Climate Tech Startups London (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:
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, Angel List and this article from StartUps Magazine (plus a few others), as well as some conversations from the Work on Climate Slack and my own personal knowledge.
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:
However it is worth noting that, due to the number of Finance companies based in London, I found it useful to extend this taxonomy to add two new subdomains — ‘Investments’ and ‘Banking’ to the Finance category. The former describing companies focused enabling better environmental investment decisions and the latter on environmental banking and payment products.
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. Now I have a decent data set I think next time I will try and train a simple NLP classifier to predict these going forward.
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 London 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, Berlin). 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.
