Tourist Investors Are Ditching Climate Tech for AI
As more climate startups enter a capital-intensive, hardware-focused stage of development, scaling up is seen as expensive and risky. It’s also more important than ever.
Traffic travelling along a highway amid heavy smog and pollution in New Delhi, India.
Photographer: Prakash Singh/BloombergGeneralist investors’ rush into buzzier artificial intelligence has added to funding woes for climate-tech startups at just about the worst time for an industry racing to combat the effects of climate change.
Globally, climate-tech companies raised roughly $10.3 billion in equity across public and private markets in the third quarter, putting full-year funding on track to fall about 50% this year, data from BloombergNEF show. Meanwhile, capital for AI has climbed, with startups in that space raising more than $21 billion in the quarter, Pitchbook estimates.