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Welcome to the first dealroom.co weekly impact newsletter! Subscribe here for updates. Tell a friend!

I’m Matteo, impact specialist at dealroom.co and I’ll be writing weekly about key news and events from the world of startups creating a positive social or environmental impact, taking a deep dive each week into dealroom.co’s rich data on the sector to identify important and sometimes counterintuitive trends. 

🍄 Mushrooms could be the ultimate sustainable material

The fungi kingdom is best known for the hundreds of edible mushrooms beloved by chefs, gourmands and everyday shovelers of pizza and pasta. They also hold magical medical qualities as antioxidants and anti-inflammatories, helping people the world over to boost their immune systems, increasing brain health or improving energy and stamina. Fungi covers not just several hundred edible mushrooms but a wide variety of micro species like molds and yeasts. Indeed, scientists estimate that there are as many as 2.2 to 3.8 million different species, with only 150,000 of them discovered so far.

Why this matters: Fungi are becoming a mainstay of startup innovation, not just as food sources, but also for an amazing array of promising applications in textiles, packaging, interior design and arguably, at the outer edges, beyond our stricter definition, including biomass energy production. Products based on mycelium, the vegetative part of any fungus, are biodegradable, with a growing role in transforming the world to a sustainable economy. The number of startups in this space has climbed from 32 in 2015 to more than 80 in 2021, and the VC funding into this space has gone from €39M in 2015 to €650M in 2021 YTD. 

Read more: So suspend everything you imagined you know about mushrooms, toadstools and fairies at play in sylvan woods. Working together with Leonardo Massa of Progress Tech Transfer Fund, we have unearthed a range of promising startups ranging far beyond the world of gastronomy. Get ready for mushroom re-engineering and fungi mass production and the startups and investors powering these industries ahead.  Read our full report on the fungi economy

What we are reading:

☀️ “What does it take to be agnostic about technologies that are decreasing in cost at 90% a decade, while placing one's hope in an unproven moonshot like fusion?” Noah Smith, Bloomberg Opinion writer via Twitter

💨  VC investment into carbon capture and storage startups reached an all-time high in 2021 YTD. How Does Carbon Capture Actually Work? - Engineering with Rosie via YouTube

🏭 “Some companies “brown-spin” - or sell off the highest-emitting components of their businesses to PE and hedge funds at a discount. Public companies under the gun to commit to net zero have begun playing a game of hot potato with their dirty assets,” Climate Tech VC’s newsletter kicks off a timely debate

🌳  “(Deforestation) is one of the least-targeted by institutional investors [...] However, Capital Monitor analysis shows that venture capital investments in start-ups tackling SDG 15 are growing at a rate that’s faster than other SDGs.” - Solving deforestation: VCs are starting to take SDG 15 seriously - Capital Monitor

♻️ “The amount of food wasted by British households has returned to pre-pandemic levels as the reopening of the economy means families backtrack on food-saving habits and opt for more take-away meals” - Bloomberg Green - Agnieszka de Sousa. 100+ startups working on food waste, with data supplied by Dealroom.co analyst Ivan Draganov.

Latest impact deals:

Top five deals in August:

🇺🇸 Apeel Sciences raised $250M at a $2.0B valuation, 2x compared to just a year ago for the maker of plant-based food preservatives. 

🇺🇸 ICON, a 3D printing construction company, has raised $207M. The largest deal in 2021 for a construction tech startup.

🇺🇸 Ample, a modular battery-swapping startup for electric vehicles (EV)  has raised $160M. We mapped EV charging startups here.

🇺🇸 80 Acres Farms, an indoor farming company, has raised $160M. This is the sixth-largest round in sustainable AgriTech, globally, so far in 2021.

🇨🇳 Caocao Chuxing, an EV ride-hailing company, raised $150M. One of China’s 17 impact unicorns.

Other promising impact deals from around the globe in recent weeks: 

🇬🇧 Newcleo, a newly founded nuclear energy company based in London with strong Italian roots, raised $118M. It is now the second most funded nuclear fission energy startup globally.

🇨🇭 Energy Vault, a developer of utility-scale battery technology for renewable energy storage based in Lugano, Switzerland and Westlake Village, California raised a $100M Series C from SoftBank and Saudi Aramco's venture arm.

🇨🇦 XpertSea, a Quebec-based marine agritech company, raised a $20 million Series B to help shrimp and fish hatcheries, farms and research centers used data to improve their operational efficiency.

🇩🇪 Xayn of Berlin raised a $12m Series A, promising "web search as it should be", combining personalisation, privacy protection and ad-free. With backing by Earlybird VC and KDDI Ventures.

🇴🇲  44.01 - a carbon removal company based in Muscat, Oman raised $5M Seed from Breakthrough Energy Ventures and others. It is one of just two carbon capture and storage companies to emerge in the MENA region.

🇮🇪  HT Materials Science - a startup developing a heat transfer fluid technology - raised €5M from Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures and Progress Tech Transfer fund. The Saudi Aramco venture fund has now made eight impact investments.

🇦🇺 Keeping with our fungi theme this week, Fable Food Co of Chevallum, Australia is "making delicious meaty food from mushrooms" and raised a $4.8m seed round.

Read up on all the latest impact deals in Dealroom.co

💡 Tip of the week

Did you catch that Amit Gudka, co-founder of UK energy supplier Bulb, is on to his next gig at Field (formerly Virmati Energy), an energy storage startup, raising £10m in funding from Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus and Songkick’s Ian Hogarth and is set to start a Series B round in September?

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♻️ Sort by the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals: https://impact.dealroom.co/curated/taxonomy/sdgs

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