It feels like VC has broken every record there is to break this year—and funding for climate-tech startups is no exception.

By the numbers: While climate tech makes up just a fraction of all VC dollars—about 6% over the last few years—the industry has been steadily gaining attention from investors.

• In the first three quarters of 2021, $30.8 billion has been invested in climate tech—already more than any previous full year, according to data from PitchBook.
• Climate-tech investments through the end of Q3 this year are already 30% higher than all of 2020.

“We’ve seen over the first nine months of 2021, the same amount of deals as the entire previous year, while the capital raised was higher. That means the deals are getting bigger,” PitchBook analyst Svenja Telle told Emerging Tech Brew.

Zoom in

Companies in the EV ecosystem, which includes not only cars but also electric mobility, fleet electrification, battery technology, and charging infrastructure, accounted for half of all VC dollars raised within climate tech. Just in July:

• EV manufacturer Rivian raised $2.8 billion, in the largest climate tech deal of the quarter.
• Lithium-ion battery manufacturer SVOLT raised $1.6 billion in a Series B, making it the largest early-stage VC deal in climate tech.
• Battery recycling company Redwood Materials raised $700 million in a Series C round.

Exits are also setting records. As of September 30, 61 climate-tech companies have either gone public or have been purchased, up from 33 in all of last year. That amounts to more than $28 billion in exit value.

Why now? For one, there is just a lot of VC money sloshing around...everywhere. But confronting the climate crisis feels more urgent than ever this year, as countries continue to face historic flooding, wildfires, and storms.

• In 2020, the US alone experienced a record 22 weather and climate disasters that caused $1 billion or more in damage.

“We are moving into the new COP26 in Glasgow, where countries are really going to be faced with where we are standing right now with how to comply with the Paris Agreement,” Telle said. “We are not achieving the targets that we should, so there’s just a lot of momentum around it, public awareness.”

Big picture: Some investors say the industry could produce as many as 1,000 unicorns—companies valued at $1 billion or more—in the coming years.

From 2013 to 2019, returns on investments in the climate-tech space were on average five times higher than overall VC funding. Climate-tech investors could reap up to $150 trillion over the next 30 years.

Click here to read the full story.—GD

The International Space Station will probably be retired before 2030, ~30 years after its launch in 1998.

Naturally, private companies are looking to fill the expanse: Last week, Blue Origin and Sierra Space announced plans to build out Orbital Reef, which would be the first crewed private space station.

• Orbital Reef will be designed to fit 10 people, and those people need somewhere to sleep.

Enter: Sierra Space, which will provide the living quarters for Orbital Reef, by way of its expandable Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE) habitat. It’ll also conduct cargo and crew transportation between the station and Earth.

• Blue Origin, on the other hand, is contracted to create the core modules, utility systems, and provide launch services for heavy-lift equipment for Orbital Reef.
• The company hopes the station will function as a “mixed use business park” for a variety of clients in research and industrial capacities.

Like an interstellar bouncy house, Sierra Space’s three-story LIFE module inflates in space once it reaches low Earth orbit. It can fit a kitchen, lab, garden, and sleeping quarters. The multilayered capsule is designed to weather the perils of space, and it can be attached to other modules.

• Sierra Space is an independent subsidiary of Sierra Nevada Corporation, and it was founded in April 2021 to specialize in LEO missions and equipment.
• Sierra (the parent company) has worked with NASA in the past on initiatives like growing food for astronauts off-world, but this would be LIFE’s real-world debut.

Sierra Space is also designing the Dream Chaser, an air taxi that will take astronauts to and from the space station. It’s designed to land at any runway in the world, opening a new degree of flexibility for launches, which historically have taken off from specially outfitted launchpads.

Looking ahead...It might be a few more years before we see new space stations in orbit. Sierra Space has yet to send any of its modules into orbit, but with competition from rivals like Axiom Space and Lockheed Martin’s Starlab, the race for the next space station is heating up.

View this story on-site.—JM

The infrastructure that emerging technologies are based on doesn’t always get as much attention as the main event—just think about how often you hear the term “data center,” compared to AI—but it’s critical. The flashy stuff can't happen without the foundation.

So, we dug into the tech powering tech. Across October, we wrote pieces like…

• Where do we put all the EV chargers?
• Physical data transfers—the *extremely* hands-on lifeblood of cloud migration.
• The 200-year history of semiconductors.
• The future of EV batteries, in five charts.

And here’s a hub containing all of the articles, in case you want to bookmark ’em all for later.

Looking ahead…We’re covering all things sustainability this month. Keep an eye out for the first piece later this week.

Stat: Amazon owns 20% of Rivian, the electric-truck startup that is looking to IPO at $80 billion later this year.

Quote: “In order to drive the cost down of batteries, we’re removing the expensive components. But at the same time, we’re removing the value of recycling. That’s a huge challenge. It’s kind of a double-edged sword.”—Jeffrey Spangenberger, director of the ReCell Center, on the catch-22 of EV battery recycling

Read: A metaverse veteran on Meta.

Captivating convos: On November 18, TELUS International is hosting How Are YOU Reducing Customer Effort?—a free webinar led by CX expert Matt Dixon. Explore the impact of customer effort, behavioral economics, and how enabling this strategy can empower your business. Register for free here.*

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All week: COP26, the UN’s 26th climate conference, started yesterday in Glasgow, Scotland. It runs until November 12. We’ll pay special attention to any discussion of climate tech, but also to more general progress toward emissions reductions. The climate emergency will affect all tech development in one way or another.

Monday: Web Summit starts today, and runs through Thursday. Speakers like Tim Berners-Lee, Frances Haugen, and Nick Clegg will present throughout the week.

Thursday: Uber announces earnings. We don’t cover Uber very often, especially since they sold off their autonomous vehicles unit. But we’re curious to learn more about the Tesla-Hertz-Uber deal announced last week, and if the company has any further updates on its pledge to help “hundreds of thousands” of its drivers transition to EVs by 2025.

The introduction of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency policy in April, which makes iOS apps request user permission to collect their data and use it to target ads, caused Snap, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to miss out on a collective ~$10 billion in ad revenue.

• In percentage terms, that would translate to a negative impact of 13.2% on Snap’s revenue, 13.2% for Facebook, 7.4% for Twitter, and 7.7% for YouTube.
• Opt-out figures vary app to app, but a majority of prompted users choose not to be tracked.

FWIW...As the FT reports, these estimates are likely conservative. One analyst estimated FB alone has lost ~$8 billion due to the rules.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Data centers can use as much water as a small town—Microsoft just pledged to slash that
• CarbonCapture is one step closer to pulling CO2 from the atmosphere
• Some high-range, low-weight batteries are still too expensive for cars. But not for planes