The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 11 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Zou: Climate tech success is graduating to project finance, not mega-rounds
“Specific to climate tech, it might not make sense to define success as an absolute dollar in venture investment, because at the end of the day, when we think about all this hardware and, you know, hard tech that needs to develop into projects, you want these c…”
Zou: Carbon accounting is oversaturated and behaves more like consulting than SaaS
“Carbon accounting isn't necessarily a market that needs 200 or 300 players. And also I think a lot of them end up being a bit more consulting advisory based than traditional enterprise SaaS like generalist investors understood.”
Kim Zou: Oxy's $1B Carbon Engineering buyout is the first DAC unicorn
“On the acquisition side, I think the one that Climatech investors and founders couldn't stop talking about this year was Oxy's acquisition of carbon engineering at a billion dollars, so the first unicorn we've ever seen in DAC and probably carbon removal.”
Zou: Transportation gets 30% of climate VC despite causing 15% of emissions
“We've tracked transportation accounting for 15% of total emissions. As per the IPCC 2019 report, but receiving 30% of venture and growth investment since 2020. Whereas on the other hand, you know, energy deals, or energy investment made up 22% of overall fundi…”
Zou: Climate tech deal count fell only 3% in 2023
“Deal activity was only down three percent, so you could call that even a tapering relative to twenty-twenty-two rather than a significant decline, so Deals are still getting done. Early stage seed series A still getting done, but that absolute dollar amount th…”
Zou: Series A climate investment dropped 41% in 2023
“Series A investment was down 41% compared to twenty-twenty-two. That's the first time we've seen series A investment drop since we started tracking the space, you know, four years ago.”
Zou: Food and land use climate investment fell 55% in 2023
“This time around, in 23, appetite for food and land use evaporated. There is a distaste for food and land use, in other words, and we saw that That sector was down 55% in investment to three billion this year.”
Zou: Six of top ten climate mega-deals leveraged major public financing
“The second major thing we're noticing across these mega deals is if you look at the funding they've raised in the last two years, I think six out of 10 had raised significant hundreds of millions of dollars of public financing or government-funded rounds, whet…”
Zou: Climate tech exits dropped 50% in 2023 as SPACs fell 80%
“It cut in half, so we tracked 50% less exits in twenty-twenty-three, and this was really driven by SPACs finally fizzing out. I think we started to see that happen towards the beginning of twenty-twenty-two but the count of SPACs were, climate tech SPACs were …”
Zou: Climate tech venture funding fell 30% to $32B in 2023
“Thirty-two billion dollars in venture and growth funding globally in climate tech, which was a 30% decline from the prior year.”
Zou: Industry replaced food and land use as third-largest climate tech vertical
“So before this year, industry actually grew a significant amount. That one has always been underfunded relative to the level of emissions coming from that sector, and it replaced food and land use in that third vertical spot.”