Practically every week brings a flood of climate tech funding news and announcements — startups raising a new round, a venture capital firm closing a fresh fund, and big projects hitting (and missing) milestones. Going forward, I’ll close out each week with a roundup of some of the biggest stories that I didn’t get a chance to cover in full.
This week, we’ve got money for electric ships, next-gen geothermal, and residential electrification in Europe. Yay!
FleetZero Raises $43 Million Series A to Electrify Shipping
Many say battery-powered cargo ships will never make sense — that batteries are too heavy, too bulky, and would take up too much valuable space. FleetZero says it can make it work. Last Friday, the electric shipping startup raised a $43 million Series A round led by Obvious Ventures, with participation from other firms including Maersk Growth, the shipping giant’s corporate venture arm, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The funding will support production of the company’s hybrid and electric propulsion systems, as well as new manufacturing and R&D operations in Houston.
Ships’ bunker fuel is extremely polluting. It accounts for roughly 3% of global CO2 emissions and dirties the air with other pollutants such as sulfur and nitrogen oxides. Most players in the shipping decarbonization space want to shift to liquid fuels such as e-ammonia or e-methanol — a move that would require mulit-million-dollar engine overhauls and retrofits. FleetZero says that battery electrification will prove to be cheaper and simpler. The company is building batteries large enough to hybridize — and potentially one day fully electrify — large container ships.
As FleetZero’s CEO and co-founder Steven Henderson told my colleague Robinson Meyer on a 2024 episode of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast, batteries are a relatively simple maritime decarbonization solution because “you can use existing infrastructure and build on it. You don’t need a new fundamental technology to do this.” And while the company has yet to provide any cost estimates for electrifying commercial shipping, as Henderson put it, “the numbers to do this are not outside the realm of possibility.”
Geothermal Company Sage Geosystems closes $97 million Series B
The next-generation geothermal startup Sage Geosystems announced on Wednesday that it raised a $97 million Series B round, co-led by the renewable energy company Ormat Technologies and the growth equity firm Carbon Direct Capital. This came atop a hot week for geothermal overall. As I wrote already, the artificial intelligence-powered geothermal developer Zanskar announced a $115 million Series C round for its pursuit of AI-driven conventional geothermal, while Axios reported that the geothermal unicorn Fervo Energy has filed for an IPO.
Like Fervo, Sage uses drilling technology adapted from the oil and gas industry to create its own artificial reservoirs in hot, dry rock. The startup then pumps these fractures full of water, where it absorbs heat from the surrounding rocks before being brought to the surface as steam that’s used to generate electricity. Sage’s CEO, Cindy Taff — a former Shell executive — told Bloomberg that this latest investment will accelerate the company’s project timeline by a full year or two, allowing the company to put power on Nevada’s grid sometime in 2027.
This latest funding follows Sage’s strategic partnership with Ormat, announced last year, and could help the startup make good on its agreement with Meta to deliver up to 150 megawatts of clean electricity for the tech giant’s data centers starting in 2027.
Cloover Raises $1.2 Billion For European Home Electrification
Berlin-based startup Cloover — which helps Europeans finance home electrification upgrades — announced a $22 million Series A round on Wednesday, alongside a $1.2 billion debt facility from an unnamed “leading European bank” that it can draw on. The company, which describes itself as both the “operating system for energy independence” and the “Shopify of Energy,” aims to help homeowners ditch fossil fuels by facilitating loans to cover the upfront cost of, say, buying and installing heat pumps, rooftop solar, or home batteries — something traditional banks struggle to finance.
Cloover’s a fintech platform allows home energy installers to manage complex projects while offering loans for green upgrades to customers at the point of sale. The software’s AI-driven credit underwriting evaluates not just a customer’s credit score, but also the projected energy savings and performance of the upgrade itself, helping align the price and terms of borrowing with the anticipated economic value of the asset.
Forbes reports that Cloover has already financed roughly 2,500 home energy installations. The company says it’s profitable, generating nearly $100 million in sales last year. With this new funding, the startup plans to expand across Europe and is projecting $500 million in sales this year, anticipating an explosion in demand for distributed energy resources.
Plus: Embattled Nuclear Veteran General Fusion To Go Public Via SPAC
One of the oldest players in the race to commercialize fusion energy, General Fusion, has been candid about its recent funding struggles, laying off 25% of its staff last spring while publicly pleading for more cash. This Thursday, it announced a lifeline: a SPAC merger that will provide the company with up to $335 million, if all goes according to plan. Read more about the deal in our Heatmap AM newsletter.
