10 Greentech Innovators to Watch (and Learn From)

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In our comprehensive guide to green technology, we listed industrial and corporate initiatives as one of the key drivers of Greentech development. But to successfully address current and prevent future contamination, those efforts need to be two-fold: 

  • it is essential to raise awareness among existing companies about the benefits of implementing more green solutions, and
  • more young, startup companies need to be 100% dedicated to building solutions to reduce our current environmental impact.

On this occasion, we wanted to share a list of 10 Greentech startups and a couple of industry veterans leading the way in sustainability. How? By employing the latest technologies to address different environmental challenges.

Here are their stories. 

Biome Makers

Biome Makers is an AgTech company that supports the future of sustainable agriculture through soil recovery. Founded and headquartered in California, they have a distributed team focused on building technology that promotes productive, precise, and restorative agriculture to discover the full potential of the land. The core of their work revolves around the integration of soil microbiology to fuel agricultural decisions, optimize farming practices, and reverse the arable soil degradation. 

Biome Makers have the most advanced computing abilities and the largest taxonomic database counting 24 million microorganisms. Owing to their patented BeCorp solutions, farmers and agricultural advisors get data on soil nutrient cycling, health, and biodiversity to verify the sustainability of their farmland parcels. Ultimately, they get actionable insights to address the pressing agricultural challenges and improve soil health. 

One thing we really love about them? They donate a part of their revenue to organizations and activities that address soil health recovery.

Skone Labs

The Skone Labs team is “transforming the food industry”. They are developing sensory devices and a dynamic AI engine that serves as a revolutionary food monitoring system: 

  • Octagon smart device, which helps improve quality management, and 
  • Skone AI that predicts the life expectancy, ripening, and spoilage of fresh produce.

These solutions enable data-driven decision-making, helping agricultural professionals increase margins and comply with regulations while reducing their CO2 footprint. Skone Labs' advanced tech can:

  • predict the changes in food quality 
  • accurately estimate produce spoilage
  • monitor the quality and ripening
  • identify best suppliers
  • improve inventory management
  • boost ESG performance
  • estimate CO2 emissions

SkoneLabs is effectively monitoring and predicting shelf life of fresh food produce using smart sensor devices and AI.

Their green technology solutions encompass a range of agricultural use cases, from small-town farmers to wholesale suppliers, as well as large storage facilities, ripening centers, retail stores, and the hospitality sector.

Normative

Normative built a platform that revolutionizes how businesses collect and report on their carbon footprint. Their science-based carbon accounting software provides accurate, specific, and actionable data to map business activities, calculate their footprint, and reveal emission hotspots. This helps businesses understand their emission profile and suggests the highest-impact actions.

Coupled with their Normative Climate Strategy team, which offers tailored advice, businesses can devise the best plan to reduce emissions and achieve net zero. Through rigorous calculations and a network of supply chains, normative provides enterprises with a holistic view of emissions and insights they need to reach their emission targets.

Arrival

Arrival designs and produces top-of-the-line electric vehicles for a sustainable driving experience. They are committed to The Climate Pledge to reduce air pollution and achieve net-zero carbon emissions. Arrival’s automotive solutions are compatible with all major charging systems and deliver maximum uptimes, which ultimately extend the length of your trip.

With 10 years of experience in their pocket, they now boast a line of sustainable vehicles, including Arrival XL Van, Arrival Bus, and Arrival Cars for individual use.

The sustainability practices are applied across the entire supply chain:

  • Eco-friendly manufacturing methods: They are pioneering a decentralized method of electric vehicle production, building their products locally, in low-footprint Microfactories, using cell-based robotic assembly. 
  • Composite materials: The materials they use are 50% lighter than steel, but are durable and damage-resistant. 
  • Design: Vehicles are built by molding and shaping recyclable materials onto the vehicle, eliminating the complex welding processes typically involved in vehicle manufacturing. All components are modular and can be used across different Arrival vehicle platforms, allowing sustainable manufacture and rapid development of new vehicles.
  • Simplified maintenance: Arrival’s Built-in technology enables easy and affordable servicing. Their vehicle software is simple to upgrade, while recyclable hardware components allow seamless replacement.

Most importantly, they have ensured that their vehicles provide advanced safety and security features. They continue to develop technology to assist and automate driving, thereby reducing the occurrence and severity of road hazards. But in the event of a crash, the vehicles are built to deliver a combination of active and passive safety measures to guarantee maximum protection for the driver.

HydroPoint

HydroPoint builds smart indoor and outdoor water management techonology that collects accurate site-specific weather data. Their systems run high-speed energy-balanced weather models to calculate temperature, wind, humidity, and solar radiation across the US. Utilizing big data and the cloud, HydroPoint tech can calculate evapotranspiration rate and help prevent under or overwatering of the land and crops. 

They have dedicated the last 20 years to producing WeatherTRACK and  Baseline, smart irrigation systems intended to help agricultural professionals reduce water waste, optimize their irrigation process, and reduce overall costs.

WeatherTRACK is their flagship greentech solution - a line of smart irrigation controllers, flow products, and cloud-based central management systems. They deliver real-time weather updates in just 2 minutes for better resource conservation. To increase transparency and prevent “water blindness”, WeatherTRACK sensors monitor water usage 24/7 and offer prompt leak detection. 

Gybe

Gybe is a water quality management app that offers daily insights and a general overview of waterbody evolution. It helps identify problem areas, understand long-term trends, and determine the most fruitful restoration actions for maintaining healthy and resilient water ecosystems. 

GybeMaps utilizes satellite imagery and ground sensors to monitor water quality and uncover existing blind spots for users across the United States, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. It is built to monitor any surface water body, including coastal areas, rivers, reservoirs, and lakes. The information can be utilized to build resilient freshwater management plans and improve water stewardship. 

Gybe is an automated system that includes a set of analytics tools that offer real-time data and compare it against historical to identify fluctuations and make accurate predictions. This allows easy detection of algae blooms, turbidity, or sediments.

SLY

The team behind the SLY ClimateTech team developed Treeage, AI technology for the early identification and classification of wildfires. Their solution can detect the earliest signs of fire and help mitigate the most dangerous scenarios to maximize the safety of the local community. 

Treeage offers 24/7 monitoring and inspects high volumes of data to inform decisions in wildlife control. They utilize terrestrial and satellite imagery to gain an overview of all landscapes, even the most remote ones. Their sensors cover vast areas of different landscape contours in various weather conditions, providing more room for an effective response. 

FireGuardia

FireGuardia is an innovative engineering and manufacturing startup that builds non-toxic fire suppression methods to fight residential and commercial fires without the side effects caused by traditional fire retardants. 

The secret ingredient? The state-of-the-art formula that changes the way we protect everything from textiles and products to buildings. To contribute to carbon neutrality and enforce a circular economy, they use only 100% non-toxic materials safe on skin, fabric, and wood, thus preventing any damage to our health or the environment.

FireGuardia’s fireproofing alternatives include Personal Protection Equipment (PPE), alternative fuels, architectural engineering designs, city infrastructure, and medical products. These are currently used across industries - manufacturing, construction, and consumer goods production - addressing public health and environmental concerns successfully. 

Bonus: How to Track, Measure, and Report on Carbon Footprint

Last, but in no way the least two startups on our list - Watershed and Emitwise - invested their funds into creating sustainability management software built to monitor, measure, and report on carbon footprint. These provide greater control over supply chain emissions and equip users with the findings to devise an effective sustainable procurement strategy.

Both act as a hub for tracking water, waste, and pollution data that companies can use to drive decarbonization. 

Watershed and Emitwise both rely on machine learning to categorize data, identify errors and anomalies, and get insight into a company’s carbon footprint. Users can generate granular reports and benchmark the data against industry peers, get validated by third-party auditors, and find opportunities to reduce emission

What You Can Do to Help

There is a growing interest among companies in corporate social responsibility initiatives, but we are particularly excited about an increasing number of organizations willing to take the driver’s seat in the ecological revolution.  

Since day one, the Inviggo team has been participating in local environmental initiatives and continuously seeks new ways to contribute to the community. Through some of our projects, we participated in building more accessible and sustainable software. We also donated and collaborated with green non-profit organizations to create solutions that make a real difference. 

And we see that we’re not the only ones fighting the green fight, with the majority of people willing to adopt a sustainable lifestyle and change their buying habits. They are, recycling, reducing consumption, and switching to eco-friendly and locally sourced produce to minimize their impact (and support the local economy in the process). 

Want to do more? Here are a few ideas (and organizations) to help you make even better choices: 

  • Bowery is an entire network of vertical farms revolutionizing the food supply chain while delivering more nutritious and fresh ingredients. Their high-tech indoor farms are powered by BoweryOS which combines AI, software, and hardware to ensure ideal growing conditions. 
  • Bevi cuts the need for recycling in the core. Their bottle-less water dispensers are easily installed in any residential or commercial space to bring smarter and personalized hydration options, enriched with vitamins, caffeine, or different flavors. 
  • Commons mobile app enables you to track your footprint and always make the low-carbon choice - find greener transportation routes, switch to discover sustainable brands and switch to renewable energy sources to take action that produces real results.

Featured image by Alena Koval

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