Create a More Sustainable Future: The 2019 class of Techstars Sustainability Accelerator in partnership with The Nature Conservancy
Today ten companies from around the US and Mexico are joining us in Denver, Colorado for an intensive three-months where they will accelerate their companies, and their impact, to create a more sustainable future for us all. Rooted in hope, urgency, and action, these venture scale companies are enabling a world where people and nature can thrive together.
Inspired by the success of last year’s inaugural program, our companies continue to be aligned with The Nature Conservancy’s core focus of tackling climate change, providing food and water sustainably, building healthy cities, and protecting our land and water. In The Science of Sustainability TNC describes ways to balance economic growth with resource conservation over the next 30 years, and these ten companies are the embodiment of those strategies.
Over the next 13 weeks we will surround these entrepreneurs with mentors, coaches, and investors from the Techstars network along with conservation scientists and subject matter experts from The Nature Conservancy. All of this wouldn’t be possible without the amazing support of our Denver and Boulder Startup Communities. The crescendo of our program, Demo Day, will take place on October 30th in downtown Denver.
Hannah, August and I are honored and excited to introduce the 2019 class of the Techstars Sustainability Accelerator in partnership with the Nature Conservancy:
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2NDNATURE
Cities and counties spend billions annually trying to comply with Clean Water Act, while the quality of urban waterways continue to decline. 2NDNATURE has embedded our proven science into the first enterprise cloud stormwater management and compliance platform. |
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AQUAOSO Technologies, PBC
AQUAOSO is building a water resilient future through advanced water risk analytics. They help financial institutions, insurers, investors, corporations and policy makers identify, understand, monitor and mitigate water risk through their software platform. |
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Bext360
Bext360 provides comprehensive and measurable accountability for critical supply chains like coffee, seafood, timber, minerals, cotton and palm oil. The SaaS platform provides a traceable fingerprint from producer to consumer using blockchain and quantifiable sustainability measurements. |
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Gybe
The health and quality of freshwater basins, rivers, estuaries and coastal areas are under increased pressure due to human activity and climate change. Gybe uses satellite imagery and proprietary ground-based hardware to transform the management, conservation, and restoration of aquatic ecosystems. |
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Mammoth Trading
Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of water consumption worldwide, and yet it’s among the least digitized sectors of the global economy, which limits growers, regulators, and conservation groups. With their software, TAPP H2O, agricultural producers can easily track and trade water allocations, submit regulatory compliance documentation, and quantify conservation practices. |
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microTERRA
The biggest pollutant of fresh water worldwide is agriculture. microTERRA uses advanced biotechnology and IoT to convert the excess nutrients in agricultural runoff into a high-quality protein that can feed livestock. |
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mobius
Over 300 million tons of carbon is lost annually as waste from food, forestry, and agriculture. mobius is converting this waste into value using green chemistry and biology, creating biodegradable plastics and platform chemicals for applications in agriculture and beyond. |
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Nori
Nori is a marketplace for reversing climate change. They enable companies to pay for removing CO2 from the atmosphere through more sustainable farming practices that improve soil conditions and ensure we can still grow food in 50 years. Nori makes it possible to fix the food system and pull CO2 out of the air. |
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Propagate Ventures
Propagate Ventures is an agroforestry investment platform focused on bridging the capital and operational needs to integrate tree crops into farmland. Their agroforestry analytics and project development tools support farmers in the design, implementation, and management of tree-crop systems to increase farm profitability and ecological capacity. |
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Regen Network
Regen Network is a digital platform that connects farmers, brands, and institutions to make regenerative ecological agreements based on verifiable data so that we can rapidly accelerate the adoption of regenerative agriculture and conservation, and reverse global climate change. |
Announcing the 2018 class of Techstars Sustainability Accelerator in partnership with The Nature Conservancy
With ten companies arriving today in Denver, Colo. – we are thrilled to announce Techstars Class 145 – the inaugural class of Techstars Sustainability Accelerator in partnership with The Nature Conservancy. Rooted in hope, urgency and action – we are honored to be supporting these companies that wake up everyday to solve for a future where both humans and nature thrive.
Representing a diverse set of industries and founders, these companies work across areas as broad as water, waste, renewable energy, fisheries and the built environment.
Over the next three months, companies will receive mentorship from world-class scientists and subject matter experts from The Nature Conservancy in addition to business and technology mentorship from the broader entrepreneurial community. The program caps off with Demo Day on October 17th in Denver.
We’d be remiss not to thank each of you that has played a part in building a strong foundation for this program. Together, we look forward to doing work that matters – for people and the planet.
Without further ado, please meet our 2018 class:
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Aqulytics is a data collaboration platform for the sustainable management of water championing open and transparent data throughout the globe in order to combat the effects of pollution in freshwater resources. |
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Outdoor places are disappearing. Every 3 days, land roughly the size of Manhattan is lost to development. Conserve With Us is an online conservation fundraising and engagement platform that mobilizes capital and communities to conserve the natural resources we all care about. |
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Presently 88% of global fisheries are not certified as sustainable. FlyWire’s patented video technology solves the observer data deficiency problem – critical to transitioning the world’s commercial fisheries to certified sustainable. |
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Environmental data science platform to drive financial stability in the water sector in the face of climate change and weather volatility. The platform allows for rapid design and testing of financial contracts including weather risk transfer (insurance) and green bonds. Additional applications include conservation/impact assessment, water price optimization, and city-scale climate risk modeling. |
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Clean technology solutions provider that improves renewable energy project economics through optimized decision making in project design, operations, and finance for energy storage applications. |
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Technology platform to deliver radically sustainable and healthy homes for everyone. NODE’s platform will leverage standardized components designed for simplicity: allowing 4 people – without any special skills – to assemble an entire house in under a month, delivering the most sustainable homes at 50% of the cost and 25% of the time. |
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Creating the world’s first smart urban watersheds by providing our customers, including municipalities and large facilities, the information they need to identify, track, predict, and prevent pollution & flooding in real time. |
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Kodo is a B2B SaaS that makes it easy, fun, and effective any size company to implement initiatives. Kodo helps companies build a purpose driven culture that counter-attacks the lack of employee retention and engagement in the modern workplace. |
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Global provider of seafood traceability software that improves business efficiency and increases trust and transparency in seafood supply chains. Mission is to improve the social, environmental, and financial sustainability of seafood enterprises and fish harvesters by making seafood supply chains more transparent. |
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20% of clean water produced every day is lost due to leaks. Currently those leaks are often found too late, after they break and cause sinkholes on the streets. WatchTower Robotics patented technology exists to find leaks, save water and protect infrastructure. |
Announcing Techstars Sustainability Accelerator, in Partnership with The Nature Conservancy
in Accelerators The Techstars Sustainability Accelerator, in Partnership with The Nature Conservancy, will ensure that we innovate to make the world a better place to live. Techstars and The Nature Conservancy are seeking entrepreneurs with commercially viable technologies that can rapidly scale to help sustainably provide food and water and address global issues like climate change.
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is a global conservation organization dedicated to conserving the lands and waters on which all life depends. Guided by science, The Nature Conservancy’s creates innovative, on-the-ground solutions to the world’s toughest challenges so that nature and people can thrive together.
The Techstars Sustainability Accelerator, in Partnership with The Nature Conservancy will be based in Denver, Colorado. Applications open in January 2018 and will launch in July 2018. The mentorship-driven accelerator program will connect entrepreneurs, conservationists, corporate partners, and investors to deliver products that can put the world on a path to sustainability. In addition, conservationists will learn from entrepreneurs how to quickly innovate and scale commercially viable businesses.
This marks the second Techstars Accelerator program in partnership with a non profit organization. Techstars is excited to blend its expertise in disrupting industries through innovation with The Nature Conservancy’s expertise in conservation and sustainability. Mission-driven, for-profit companies are encouraged to apply.
Techstars is the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. With an accelerator portfolio market cap of more than $10 billion, Techstars has 34 accelerators and thousands of Techstars Startup Program events in nearly 170 countries.