Predicting what’s in and what’s out in any given year is next to impossible. And yet, we’re confident on this one: For 2022, batteries are in.

Battery technology is the key to electrifying transportation and transitioning to renewable energy. That means scaling up global battery manufacturing is essential for automakers to meet lofty EV targets—like becoming carbon neutral by 2050 or ending sales of new gas-powered vehicles worldwide by 2040—and to meet broader climate goals.

So where do we stand today? A new report from BatteryBits, assembled by industry professionals from Volta Foundation and Intercalation, provides a deep dive into the ecosystem, highlighting the most significant deals, breakthroughs, and challenges faced in 2021.

We broke it down in detail here—below is a quick highlight reel.

Big picture: The global race for battery production is well underway, and everyone is chasing China. In 2020, there was about 630 GWh of global battery production capacity, with nearly 75% of that in China.

• Companies have announced plans to boost production capacity to about 2,300 GWh by 2025, according to the report, and industry experts expect that capacity could rise to about 3,400 GWh by the end of the decade.
• Assuming an average battery capacity of 100 kWh, that’s enough to power about 34 million EVs per year.

Today, just three companies make up almost 70% of the EV battery manufacturing market: China’s CATL, South Korea’s LG Energy Solution, and Japan’s Panasonic.

Zoom out: The governments of 30 countries, states, or regions have set deadlines for phasing out fossil-fuel vehicles. The list includes California, Massachusetts, and New York in the US, which aim to reach the goal by 2035. Meanwhile, investment in climate tech has reached historic levels over the last year—with the vast majority of the funding going to transportation and energy ventures—and experts expect that momentum to continue in 2022.

But, but, but…In the near-term, EV makers and battery manufacturers will face price volatility due to shortages of raw materials like lithium. Growing demand has led to big investments in mining and inspired innovation in extraction techniques.

Click here to read our full breakdown of the report.—GD

If you’ve ever balked at paying, like, $60 for a video game, you are obviously not a venture capital firm trying to get in on the metaverse’s first smash-hit app.

To wit: This week, VR gaming studio Alta closed a $12.4 million seed round that values it at $62 million. The studio makes an open-world RPG called A Township Tale, which topped the Oculus sales charts for more than seven weeks last year.

• The company says it has 500,000 users and plans to raise more capital as early as this year so that it can hire more people.
• Alta uses a technique called procedural generation, that allows it to combine algorithmic- and human-generated content on a large scale.

Alta’s not the first VR content developer to milk metaverse success for millions in funding.

Within, the maker of popular VR fitness app Supernatural, was scooped up by Meta for a reported $400+ million—the acquisition is currently under review by the FTC, though.

• Meta also bought Beat Studios, which makes another popular VR fitness app called BeatSaber, for an undisclosed sum in 2019, along with several other mixed-reality studios.

And two other independent VR content developers have landed fresh batches of cash in recent weeks:

• RecRoom, which makes a social-gaming platform that is available on VR and other mediums, raised $145 million in December, bringing its valuation to $3.5 billion.
• AmazeVR, a VR concert platform, raised $15 million earlier this month.

Looking ahead: The killer app for mixed reality has yet to arrive, but plenty of studios are hard at work trying to change that. Expect the VR content development space to continue to attract attention from metaverse-minded investors and Big Tech buyers alike.

Click here to view on-site.—DM

In 2021, space investors really took to the old adage of aiming for the moon.

And it’s landed among the stars: VCs poured a record $17 billion into 328 different space companies in 2021, per a report from venture capital firm Space Capital. The figure beats the record set in 2020, which was $9.1 billion. Space investment accounted for 3% of total global venture capital flows, according to the report.

• Over the last decade, the United States is the leader in space investment (62%), with Japan coming in second (30%), followed by Italy in a distant third (2%).

Money has come from all corners of the universe to fuel space companies, but it mostly flowed to one segment: launch and satellite companies, which claimed 95% of all investment last year. Part of the remaining 5% went to emerging space industries, like biospheres.

• A whopping $4.3 billion was invested in space infrastructure—the hardware and software used to build, launch and operate space tech—in Q4 2021, led by mega rounds in companies like Sierra Space, SpaceX, and Planet Labs.
• Some examples of emerging space startups: Astroscale, which specializes in debris cleanup; CubeSat maker Swarm Technologies, which uses sandwich-sized satellites to transfer small amounts of data to IoT devices and is now owned by SpaceX.

A quick aside on public markets: 2021 was also—of course—a significant year for space SPACs, as companies like Rocket Lab and Planet Labs both went public via reverse mergers.

Looking ahead…The space economy will only continue to grow as launch and satellite companies expand, satellite broadband develops, companies vie to build the first private space stations, and space debris cleanup enterprises try and get to work.

Click here to view on-site.—JM

Stat: Last year, energy transition and climate tech netted more than $900 billion in investment, per a BloombegNEF analysis. Most of that $ went to renewable energy, which attracted $366 billion, with transportation electrification next at $270 billion.

Quote: “Every time I would talk about crypto, my analytics would go through the roof.”—Francis Suarez, mayor of Miami and one of the country’s more prominent crypto mayors

Read: Seven technologies to watch in 2022, according to Nature.

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• A smart toilet seat company raised $30 million.
• A seven-year-old piece of a SpaceX rocket will likely hit the moon.
• Speaking of the moon, MoonDao is literally trying to take its investors there.
• Gordon Ramsay says he’s only eating (and serving) lab-grown meat from now on.

Google would like to introduce its group of large language models, LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). It announced LaMDA in May 2021 at its I/O event, but didn’t provide specs at the time.

Now, specs: The models range from big (2 billion parameters) to very big (137 billion parameters, compared to Open AI’s GPT-3s 175 billion), and have been trained on 1.5 trillion words.

• As Jack Clark at Import AI points out, LaMDA has a notable emphasis on dialogue—half of its training data comes from “dialogues data from public forms.”
• And 12.5% of its data comes from “code documents from sites related to programming,” so that LaMDA can have some ability to parse programming languages.

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

• How the ‘world's first’ AI-managed ETF stacks up, almost five years later
• Ready to electrify your vehicle fleet? EV fleet tech providers want to help
• Experts say 2022 is the year smart city projects move from flashy to functional