With climate action being the need of the hour and the urgency to take action to reach net-zero, countries, and businesses all over the world need to step-up their speed and scale of green transformation. While the big players hog the limelight, smaller or lesser-known companies, especially start-ups often stay under-the-radar. To acknowledge their efforts, create awareness, generate media coverage and – more importantly – to enable these companies to find the investment they deserve, a team of dedicated people founded the Diamond List. Published once per year, it is a list of climate start-ups that have been nominated by qualified climate investors.
How it works
Professional investors and analysts nominate early-stage climate companies they believe in. Diamond List shares the resulting list of companies back with them. They also proactively share the list with angel investors and philanthropists who are uniquely risk tolerant and eager to hear the nominations.
Diamond List criteria
A company can be nominated if it is investment worthy, climate focused, at an early stage and/or solving a unique sub problem in climate change or at least has a unique approach.
Why was the Diamond List created?
The Diamond List is an attempt to surface the untapped gems in climate, like early-stage companies that deserve investment but have so far been overlooked.
Investment in climate ventures has increased substantially in the last 6 years, but the sector is still experiencing growing pains, some of which the Diamond List aims to resolve.
Angel investors, philanthropies, and venture capital companies (VCs) new to the space have the risk appetite to support promising, early-stage companies but smaller staffs and fewer resources to do the due diligence and keep up with all the new regulation and climate market changes.
VCs regularly turn away strong teams with high potential because of thesis fit or the opportunity is just a little too early or too risky at that time.
Diamond List helps these groups come together and ask leading climate investors to spotlight the strongest early-stage climate companies so that they could reach high risk capital and get to scale and profit faster.
Inspiration for the Diamond List
The inspiration for Diamond List has come from Hollywood’s Black List for underappreciated screenplays. Since 2005, the Black List has uncovered hidden gems such as ‘Argo’, ‘Juno’, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, and ‘The King’s Speech.’
Impact
A few months after publishing the 2021 Diamond List, start-ups received at a minimum over $3 million in investment thanks to connections made through the list. Further, the list generated inbound interest from job seekers as well as media coverage, including articles, social media coverage, and requests to be featured in climate-focused films and documentaries.
Carbon capture start-ups ripe for investment and poised for impact
Diamond List was first published in 2021 and a number of carbon capture removal and storage start-ups made the list. As mentioned earlier, the list helped these companies get additional exposure and funding, therefore, another list was release in April 2022, which once again features several carbon capture projects in their initial stage.
2021 and 2022 Diamond List
The list below highlights those companies included in the 2021 and 2022 Diamond List that have a focus on decarbonisation.
Cambium Carbon – Turn waste into wood into new trees.
Three Wheels United – Averting 6.5bil tons of CO2 by 2025
Noya – Cooling plants to capture between 11-41M tons of CO2 each year.
Recoolit – Generates high-quality carbon offsets.
Earthly – A platform that helps businesses remove carbon, restore nature
Phykos – Large scale macroalgae cultivation for carbon dioxide removal
Mission Zero Technologies – Developing a direct air capture (DAC)
NovoNutrients – Transforming industrial waste carbon dioxide emissions into protein
Origen – Heavy industry carbon dioxide removal
Packetized Energy – advanced grid service to enable 1-3 gigatons of CO2 reduction
1point8 – Develop technologies that have the potential to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere
CyanoCapture – Affordable carbon capture on an industrial scale by harnessing genetically modified cyanobacteria.
WattCarbon – Calculates the actual Scope 2 carbon emissions for buildings and energy resources
Mote – Recycles wood waste into hydrogen that’s cheaper than fossil fuel hydrogen. Photosynthesis removes carbon from the air and Mote buries it underground.
For more information about the Diamond List, please do visit: https://www.diamondlist.co/
