April was a good Q2 start for Prithvi
Between investing in 3 Climate startups in April, Prithvi Ventures is at 7 new Climate investments ytd, our commitment to grow Climate investing isn’t slowing down, regardless of a war/ inflation/ recession/ intense weather patters like the one in SE Asia. Our goal is to grow our core Climate obsessed team as the funds grow, this team is full remote/ defines its own hrs/ is climate obsessed/ meets every few months.
Moving onto investing, for long we have been scouting startups focusing on Methane, until we recently invested in Geo Financial Analytics. Methane is the second most abundant anthropogenic GHG after carbon dioxide (CO2), accounting for about 20 percent of global emissions. Methane is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Over the last two centuries, methane concentrations in the atmosphere have more than doubled, largely due to human-related activities. Because methane is both a powerful greenhouse gas and short-lived compared to carbon dioxide, achieving significant reductions would have a rapid and significant effect on atmospheric warming potential.
Methane emissions are becoming a huge liability for corporations and a risk factor for the insurance underwriters. Natural gas producers are getting rated by the emissions related with their wells and this is expected to impact their product and stock prices going forward. Insurance companies and financial institutions are getting to have a big impact on how oil and gas companies are managing their emissions. In addition to insurers and investors, regulators and even utilities are getting concerned about the emissions associated natural gas. In the future it is expected that utilities will want natural gas that has low fugitive emissions. All natural gas will not be treated equally. Renewable natural gas is already available in the market today and has a premium price. Turkmenistan’s (the former Soviet republic) is one of the world’s worst emitters of methane. Its exported natural gas is becoming crucial to China. Geo financial Analytics provides the first real-world methane emissions ratings of energy producers, based on live satellite data analytics. MethaneScan® 100 rates the top 100 global energy producers by observed methane emission intensity vs. both peers and company-reported emission intensity and maps the corporate entities to securities identifiers. MethaneScan® has expanded their product suite to include their Data Lake that offers a deep dive into the environmental performance of 100,000 other producer-operators — both listed and private — in addition to the top 100. Geo financial recently won the prize for the best new climate technology for insurance. Their MethaneScan® data product has been awarded first prize by Cookhouse Labs for the 2022 Global InsurTech Competition.
Next up on the investment front, nearly 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the collective manufacturing industry. A shift in world-wide manufacturing to bio-based products throughout the supply chain would have massive implications in tilting the climate change scales back in the right direction. Over the past 100 years, yeast, fungi, and bacteria have been the dominant bio- manufacturing platforms for production of high-value bio-based products. Within the past 15 to 20 years there has been an increased effort to add green algae to the cohort of bio-manufacturing organisms, mainly for the production of biofuels but also for nutraceuticals, biomaterials, and biopharmaceuticals. Algae have a chloroplast that can produce proteins that bacteria cannot. But also, they can produce selenoproteins, unlike yeast and fungi. While bacteria have some ability to produce selenoproteins, production is limited due to mechanistic differences which give algae a distinct advantage in selenoprotein production. Furthermore, green algae have massive evolutionary capacity that is largely untapped and can be leveraged through advanced breeding and selection methods via directed evolution.
We recently invested in Prosel Biosciences, that is developing an algal-derived protein fermentation platform to assist with the needs of multiple industries. Whether it is food, plastics, cement, or pharmaceuticals, Prosel can develop highly efficient proteins to help companies meet their sustainability needs. Synthetic biology companies are spending tens of millions of R&D dollars to develop enzymes that will be inherently less potent than enzymes with selenocysteine substitutions, and Prosel’s core technology will enable them to produce a better performing enzyme at a competitive cost.
