenue and margins. With Enzinc, legacy battery manufacturers can compete for decades, leveraging their domestic supply chains and existing capital equipment for a significant ROIC. For the first time, the U.S. can onshore the production of high-performance batteries using domestic supply chains and abundant U.S. zinc resources that rival lithium-iron phosphate (LFP), all without the fire risks and environmental concerns.

    Enzinc’s proprietary zinc micro-sponge anode, a drop-in solution that unleashes zinc’s full potential. For the first time, zinc can be used in a high-performance, rechargeable battery that offers both high energy density and unparalleled safety. A feature of the zinc micro-sponge is it gets its unique attributes from the sponge structure, not from additives or mechanical systems. This results in a platform anode: it can be paired with different cathodes (i.e. nickel, manganese, and carbon) for different applications at different price points. Enzinc is starting with nickel (NiZn) as it is well characterized and already used by the Company’s first customers.

    NiZn batteries with Enzinc Inside™ dramatically outperform lead-acid with triple the energy, extended cycle life, and a broad operating temperature range making them comparable to LFP and sodium-ion. They double the energy density of other zinc batteries in development, making them the only viable option for mobility.