Google zeroed in on these 3 categories of climate companies to boost
The Voltpost team.
Photo courtesy Voltpost and Google.
Thursday marked the third Demo Day for the Google for Startups Accelerator: Climate Change program, where startups in the program presented the status of their startup, capping off 10 weeks of programming and mentorship from Google’s robust network of in-house experts, training, and credits to use Google technology.
This year, the 12 companies mostly fell into three broad categories: Artificial intelligence, electric vehicle infrastructure, and providing companies with better data to decarbonize their operations. There are a couple exceptions: For example, Sesame Solar is decarbonizing disaster response, and Bodhi is improving the customer experience for home solar installations.
Google’s startup accelerator programs are all focused on using artificial intelligence, and some have industry themes like gaming or the cloud economy, particular geographies like India or Brazil, or underrepresented founders like Black founders or Latino founders. All the programs are equity free, meaning Google does not take a stake in the companies for participating, and so far 1,100 startups have participated since the programs launched in 2016.
For this latest cohort, all of the participants had to be somewhere between their seed and series A rounds of investment, already generating revenue or with an established user base, with five employees or more, and with the potential to benefit from Google’s Cloud, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.
Soupid Roy Chowdhury, founder of Eugenie AI
Photo courtesy Eugenie AI and Google
Matt Ridenour, Head of Startup Ecosystem at Google in the U.S., told CNBC he derives a sense of meaning in supporting climate change startups.
“I care about climate tech for many reasons, but most personally, having three young children, I often think about the world that they are inheriting. When I read the headlines about the dangers of the climate crisis, I feel a personal obligation to be a part of supporting innovative climate solutions to scale,” Ridenour told CNBC. “This is one of the greatest gifts I believe I can offer to my children and future generations.”
The programs are also good for Google business because they get early stage companies using the company’s technology, giving it an early edge over competitors like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple.
“Google sees value in supporting the best startups and founders around the world. As they work with our people, products and tools, we mutually benefit. And supporting early stage companies sparks further innovation in the ecosystem, providing further opportunities for developers to build their business on Google products — like Cloud and Android for example,” Ridenour told CNBC.
Google has hosted three climate change startup accelerators for North American companies in the last three years, and all 33 of the participants are all still operating, a spokesperson for Google told CNBC.
The Sesame Solar team.
Photo courtesy Sesame Solar and Google.
Using artificial intelligence to fight climate change
Alphabet-owned Google is itself in the midst of a company-wide push to focus on improving its product offerings with artificial intelligence. Many of the companies in the latest climate change accelerator employ AI and machine learning to help with various tasks such as agricultural soil monitoring, decarbonization of commercial buildings, and improving the process of recycling textiles.
“Teams are leaning deeper into developing AI and ML models to address climate change,” Ridenour told CNBC. “By partnering with emerging technologies like these, startups can have an outsized positive impact, developing solutions and innovations faster and more accurately than ever before.”
Agrology helps farmers adapt to climate change by providing field-level data on smoke, drought, irrigation optimization, microclimate weather forecasts from extreme weather, pest and disease outbreaks. Also, Agrology has a system to monitor the carbon content in soil to help farmers quantify carbon sequestration they achieve with regenerative farming practices and, if they are interested, participate in the carbon credit markets.
The Agrology team working on a farm.
Photo courtesy Agrology and Google.
During the Google accelerator, Agrology made its product more accurate.
“Through mentorship they received in the accelerator, Agrology was able to build a new, more efficient API that uses integrated Google Machine Learning products, increasing their training and testing dataset by over 400%, and reducing their error rate by 4x,” Ridenour told CNBC. “This will help them deliver more accurate data to farmers so they can grow better and more sustainably.”
Another startup within the cohort, Cambio, is using AI to help companies decarbonize large commercial buildings.
“Once companies have set their climate pledges, they find that data tracking and decarbonization across any real estate, whether it’s owned or occupied, is the hardest part of their sustainability journey. Implementation remains a blackbox,” Stephanie Grayson, a co-founder of Cambio, said on Thursday during the demo day.
Cambio provides a baseline carbon footprint for a building, and then uses AI based on previous building projects and recommendations from leading building scientists and data scientists to provide the customer with a path on how to get that building to net-zero. “The bottom line is we’re democratizing best in class building science across the industry at large,” Grayson said.
Leia de Guzman and Stephanie Grayson, co-founders of Cambio.
Photo courtesy Cambio and Google.
“During the accelerator, Cambio was able to connect with Google’s real estate team to get direct product feedback and discuss the topic of decarbonizing buildings,” Ridenour told CNBC. “Armed with Cambio’s ML models, managers can plot an entire real estate portfolio’s path to net zero, a near-term requirement for publicly-traded companies as part of the SEC’s latest carbon emissions transparency proposal.”
Another example is Refirberd, which is using spectroscopy and artificial intelligence to sort recycled textiles, remove buttons and zippers, and send processed textiles to the recycler that can best manage that particular batch of textiles.
Eugenie.AI uses artificial intelligence to help heavy manufacturers track their emissions, report that data for any relevant compliance standards and reduce those emissions with recommendations on how to solve a particular problem.
Refiberd co-founders, Sarika Bajaj and Tushita Gupta.
Photo courtesy Refiberd and Google.
Electric vehicle infrastructure
“As cars become more and more electrified, a variety of startups are tackling the massive EV industry opportunity in creative ways,” Ridenour told CNBC. Indeed, 14% of new cars sold in 2022 that were electric, up from 9% in 2021 and less than 5% in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency.
Batt Genie, one of the startups Google picked for its most recent climate change cohort, was spun out of Venkat Subramanian’s labs at the University of Washington and uses software to improve the function and efficiency of lithium ion batteries, which are used in consumer electronics, electric vehicles and grid storage battery applications.
The battery management system, or BMS, in a lithium ion battery monitors how much charge is left and regulates charging. Batt Genie’s software aims to makes the BMS system more efficient and productive. If a traditional electric vehicle battery lasts for about six years, the same battery can last for 12 years with Batt Genie’s improved BMS, CEO Manan Pathak said on Thursday.
The Electric Fish team.
Photo courtesy Electric Fish and Google.
Another startup within the cohort, ElectricFish Energy, is making an energy storage system that both charges electric vehicles quickly which have smart chargers that store cheap, clean power from the grid when it is available.
“The current state of electric grid is fundamentally broken,” Anurag Kamal, CEO ElectricFish, said on Thursday. “We are the only ones who understands that EV charging is incredibly connected to feeding energy back to the grid itself,” meaning that the ElectricFish device can serve as a source of backup power.
Another company working to improve EV infrastructure is Voltpost, which converts lampposts into electric vehicle chargers. Voltpost has partnered with the New York City Department of Transportation to pilot its lamp posts into EV chargers. And Voltpost is also conducting a pilot at the Detroit Smart Parking Lab in Michigan. During the accelerator, Voltpost connected with the Google Maps team to discuss whether electric vehicle charging locations could be added to Google Maps or Android Auto.
Decarbonization data and reporting
The third area of focus for the startups included in the climate change cohort was improving the data companies use to track their own emissions.
“As governments require more carbon emissions reporting, companies need better data to track their emissions. Startups are offering better analysis and tracking to help customers and consumers understand their emissions and gain actionable recommendations on how to operate more sustainably,” Ridenour told CNBC.
For example, Cleartrace provides auditable emissions data for companies.
“The issue is data around the electricity space, the energy space, and the environmental reporting space, is very hard to come by, very siloed, very error prone,” CEO Lincoln Payton said on Thursday. Before starting Cleartrace, Payton was the head of investment banking for BNP Paribas Americas. “I retired from that to address the biggest issue I saw, which is the quality data available in the transfer to the renewable energy world.”
The Cleartrace team.
Photo courtesy Cleartrace and Google.
Cleartrace is particularly focused on measurement techniques for Scope 3 emissions — emissions associated with a company’s entire supply chain or value chain, which can be fiendishly difficult to track. It’s also looking at helping companies certify how green their operations are, particularly for processes like direct air capture of CO2 emissions and hydrogen production.
Another data-focused company is Finch, which puts sustainability scores on products to help consumers make more climate-conscious shopping decisions. Finch has a browser extension that works on Amazon and Target websites and gives products a sustainability rating between zero and ten, then suggests a more sustainable alternative if applicable.
“For most of the population who believes in climate change and wants to do something about it, but doesn’t necessarily have more than seven minutes to research it online, this is a perfect solution,” Lizzie Horvitz, the founder and CEO of Finch said on Thursday.
Finch sells the data it gathers from consumer behavior to clients, including manufacturers and investors, Horvitz said.
“We are able to see who is buying what and why — that women, for instance, between the ages of 35 and 40 are twice as likely to buy aluminum-free deodorant as men of the same age and location,” said Horvitz.
This kind of data closes what Horvitz calls the “say and do gap,” meaning the difference between what consumers say they will do in a focus group, and what they actually do at checkout.
Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement this week that Meta would pivot its moderation policies to allow more “free expression” was widely viewed as the company’s latest effort to appease President-elect Donald Trump.
More than any of its Silicon Valley peers, Meta has taken numerous public steps to make amends with Trump since his election victory in November.
That follows a highly contentious four years between the two during Trump’s first term in office, which ended with Facebook — similar to other social media companies — banning Trump from its platform.
As recently as March, Trump was using his preferred nickname of “Zuckerschmuck” when talking about Meta’s CEO and declaring that Facebook was an “enemy of the people.”
With Meta now positioning itself to be a key player in artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg recognizes the need for White House support as his company builds data centers and pursues policies that will allow it to fulfill its lofty ambitions, according to people familiar with the company’s plans who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak on the matter.
“Even though Facebook is as powerful as it is, it still had to bend the knee to Trump,” said Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president, who left the company in 2020.
Meta declined to comment for this article.
In Tuesday’s announcement, Zuckerberg said Meta will end third-party fact-checking, remove restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity and bring political content back to users’ feeds. Zuckerberg pitched the sweeping policy changes as key to stabilizing Meta’s content-moderation apparatus, which he said had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
The policy change was the latest strategic shift Meta has taken to buddy up with Trump and Republicans since Election Day.
A day earlier, Meta announced that UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump friend, is joining the company’s board.
And last week, Meta announced that it was replacing Nick Clegg, its president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplan, who had been the company’s policy vice president. Clegg previously had a career in British politics with the Liberal Democrats party, including as a deputy prime minister, while Kaplan was a White House deputy chief of staff under former President George W. Bush.
Kaplan, who joined Meta in 2011 when it was still known as Facebook, has longstanding ties to the Republican Party and once worked as a law clerk for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In December, Kaplan posted photos on Facebook of himself with Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during their visit to the New York Stock Exchange.
Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global policy, on April 17, 2018.
Niall Carson | PA Images | Getty Images
Many Meta employees criticized the policy change internally, with some saying the company is absolving itself of its responsibility to create a safe platform. Current and former employees also expressed concern that marginalized communities could face more online abuse due to the new policy, which is set to take effect over the coming weeks.
Despite the backlash from employees, people familiar with the company’s thinking said Meta is more willing to make these kinds of moves after laying off 21,000 employees, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.
Those cuts affected much of Meta’s civic integrity and trust and safety teams. The civic integrity group was the closest thing the company had to a white-collar union, with members willing to push back against certain policy decisions, former employees said. Since the job cuts, Zuckerberg faces less friction when making broad policy changes, the people said.
Zuckerberg’s overtures to Trump began in the months leading up to the election.
Following the first assassination attempt on Trump in July, Zuckerberg called the photo of Trump raising his fist with blood running down his face “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
A month later, Zuckerberg penned a letter to the House Judiciary Committee alleging that the Biden administration had pressured Meta’s teams to censor certain Covid-19 content.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he wrote.
After Trump’s presidential victory, Zuckerberg joined several other technology executives who visited the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.
On Friday, Meta revealed to its workforce in a memo obtained by CNBC that it intends to shutter several internal programs related to diversity and inclusion in its hiring process, representing another Trump-friendly move.
The previous day, some details of the company’s new relaxed content-moderation guidelines were published by the news site The Intercept, showing the kind of offensive rhetoric that Meta’s new policy would now allow, including statements such as “Migrants are no better than vomit” and “I bet Jorge’s the one who stole my backpack after track practice today. Immigrants are all thieves.”
Recalibrating for Trump
Zuckerberg, who has been dragged to Washington eight times to testify before congressional committees during the last two administrations, wants to be perceived as someone who can work with Trump and the Republican Party, people familiar with the matter said.
Though Meta’s content-policy updates caught many of its employees and fact-checking partners by surprise, a small group of executives were formulating the plans in the aftermath of the U.S. election results. By New Year’s Day, leadership began planning the public announcements of its policy change, the people said.
Meta typically undergoes major “recalibrations” after prominent U.S. elections, said Katie Harbath, a former Facebook policy director and CEO of tech consulting firm Anchor Change. When the country undergoes a change in power, Meta adjusts its policies to best suit its business and reputational needs based on the political landscape, Harbath said.
“In 2028, they’ll recalibrate again,” she said.
After the 2016 election and Trump’s first victory, for example, Zuckerberg toured the U.S. to meet people in states he hadn’t previously visited. He published a 6,000-word manifesto emphasizing the need for Facebook to build more community.
The social media company faced harsh criticism about fake news and Russian election interference on its platforms after the 2016 election.
Following the 2020 election, during the heart of the pandemic, Meta took a harder stand on Covid-19 content, with a policy executive saying in 2021 that the “amount of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation that violates our policies is too much by our standards.” Those efforts may have appeased the Biden administration, but it drew the ire of Republicans.
Meta is once again reacting to the moment, Harbath said.
“There wasn’t a business risk here in Silicon Valley to be more right-leaning,” Harbath said.
While Trump has offered few specific policy proposals for his second administration, Meta has plenty at stake.
The White House could create more relaxed AI regulations compared with those in the European Union, where Meta says harsh restrictions have resulted in the company not releasing some of its more advanced AI technologies. Meta, like other tech giants, also needs more massive data centers and cutting-edge computer chips to help train and run their advanced AI models.
“There’s a business benefit to having Republicans win, because they are traditionally less regulatory,” Harbath said.
Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg reacts as he testifies during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., January 31, 2024.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
Meta isn’t alone in trying to cozy up to Trump. But the extreme measures the company is taking reflects a particular level of animus expressed by Trump over the years.
Trump has accused Meta of censorship and has expressed resentment over the company’s two-year suspension of his Facebook and Instagram accounts following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
In July 2024, Trump posted on Truth Social that he intended to “pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time,” adding “ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!” Trump reiterated that statement in his book, “Save America,” writing that Zuckerberg plotted against him during the 2020 election and that the Meta CEO would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if it happened again.
Meta spends $14 million annually on providing personal security for Zuckerberg and his family, according to the company’s 2024 proxy statement. As part of that security, the company analyzes any threats or perceived threats against its CEO, according to a person familiar with the matter. Those threats are cataloged, analyzed and dissected by Meta’s multitude of security teams.
After Trump’s comments, Meta’s security teams analyzed how Trump could weaponize the Justice Department and the country’s intelligence agencies against Zuckerberg and what it would cost the company to defend its CEO against a sitting president, said the person, who asked not to be named because of confidentiality.
Meta’s efforts to appease the incoming president bring their own risks.
After Zuckerberg announced the new speech policy Tuesday, Boland, the former executive, was among a number of users who took to Meta’s Threads service to tell their followers that they were quitting Facebook.
“Last post before deleting,” Boland wrote in his post.
Before the post could be seen by any of his Threads followers, Meta’s content moderation system had taken it down, citing cybersecurity reasons.
Boland told CNBC in an interview that he couldn’t help but chuckle at the situation.
“It’s deeply ironic,” Boland said.
— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.
WATCH: Meta is returning to free speech tradition, says Facebook’s former chief privacy officer Chris Kelly
Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Apple is losing market share in China due to declining iPhone shipments, supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote in a report on Friday. The stock slid 2.4%.
“Apple has adopted a cautious stance when discussing 2025 iPhone production plans with key suppliers,” Kuo, an analyst at TF Securities, wrote in the post. He added that despite the expected launch of the new iPhone SE 4, shipments are expected to decline 6% year over year for the first half of 2025.
Kuo expects Apple’s market share to continue to slide, as two of the coming iPhones are so thin that they likely will only support eSIM, which the Chinese market currently does not promote.
“These two models could face shipping momentum challenges unless their design is modified,” he wrote.
Kuo wrote that in December, overall smartphone shipments in China were flat from a year earlier, but iPhone shipments dropped 10% to 12%.
There is also “no evidence” that Apple Intelligence, the company’s on-device artificial intelligence offering, is driving hardware upgrades or services revenue, according to Kuo. He wrote that the feature “has not boosted iPhone replacement demand,” according to a supply chain survey he conducted, and added that in his view, the feature’s appeal “has significantly declined compared to cloud-based AI services, which have advanced rapidly in subsequent months.”
Apple’s estimated iPhone shipments total about 220 million units for 2024 and between about 220 million and 225 million for this year, Kuo wrote. That is “below the market consensus of 240 million or more,” he wrote.
Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
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