Cerulean Ventures

Today we're excited to announce our latest investment in the energy sector — Asoba, founded by Shingai Samudzi, based in Cape Town, South Africa! (link in the comments) South Africa has been facing energy struggles for nearly 20 years, with load shedding and grid reliability leading to blackouts across the country. If there's one thing that's a certainty for development and thriving, it's access to energy— there's a nearly 1:1 correlation between GDP growth and energy access. However, in much the same way that the African continent leapfrogged telecom infrastructure and rapidly adopted mobile internet and fintech, we think there's an opportunity in energy infrastructure on the small, massively distributed scale. What is needed is data, coordination, and the ability to underwrite and take on the risk necessary to bring massively profitable and life-changing assets to market — and that's exactly what Shingai and team are building, starting in South Africa. We believe the team's background in machine learning in the solar industry will be a huge boon and unfair advantage as they go to market to train optimization models on energy use and help add balance and reliability to the SA grid. We see a bright future powered by solar, geothermal, and hydro assets, coordinated by hard-to-get energy data, backstopped and hedged by deep energy markets, allowing people to thrive across the continent in partnership with state utilities, power producers, and grid operators. Onward and upward! Joshua Romisher, CFA Abby Stern Dr. Emile-Reyn Engelbrecht Matthew Stotts 🌐 Duval Van Zijl chiwoneso mashapure Gordon Gould Amer Vohora Jack Wielebinski Rene Reinsberg Moritz Seidel Dr. Holger Sprengel Pablo Alonso Aja Miles Ward Tom O'Keefe Michael Smith

Excited to officially announce Popular Power's Pre-Seed funding round! Super grateful to my partner Manuel Wiechers and to our starting rockstar team members Juan David Behar Rodriguez and Abraham L.. We are so grateful to have awesome investors on board-- some of whom we've had the privilege to get to know closely through the industry in the past several years. We are honored to have on board Amplifica Capital, Cerulean Ventures, Mercy Corps Ventures, 0BS... and special shoutout to long-time supporters turned investors Sarah Valdovinos, Natalie Vergara Giron @ Mercy Corps Ventures, and Jay Dunn at Dunn Family Impact Capital :) We appreciate you all. https://lnkd.in/gU_9duz2

Very happy Popular Power to announce our pre-seed investment round and the launch of our new monitoring platform! It’s been very rewarding to start a new venture with a rockstar partner Morgan Babbs and our growing team! And very grateful to our investors Amplifica Capital, Dunn Family Impact Capital, 0BS, Cerulean Ventures @MercyCorpsVentures, Sarah Valdovinos Lots of work to do to continue to enable the energy transition to distributed solar!

The Cerulean portfolio is rapidly growing its fingerprint across the EU (and India and Kenya, where Earthbanc's boots are on the ground 🥾) Great to see folks like Susanne highlighting the progress, and we're proud to back them from day 1 💪

🚨 New white paper release! CarbonPool and Renoster have released a new white paper, titled "Buffer pools: Why the carbon market needs a new approach to permanence and how insurance can help." The white paper sheds light on how registry buffer pools - the carbon market's main mechanism to secure carbon credit permanence and mitigate against reversals - risk failing to deliver on their promise in the long-term--and how risk mitigation solutions like insurance can do what buffer pools can't, including ensuring carbon credits' permanence for 100+ years. The report is released in tandem with our upcoming webinar on July 22 at 4pm CEST / 10am EST, where CarbonPool co-founder and COO Nandini Wilcke will discuss this topic further with Elias Ayrey (PhD) from Renoster, Dr. Kirti Ramesh from BeZero Carbon, and Injy Johnstone from the University of Oxford. Link to the report page and the webinar are in the comments below. For anyone interested in building a mature carbon market where investing in carbon removal projects is safe and secure, and can scale to meet our global climate goals, this report and webinar are for you.

🌿 Green Fridays with Asoba: IoT in Energy Management: Applications and Benefits 🌿 The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming energy management, enhancing efficiency. This week, we investigate how we can monitor, control, and optimize energy usage across various industries and households. Watch the full video on our website 👉 https://asoba.co/videos/ #GreenFridaysWithAsoba #IoT #EnergyManagement #Sustainability #SmartGrids

Really proud of the ongoing developments happening at Thallo! With the additional functionality, the platform now enables you to manage your entire portfolio from one login. On top of this - all of the infrastructure we provide is available to embed into your existing products and services through our simple API integrations. Simple, effective and trusted carbon market engagement - what more do you need?! 🧐 Also check out our website update - www.thallo.io

Satellite analysis looked at credits sold by Finite Carbon, which runs some of North America’s largest #offset projects. Some #forestcarbon offsets sold by the biggest offsetting company in the US offer little or no benefit to the climate, a satellite analysis has found. https://lnkd.in/dz6_8j4n Finite Carbon, created in 2009 and bought by British multinational #oilandgas giant bp in 2020, is responsible for more than a quarter of the US’s total #carboncredits, which it says it generates from protecting more than 60 “high credibility, high integrity projects” across 1.6m hectares (4m acres). However, experts at the offsets ratings agency Renoster and the non-profit CarbonPlan analyzed three projects accounting for almost half of Finite Carbon’s total credits, with an estimated market value of $334m, according to analysis by market intelligence company AlliedOffsets. Renoster found issues, including trees in a project in the Alaskan Panhandle that were likely never in danger of being cut down in an already extensively logged area. Of the credits Renoster looked at, they found that about 79% should not have been issued. Renoster, a company mostly used by prospective buyers of carbon credits to help them avoid those without real #climate benefits, was commissioned by the nonprofit newsroom SourceMaterial to examine Finite’s projects. CarbonPlan provided additional analysis. “We don’t think that the project should have been allowed to proceed and earn credits,” said Elias Ayrey (PhD), Renoster’s head scientist, commenting on the Alaskan project. The analysis comes amid mounting concern about the global offsetting industry, predicted by Barclays bank to be worth $1.5tn by 2050. US treasury secretary Janet Yellen in May unveiled new principles to help strengthen the #carbonmarket in an effort to “address significant existing challenges”, saying she had seen too many examples of offsets which didn’t represent real #emissions reductions.

One of the major problems with carbon and carbon markets is carbon is a commodity that has almost no demand So if you’re a founder building in the carbon markets, the promises you’re selling to investors are one of two really — “McKinsey says the market will be $50B by 2030”(NGMI) “I have a secret to how I’m going to blow this market up” 💯 We should all be thinking about what levers are necessary to pull to _make carbon a secular market_, not assume some secularity (really assuming a cyclical trend), and hope for the best And founders are some of the people who are working to unearth those paths, not those relying on “shoulds” in the rest of the market for them to build their businesses into

The meteoric rise of AI demand can be harnessed to balance grids, finance new renewable energy installations with offtake agreements, and with dispatchable training workloads, help grids meet peak demand Software, data, fintech, and new asset light companies will be needed to drive this energy and compute revolution - you know where to find us 😉