Bayes Entrepreneurs Talk: Building a Climate Tech Startup

CityVentures hosted another instalment of its Entrepreneurs Talk series at Bayes Business School with a deep dive into climate tech startups.

Freelance journalist and podcaster Bex Burn-Callander, former enterprise editor at The Telegraph, hosted the talk which focussed on the experiences of climate tech founders.

CityVentures, the University’s entrepreneurship support programme, also hosted a startup showcase which took place before the talk. This offered the chance for emerging founders to platform their startup ideas and visions for the future.

Speakers at the talk included:

• Louise Parlons Bentata, co-founder and CEO of Bluemethane, a startup that unlocks the value of wasted methane from liquid streams to create a clean energy resource
• Chris Smith (Executive MBA 2005), founder and CEO of Meld Energy, a large-scale green hydrogen project developer based in the UK
• Richard Davis (Corporate Strategy and Innovation MBA 2012), co-founder and CEO of 51toCarbonZero, a climate success platform that helps companies automate carbon footprint measurement

From marketing to methane: how Louise made the jump into climate tech

The speakers shared their career backgrounds before working in climate tech. Bluemethane founder Louise said she worked in marketing before pivoting to sustainability. Wanting to find out more about ways to prevent the products she was marketing from later ending up in landfill, she embarked on a postgraduate degree at Cambridge in Sustainable Business Leadership.

“Once I understood more of the sustainability concepts and frameworks, I didn’t want to go back to marketing and looked for opportunities to apply what I had learned,” she said. She then met the man who would later become her business partner on a virtual climate technology fellowship programme. But it was not until the pair were on their way to their first accelerator programme for their new business that they finally met ‘offline’.

“We set up this business, gave up the things that paid our mortgages, and we had never met in person. We met for the first time on the platform of King’s Cross on our way to an accelerator event.”

Telling the audience more about her venture, she said: “Bluemethane exists to stop methane emissions from any liquid source. To do that we have technology that measures how much methane is in a liquid and we capture it, as well as preventing further methane from being produced from that waste stream.”

‘Solving my own problem’: Richard on reducing corporate carbon footprints 

For Richard, his climate tech venture was born from his own frustrations with data crunching when it came to the climate footprint of his last employer.

“I experienced the problem I was trying to solve myself at my last company. I was Chief of Business Strategy across international business, and I was trying to crack the data for the carbon footprint of a £9 billion global business. I couldn’t make sense of the data or find anything from the tech side of things that gave me everything I needed.”

Having developed his own company to solve this issue with his business partner, Richard now works with businesses including Charlie Bighams, Renault Trucks and Photobox to quickly measure and reduce carbon emissions across enterprises.

One small project can lead to big investment: Chris on getting backing for his business

For Chris and his hydrogen developer company, it was just one project that led to the first major investment into his business from a US Fortune 500 company.

“Our first investor was a US-global fuel trader and distributor. They commissioned us do a small report on how hydrogen could impact their markets. They liked it so much that they bought half our company. That’s how Meld has got to where it is today: having a strong, technical and commercial understanding as well as insight of the hydrogen market in the UK.”

Trump, ‘green-hushing’ and selling in a buyer’s market: the challenges of climate tech

The founders shared their perspectives on the shift in public discourse relating to climate change and achieving Net Zero. As Trump works to repeal dozens of environmental regulations for fossil fuel companies over in the US, the conversation turned to the impact of UK and global politics on the climate tech industry.

Louise mentioned the concept of ‘green-hushing’, when companies deliberately downplay their sustainability credentials, and shared her experiences with this while trying to attract investors to her business.

“We exist to help prevent a billion tonnes of greenhouse gases coming from water each year. But what I was hearing and feeling was that people didn’t want to know our work was sustainable, green or clean. We were advised to downplay this aspect of our business and focus on resource efficiency instead. But our mission remains the same, we just market ourselves in a more palatable way for investors,” she said.

Chris added: “It’s been a remarkable ride. The impact of what’s happening in the States has been huge over here and we’ve seen the impact of the UK-US trade deal on markets such as bioethanol. The changing attitude towards net zero in some quarters and the travails of the UK economy have also created challenges.”

Richard said despite so much uncertainty, opportunities come from challenging times. “There’s lots of companies in this space who are struggling which means there’s opportunity to acquire and integrate talent. We’ve created a couple partnerships now with companies who were having difficulties.”

Startup Showcase

While experienced founders shared lessons learned in climate tech, budding entrepreneurs networked at the startup showcase.

Founders of loneliness-fighting app ‘Becca’, Kateryna Ushmaieva and Mohamed Omar, were two members of the CityVentures community showcasing their new business. While it is still in the early stages of development, the app promises to help people manage and build their relationships by nudging you to reach out or respond to your phone contacts. Co-founder Kateryna is a graduate of Bayes Business School based at Venture Space and has accessed support from CityVentures as a student and recent graduate.

Venture Space is the City St George's incubator workspace seeking to support start-ups in the heart of the City of London. Venture Space welcomes entrepreneurs, students and alumni from the university as well as entrepreneurs from the City of London area, to make up the CityVentures startup ecosystem. Being part of the community comes with a wide range of benefits to help accelerate the growth of startups.