Inside New York's Longest-Running Climate Tech Incubator

Hello friends, you are watching or listening, depending on the platform of your choice. A brand new episode of the Green New Perspective podcast. Hopefully your go to place when you want to find out more about innovations happening in climate tech, and learn more about marketing strategies aimed at accelerating growth in this space. This episode of this whole podcast is sponsored by New Perspective in Boston based marketing agency working with climate clients for over 20 years now. So if you want to find out how we can help our clients to grow, check out the links in the description of this episode. In today's episode, we are talking about a couple of biggest challenges climate tech companies face when they aim to grow, meeting the market demand and finding the funds to do so. My guests today are Frederick Clark and Jeanette Williams from Urban Future Lab. Urban Future Lab is this really cool innovation hub at NYU Tandon. They're offering mentorships and partnerships to climate tech companies, all while tapping into NYU's use resources and talent. If you stay tuned to this episode, you're definitely gonna learn on what it really takes to build an impactful and resilient climate tech company.

So stay tuned and enjoy this conversation. Hello, Jeanette. Hello, Fred, and welcome to our Green New Perspective podcast.

Hi, Dunja. Thank you for having us. Yeah.

Hi, Dunja. Nice to be with you.

Oh, for starters, can you tell us a bit more about yourself, your backgrounds, and then a bit about the Urban Future Labs mission and how it came to be. Jeanette, can you start?

Yeah, definitely. So my name is Jeanette Williams. I'm the CEO of the Urban Future Lab at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. so in this role, I, of course work with budgets and processes, but also work very closely with Fred and the leadership team to think about our internal and external goals, and who we work with in the ecosystem to execute on those goals. So sometimes that output is new strategic initiatives, new business development, new partnerships. So I came to this space back in March 2020, after having worked in educational publishing and then in book publishing and then for the city health department.

So a series of left turns to get me to climb it. But I think all of that is really valuable because it is a space that sort of needs all perspectives. so yeah, thank you for having us today to talk a little bit more about our work. Yeah.

Fred, do you have something to add? Can we learn a bit more about you?

Yeah. my name is Frederick Clair. I'm the interim managing director for the Urban Future Lab. And then I also run one of our program called the Carbon to Value Initiative, which is one I lead. since I joined UFL about four years ago. I have a background in chemical engineering and management consulting. Prior to UFL, I was assessing different strategies to use waste biomass as a feedstock for fuels, chemicals and materials. So that's kind of my climatic angle, if you will, prior to UFL.

Can we talk about Urban Future Lab? So how did it came to be?

Yeah. UofL we have we are the longest climatic incubator in New York City.

we were formed in 2009, right after the financial crisis, as a strategy to revitalize the New York economy. And since then, we have supported about 170 climate tech startups from Pre-seed to series A. Typically, they join us when they are as small as two co-founders, and they leave us when they are as big as 100 employees. And and then you have everything in the middle. Essentially, we are kind of climatic agnostic. you know, what we offer is a lot about the help entering the New York market. So it's obviously often related to the built environment and mobility. But more and more in the recent years we have. We have diversified into industry decarbonisation with hydrogen and carbon tech with, you know, renewable energy with offshore wind. So we have, at this stage, we have five programs overall to cover different aspects of climate tech. but our, you know, historical program is the incubator called ECR. So we have a space downtown Brooklyn. And do you want to add anything?

Yeah, I think that definitely covers, some of our history and origins.

And, you know, since that inception in 2009 with a grant, a catalytic grant from NYC EDC, we expanded to include more accelerator programming that Fred was mentioning. So the innovate UK Global incubator program, now in its fifth year, the Carbon to Value Initiative, now in its fourth year, and the Offshore Wind Innovation Hub, which Fred also mentioned now in its second year. And through all of those programs, including the Anchor Incubator, we've supported more than 170 companies who have raised more than 2.5 billion. And that number doesn't include recent raises like the 200 million from nine Dot or the 69 million from Eriko, among others. and all of these really amazing companies have an 88% survival rate since 2009, which we'd like to think we have a little something to do with through our support that we provide to the founders.

And, Jeanette, as far as I know, you are partnered with New York City University. So can you tell me how that partnership works and how do they help companies?

So we sit within NYU Tandon and within Tandon.

We specifically sit within the Sustainable Engineering Initiative. So that is the part of Tandon that really focuses on research to avoid, remediate, mitigate or adapt to environmental challenges and the climate crisis. So you can see how much of really strong overlap there is between UFL and that sustainable engineering initiative. We are sort of this bridge to that external entrepreneurial world and connecting that back to the researchers and faculty here at Tandon. So eligible startups have the opportunity to work very closely with the researchers and faculty to advance their innovation and to advance that research, and to also apply jointly for funding. So, for example, one of our companies has jointly raised over 6 million with our faculty and researchers, and we just want to see ten times more of that, because we think that sort of flywheel and symbiotic relationship between academia and innovation through the entrepreneurial space is so, so critical to moving this work forward.

I would just add on the NYU sort of advantage is, you know, access to top talent like climate tech is a very, I say, engineering hungry caterpillar.

And, you know, it's like, software and hardware and chemical, electrical, mechanical. And so we have an internship program so that student can start to dip their toes into climate companies. And of course, NYU has more than just the tendons. Cool. They also have, you know, stern and the law school and many other schools that can feed really good talent into into climate. And we know it's a bottleneck. So we're excited about this, this opportunity, to fit good talent into startups.

Fred, you've mentioned, I mean, you and Jeanette both mentioned that you helped 100 plus startups to rise to from from series A, series B to full developed companies, commercialized companies. So can you tell me what are some of the biggest challenges that you feel they're facing when they're getting started?

You want to start?

Yeah, I can definitely start with that. I think, you know, some of the biggest challenges that these companies face when they're just getting started. It really begins with customer discovery.

They have this idea, this innovation. And usually when they come to us it's been validated and tested. But they're looking for that beachhead market. And so really that customer discovery is super, super key. And I think the challenge for startups is truly active listening. so not being so wedded to the innovation and the problem that they think they're solving at the detriment of listening to the potential customer and of course, the community who may be impacted by their solution as well. So I think that challenge of finding the time to really invest in the customer discovery process and really being able to be flexible enough to receive the inputs that they're getting from the customer discovery process. I think that's one of the big challenges we see for these early stage companies.

Just to clarify, you know, because I think we support best companies from Pre-seed two series A and the but, you know, we obviously we have alumni, you know, and so we understand the struggles. Also post series a an example is a carbon free is a company that participated in the cube cohort the carbon to value cohort in 2021.

Now they are raising capital to build a first of a kind demonstration plant that will capture and mineralized CO2 from a steel mill that's going to be around 50,000 tonnes per year of CO2, over $100 million in capital investment. And so for funding, financing, this kind of scale up, it's very, very difficult because you're still not have proven the technology at scale. So you still have technology risk. You have execution risk because this is your first project. So you can ensure you can actually deliver in the time and, and the cost. And then you have, you know, you need to secure your supply chain, your offtake agreement, your supply on the, on the power side, your site, your permits. And so it's a very, very tricky part to switch to, to kind of transition from like this innovation. I have a pilot, I have early customers to like large scale, much bigger volumes and industrial scale facility. Not every climate tech will need to. We'll need to build, you know, first of all, kind industrial facilities.

But there is a lot of like subsectors in climate, like energy storage, carbon capture, hydrogen, everything that is like hardware and heavily science based innovation. They will need to prove that that stage. And it's a very, very, long valley of this and very dangerous, I would say value of this that perhaps is not talked about. I think there is more and more a trend around, around talking about this, this problem. But it's we need we need to more solutions. And it's it's not it's not easy I guess maybe it's not the point of the podcast, but this is definitely a huge challenge in commercialization for later stage companies.

Absolutely. We had some of our clients who worked with us but didn't get to commercialize, which was sad, but it's the reality we live in. So yeah, like you said, it's not something that we talk about very often, but we definitely need to. It is a part of this podcast. We want to discuss challenges and be real and open about it, because if we don't talk about it, how are people going to overcome them? What are some of the positives thread that you saw while working in startups? What challenges did they overcome and what were some of the best practices that we can share here?

Yeah, we are biased, obviously, but a lot of like successful startups, they they do join accelerators and incubators because we provide a lot of the connections.

And I like to compare, you know, the infrastructure, like we are the roads between all the stakeholders that need to be connected and aligned to be successful and climatic, you need to have a very good understanding of regulation. You need to have a very good understanding of the investment landscape, like not every investor will be a fit for your company. And so we can help you, you know, navigate our investment network. Obviously you need customers and partners to scale industrial partners. And so that's definitely one thing that, you know, we encourage committed company to consider is like which accelerator program? Which incubation program is a good fit for you. Don't do like accelerator tourism because then you kind of spend all your time on these programs, but be very strategic, very intentional. Join just a few and stick with them and invest with them. And I think that's why we still have 9.9. Dot is pretty much ready to graduate from us, but they stay with us because they love the community. They love to bring give back to the community.

They love to be part of us and just, you know, be part of the bigger story. That's definitely one thing that, I think that we see and I don't know, Jeanette, what would you would do? You have another one? I mean, we have a lot of them, so I guess.

Yeah.

All the time. But we can maybe go through 3 or 4.

Yeah, I definitely want to. Plus one the joining an incubator accelerator or some other group that can really help you with those connections. Climate tech, like so many other industries, is really about who you know. And these incubators and accelerators, they have spent the years building those relationships, becoming trusted partners to VCs, policymakers, utilities, all of those folks that you need in your your corner basically to commercialize. so leveraging that network as much as possible is really, really key. And then once you're in an incubator accelerator, I think the traits that we've seen of founders and startups that make them most successful are really coach ability.

So the ability to take feedback and to really implement that feedback, again, that listening, which sort of goes back to the coach ability of listening to the market and being able to pivot where needed. and then really it's, you know, it's their bread and butter, but that ingenuity and that grit, to be able to follow up on the opportunities when they come, even if the timing isn't exactly right. and to really take the opportunities and the connections, for investment, for funding and all of those really good things that help you clear those valleys of death. It might sound surprising, but every once in a while there are startups that come into incubators and accelerators, and it's what you put into it is what you get out of it. So I think once you actually get that connection, as much as you can put into, again, leveraging those relationships better, your company will be in the more success you'll have.

Can you share a story about certain startup or startups, if you will, that managed to push through early challenges with your help?

we have a lot of success stories, which is, you know, wonderful for us.

I will share a story from one of our innovate UK companies. and the global incubator program that we run, companies called types. They were a cohort for company. They've made the first truly flushable and biodegradable wet wipe with an innovation in the binding of the wipes. So no longer plastic based, but a plant based fibre. And they came in to do their customer discovery, as all the startups do in that program. They have to complete 50 interviews. So as you can imagine, it's a lot of work and they find some really great insights. But basically, they really came in with this idea that their beachhead market would be moms. and that's what worked for them in the UK and found that actually here in the US, it was campers, hikers, fishers, sort of more outdoorsy people. and so their ability to take that feedback and actually pivot and really change their marketing and change their strategy, that's what led to their success. And through the program opening up, I believe, three new markets within the US and beginning to sell within the US for the first time ever.

So really just an example of how those traits that we see among our startups, they really do yield to success and new customers. If you're willing to take the feedback and to pivot and be flexible, you.

Know what I'm also interested about? We had a couple of these challenges with our clients as well. How do you help startups to develop in a business sense, but also to stay green along the way?

I mean, yeah, how do you define stay green? You know, I think for us it's we we are focused more on decarbonization. But we have to keep in mind that, you know, you don't want a it's not that the cost of everything else, like if you need a lot of land and a lot of water and you're going to have a lot of other environmental impact or other actually social impact too, right? Like you, you get a you got to think about this. So I think one thing that we try to sort of include in our, in our programs and curriculum is the idea of like what? Think ahead of your adverse effects of on startup.

They they they think about the opportunity and they are excited about the solution and they focus on like the positive. But you gotta think down the road about the impacts and the risks because eventually, you know, if you're successful, you're going to also need to to raise some debt capital and and down the road, like the capital journey is all about risk is not about opportunity anymore. It's it's the VC world is kind of driven by opportunity. But but you know, down the road you get to think about more about the risk. And so helping the company thinking about adverse impact of their innovation. What is like what could go wrong, from a social, social, economic from an environmental impact perspective on the CTV program, for example, we a lot of companies claim that they are carbon negative, but because they take CO2 out of something and they make something else with it and they're like, hey, we're carbon negative. But in fact, it's we, you know, we spend a lot of time to redefine the concept and really explain that.

For example, carbon negative. It's only if you take CO2 from the atmosphere and you are able to make a product that is very long lasting, that sequester of CO2 for, you know, over a hundred years, ideally thousands of years. And again, that's why carbon freeze is a good innovation, is because mineralization, you bind CO2 to a mineral. And once that has happened, it's very hard to reverse. And so you have a product. In this case it's like calcium carbonate can be used in household as an ingredient, you know, to decarbonize scope three supply chains of big, big CPG brands. But it doesn't really emit CO2 even after use unless you really have to, you know, heat it up a very high temperature. You really have to try really hard to release the CO2. Two. And so we have a lot of companies that actually changed, you know, change the language a little bit. It doesn't change in the value prop. But, you know, I think carbon accounting can be very confusing.

And so that's a lot of a lot of our focus on the UN, like trying to explain the basic concept around carbon accounting LCA and this kind of thing.

Yeah. I have to say, we see like this type is not greenwashing, but it's not like the like, taking a look at it and the entire picture, we said, we see that a lot with companies that are using AI to better the climate, or working with climate tech companies with AI softwares. These softwares are definitely helping the companies. But then we are not talking about their own emissions and water usage and things like that. So we need to optimize everything I guess.

Or at least look at the whole picture like you are saying and and think about the circularity of things also because you can we can decarbonise the economy but keep it linear. Right. Extracting especially, you know, in the EV space, for instance, extract lithium and all the minerals make the batteries. Yes. You have decarbonised force to some extent, mobility.

But you are still extracting resources. You still generating a lot of waste. What do you do with the waste? We haven't. That's to me, a huge challenge that I think about a lot. It's like intersection of circularity and decarbonization and keep keep data in mind a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. Not to stay in this carbon tunnel vision space, right? Yeah. When we talk about startups and how they're scale what you've seen that really helped them. And are there any strategies that you used for that to help them scale?

Well, I think there is one story in our portfolio that was very smartly done. It's a company that makes alcohol and fuels from CO2 and hydrogen. They are called air company. And really, one thing that they that they did really well in the early stages is to try to monetize their R&D production. So they had a small lab pilot plant and they were making product out of it. And one of the co-founders is actually from like the CPG world from like a big brand background.

So he had a marketing sort of angle to the problem. And he they started to just directly sell, sell the ethanol as vodka. it's called, air vodka. It's sold out. You cannot find it. And it's very pure. It's, you know, it has certain traits compared to traditional vodka. And they could sell like basically ethanol, which, you know, most people think about ethanol as a fuel. they could sell it with like a ten x 20 x price premium so they could generate revenue. And that really is very, very appetizing for like the, the investors because for like hardware technologies, it's very hard to have revenue early on. So trying to monetize the early product R&D sell pilots. So very often we see companies, you know, that just try to do a pilot for free because they are hungry to just take put the technology in the field. But in our experience you're only going to get really good results. Also if you have if the customer has skin in the game and if you're really solving a problem, they should be able to pay for it.

And so even if it doesn't have to be like the price that you will charge at the commercial scale, but really make sure that the pilots that you generate, that you run are paid so that you get a little bit of runway. Right. It's it's not insignificant. It's some non dilutive dollar. And and then we help them to think about scale beyond the beachhead. So in case of air company I think you know we were excited when we welcome them into the CDB cohort. Not because of the vodka play, because we're like, you're not going to you're not going to solve climate change. You know, selling decarbonized vodka or kind of a new vodka. But because you can make fuels at scale, they have a process that can scale really well. It's called thermochemical. So it's basically a big reactor. And we know how to scale a big chemical reactor. We have 150 years of experience of scaling chemical reactors so they can go very big, if they are successful, and then they can get economies of scale and the cost, cost can go down and as they scale up.

And so we this is one of the reasons why we selected them to be part of CTV. And then we try to to, to see, you know, on the roadmap, when are you going to go towards larger scale market, like sustainable aviation fuel. And since then they have signed a 1 billion gallon offtake agreement with airlines like JetBlue to make sustainable aviation fuel. So a story from the lab. Vodka to like, now they are built. They have plans to build a large demonstration plant in upstate New York, too. It's not done for them. They still have a lot of, way to go. But the this is an example of, like, scale up, you know, and they've just raised a series B, $69 million.

Jeanette. We just we mentioned just a little bit about social impact of climate tech. So I would like you to tell me, how does the idea of equity shapes the way you work with startups? I think when we had our intro conversation, you said that that's really important to you.

So I wanted, you know, us to to spend some time talking about this issue, about this topic.

Definitely. so back in 2020, the Urban Future Lab, like many other organizations, kind of took a hard look about what we were doing to support equity in our work. the unique role that incubators and accelerators can play in, advancing equity. And then also some of the ways that we were unconsciously or inadvertently implicit in maintaining inequitable processes or systems or things like that. So out of that work and out of a listening tour that we went on with several climate justice experts and environmental justice experts, we launched our first Future Impact Prize track, which was awarded to a community based organization working on climate justice. And so that was one way that we realized that our role was really to be a connector, a convener, a supporter, rather than reinventing the wheel of any work that had been done to advance equity in the climate tech space. So after that, we continued that work through this event series called Climate is New Economy and Bridging and bringing together innovators, policymakers, funders and CBOs in the same space to have these conversations, recognizing that like any stakeholder that we're introducing startups to, to help on their commercialization journey.

CBOs and communities and workforce development groups should also be in that stakeholder category. This transition to clean energy is really powered by people. And if you don't have the support and the buy in of people, it unfortunately doesn't go very far through. Climate is a new economy. We hosted several event series that we or events where we brought together all of these different stakeholders and also hosted this Urban Future Forum in June of 2024 that did that across a full day, focusing on equity in deployment. So some of the ways that we really try to weave equity into our work and to provide insight into equity for our startups are through these events where it's really key for them to meet these key, these stakeholders who are so pivotal in their commercialization journey, and then also through the Education that we provide in our programming. So teaching them and sharing more about what does Jedi or justice equity, diversity and inclusion look like in the climate tech space, especially for some of our UK companies, how that might be different than what is sort of diversity or equity or inclusion in the UK, and how that history is different here, and then how that might relate to funding opportunities like federal funding opportunities, where you now have to include community benefits plans and to work within these justice 40 principles.

And what would you say? What are some of the biggest barriers you've seen to making climate tech more accessible?

I mean, communication is really the biggest barrier to making climate tech more accessible. It's everyone is starting at very different points in terms of knowledge of the problem, knowledge of the solutions, knowledge of the impact. And I think communication is one of those things where if you can find a way to meet people, where they are in their understanding or lack of understanding or sort of the gap, you can get people to actually take action. So it's going to be very hard for, say, an innovator to talk to a community who doesn't quite know anyone who is using like a heat pump, for example, in their home. It's going to be hard for them to explain why this is really advantageous to them, especially because heat pumps that, you know, runs on electricity there may be getting free steam heat here in New York City from their landlord, and then the heat pump, they actually have to pay for it themselves.

And the electric bill they have to pay for themselves as well. So that communication gap, it's knowledge on both sides of the experience being lived by the community, and then some of the knowledge of the innovation or the solution and the pros and cons. Because innovations do have cons, they're not always totally net positive knowledge gap. That has to be to be bridged.

Do you have any ideas how to overcome that challenge? It's not a small challenge.

It's not a small challenge. And I often think about my public health work because I worked in the communications department, and that was our challenge of educating people on different health issues and trying to get them to change their behavior, to take action to improve their lives. That is not easy. Even if you think it is a positive thing for people, it's convincing them that it's positive for themselves is quite challenging. And I think as many opportunities and as many plays that we can get from different industries that have tried to do this, including the health industry, I think could really be helpful for the climate tech industry.

We don't have to reinvent the wheel here. We have gotten people to take really amazing measures for themselves, think about anti-tobacco campaigns and how that has really changed things. Think about the campaign to reduce the ozone, the hole in the ozone layer, and how that really moved people. There have been success stories and communication, and as much as we can replicate those, I think the better it will be.

Since we are approaching the end of this conversation. I have to ask you, looking ahead, what excites you the most about the future of climate tech and the role of Urban Future Lab in it?

Every year we run a competition where we award 250 K checks to very early stage companies, and we use that competition as a funnel to our incubator. So we work with the best, most promising companies. So we focus our effort on what we think is worth our time. and every year we think about what are the new problems in climate tech that they want to solve. And I think one very underserved space right now for innovation is adaptation, climate adaptation.

You know, we think about climate adaptation, basically like seawalls and emergency communication. And and I think there is a lot of innovation. Yesterday we had five companies pitching from like water scarcity to flood resiliency to insurance to energy storage for outage. A lot of solutions that are sometimes intersection of mitigation and adaptation, sometimes only adaptation that are really important and we are seeing climate impacts on the day to day basis is tomorrow is it's we are going to get impacted. Our our grandchildren's are going to be impacted by us not mitigating, but we are going to see the impacts of climate change tomorrow. So I think adaptation innovation for adaptation is really a space that we are investing and looking at a lot in, in our day to day. And maybe the second thing that always gets me excited, you know, it's just New York. New York state as a market is an incredible market to scale climate tech. It has a lot of capital. Obviously, it has a lot of talent and he has a big market.

If you look at the New York State. If he was a nation, it would be the 10th largest economy in the world. So really, you have a lot of space to scale and a lot of consumer you have about, you know, 20 million consumers just around New York that are ready to use your products. There is a port, there is manufacturing base, agricultural base. There is very aggressive regulation. we are 100% net zero electricity by 2040 and Local Law 97 for the built environment. So just New York is a great place to scale climate tech. And so, you know, you should definitely come and work with us to scale your, your innovation in, in New York.

Absolutely. I just have to give a comment on your we're going to, you know, feel the impact of climate change tomorrow. I think we're feeling the impact today already. You know, I definitely feel like we need more people in the climate, space and climate tech. Yeah. and, Jeanette, do you have.

Well, we'll talk about this, about, you know, the future of climate. Are there any future partnerships that are exciting and going to happen within the Urban Future Lab?

Speaker 2 00:32:31 Yeah, I think, you know, you said it's we definitely need all the people that we can get in the climate tech space. And for the urban future lab future partnerships are always sort of looking outside of our usual suspects of people that we work with. But how does connection for their urban future lab to events like the Climate Film Festival help advance the work that our startups are doing to help advance the work that our faculty and researchers are doing? so they had a section all about science and solutions for the climate challenge. And so how does our interaction with communicators, with folks in the business school at stern, with folks at Tisch and things like that? How does that help advance the work that our startups are doing and help to really move the needle on climate innovation.

Please do send us an invite to the fest.

Thank you both for being my guest here for the end. Can you tell our audience where they can find more info on Urban Future Lab where they can get informed? Sign up for some of your programs if they want to.

Yeah, we have a website very easy UFL dot NYC and you can subscribe to our newsletter. This is our main channel. We also have social media LinkedIn, Instagram. and so you can follow us on on both and hear about all the news, all our companies hiring, fundraising and all our programs. If your startup to to join some of our programs.

Thank you.

Again. Thank you Dunja. It was great to chat with you.

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