Climate Tech Startups Berlin (2021)

Samuel Dylan Trendler King
2 min readMar 23, 2021

Summary

So I’m really interested in the climate tech space and especially how AI/ML can be applied to help make the world sustainable.

In particular I found the Climate Change AI (CCAI) paper has a great taxonomy to start thinking about areas AI/ML applies to the climate tech world. However it does not offer a lot of on-the-ground examples of real startups working in the space. I was also unable to find a really satisfactory list anywhere online so I decided to make my own:

Climate Tech Startups Berlin (15.10.2021)

Data

The current mapping is built an underlying dataset I built and have published publicly below. It’s an aggregation of the following sources: (Dealroom, Climate-KIC’s alumni page, PwC’s report on state of Climate Tech 2020, Angel List jobs board, this article from Tech Founders, this one from EU-Startups, and this one from MTC, as well as some conversations from the Work on Climate Slack and my own personal knowledge.

Dataset of Berlin Climate Tech Startups (05.04.2021)

This is by no means an exhaustive mapping, but I do think it is currently the most comprehensive list for Berlin. However if there are any companies I’ve missed and you think should be added, I’d be really happy to hear from you.

Methodology

As mentioned above, the CCAI paper has a great taxonomy which I used to start thinking about areas AI/ML applies to the climate tech world:

AI/ML Climate Tech Taxonomy from CCAI paper

I did the categorization manually for both domain and subdomain, as the number of companies was still relatively small and I was interested in researching each organization individually.

I also added an additional boolean field ‘AI/ML’ in the data for companies who specifically mentioned using Machine Learning in their venture.

Conclusions

The climate tech space in Berlin is growing fast and it's exciting to see so many new companies and founders joining the space.

I hope to maintain and update this market map as the space grows and hopefully to expand to other areas in the EU (see, London). I’d also like to run some analysis on the dataset as it grows to understand some of the key trends emerging in this space.

In the meantime, feel free to reach out if you have any questions or comments.

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