We’re looking for world-class entrepreneurs to help fight climate change
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It’s been a minute since we launched Earthbound and this little newsletter and our LinkedIn page have already gained a significant following, going from 0 (yesterday) to 200+ subscribers and followers (today). Hello to all of you!
And welcome to the second edition of Earthbound Journal, our monthly report from the forefront of deep tech. What you’ll find in this edition:
An introduction to our Fellowship for Entrepreneurs
An interview with Suzanne Zamany Andersen and Rasmus Bjerngaard from NitroVolt, a startup building a decentralized nitrogen fertilizer solution and Earthbound’s newest fellows
Our latest open deep tech case for which you can apply to join the team as an entrepreneur in residence.
Let’s jump right in, shall we?
How the entrepreneur fellowship works
Our Entrepreneur Fellowship is an unique opportunity to be matched with leading scientists to build startups that fight climate change. Fellows receive a grant, access to Earthbound’s network and the opportunity for equity and co-founder agreements when the company spins out.
Who we’re looking for:
Entrepreneurs who know the ins & outs of the startup rollercoaster
People with existing networks and commercialization experience
The desire to start something new, become an early co-founder of a deep tech startup and change the world
Meet the Earthbound fellows building a decentralized nitrogen fertilizer solution to help farmers abate CO2
NitroVolt is a startup spun out by Suzanne Zamany Andersen and Mattia Saccoccio at Denmark’s Technical University. With several patents under their belt and a team of seven technical employees, seasoned entrepreneur and ex-VC Rasmus Bjerngaard recently joined the team via an Earthbound fellowship to bring the idea to market. In this interview, Suzanne and Rasmus talk about the collaboration between science and entrepreneurship.
Which problem are you solving?
SZA: We're working on one of the most important things for the agricultural sector: ammonia production. Without commercial ammonia production, half of us today would not be alive, because commercial ammonia production supports 40-50% of the entire agricultural sector. Ammonia is today used either directly or as a stepping stone to produce other nitrogen-based fertilizers; something crucial for plant growth. But the production of ammonia occurs in huge, centralized facilities due to the harsh reaction conditions of the chemical process, and the process emits 1-2% of our global CO2 emissions, depending on which report you consider.
We have found a novel method to produce nitrogen-fertilizer completely decentralized via an electrochemical process that takes air, water, and electricity to generate ammonia. And we can do this completely decentralized in a system that can fit inside a container, standing on the farm, generating the nitrogen-fertilizer on demand. This not only gives the farmer a green product (if the supplied electricity is green), circumvents CO2 emissions from transport, but also gives the farmer resilience to geopolitical issues, because they control the production themselves.
As soon as we had something that worked, it was just an engineering challenge to make it work better.
How did you come up with that idea?
SZA: It's not a novel idea. Scientists had this idea more than 200 years ago, even before the current commercial ammonia production was discovered. The professors here at Denmark’s Technical University – Ib Chorkendorff and Jens Kehlet Nørskov – decided about 20 years ago to start pulling research funding into this. Many PhDs and postdocs have worked on this at DTU for the past two decades. But it didn't work.
I was hired as a PhD student to work on this in 2017. I was told that the project was like finding a golden needle in a huge haystack. Nothing they had tried at that point had worked, but if we could find the way, then there was the possibility to have both a huge environmental and societal impact. I was completely bitten by this, and spent the first year of my PhD struggling, because the team and I were testing what other people in literature were doing, and it was not reproducible.
But a year into my PhD project, we found the lithium mediated process, and were able to make ammonia for the first time. The process is complicated, and had first been proposed by a team of Japanese scientists in the 1990s, but was then forgotten. It is essentially a way that generates ammonia using lithium as a catalyst; the mediator for the chemical reaction. As soon as we had something that worked, it was just an engineering challenge to make it work better.
How did NitroVolt become a company then?
SZA: Since I was five years old I wanted to be my own boss, and I always knew that I wanted to do a startup. The reason why I took this project was because during my PhD interview, my supervisors made it clear that this project could have a huge impact. You can bring this system out to regions of the world that do not currently have nitrogen fertilizer available to them. There are very rural regions of the world, like in Central Africa, South America, even rural Canada, where it is just too expensive to transport and distribute centrally produced fertilizer. If you can place a decentralized system there, making nitrogen-fertilizer commonly available, you can grow significantly more food. That can have a huge societal impact, not to speak of the sustainable aspect. That was the reason why I applied for the PhD project.
I asked my co-founder, Mattia, to join me on this journey 2 years ago. We started talking to farmers to really understand the customer pain points, and once we knew there was a need, we successfully applied to several national and international grants to take the research to market. There has been a lot of support at DTU to commercialize this, both via various university employees and via DTU grants. Two months ago we applied for Earthbound, because our current NitroVolt team of in total seven people are all technical. Even though Mattia and I have been doing a lot of business development on the side, we felt having someone with this as their main expertise would strengthen our team. So we applied for Earthbound, and got paired with Rasmus.
Rasmus, why did you get involved and what’s your role in the project?
RB: I focus on the business, operational and financial side, currently on further developing the go-to-market, the funding journey and overall strategy. Originally an engineer and researcher myself, I have a lot of respect for the many years of research effort that eventually led to a technology like NitroVolt’s. The research will continue to live on independently at DTU, so think of the NitroVolt spinout as an offspring that needs to be given its own life.
Building a technology company from scratch is super hard, and even if it is crucial, the technology is just a small part of it. So if we want university spinouts and the positive climate impact they can generate, we need to create attractive framework conditions and incentives. Sometimes it is tricky because it clashes with other priorities, for instance with regards to intellectual property.
Having a grant like Earthbound come in and pair us with someone who has that [business] expertise is incredibly helpful.
What are the challenges of working on deep tech solutions to fight climate change?
SZA: The biggest challenge is the timeframe. I don't think a lot of people understand that deep tech takes years to develop. It's not “just” SaaS, an app, or even a gadget. It is far more complex and time consuming. Even if you give us an infinite amount of money right now, it will still take some years to do the research and development, the piloting with a customer, re-building based on the piloting, and upscaling the technology. It is crucial to find the right people with the right expertise at the right time. That is a lot of things that need to align.
This ties very nicely back to Earthbound. As researchers and entrepreneurs, we need to be doing the research and tech development, but also understand the market, reach out to customers, start fundraising, hire team-members and on-board them, update our website, pitch at events, learn how to engage with investors, do a product market fit, etc. The list goes on. And there's just not enough time in the day. Having a grant like Earthbound come in and pair us with someone who has that expertise is incredibly helpful, as Rasmus can take on some of these challenges and teach us better and more efficient ways of tackling all these things.
I'm extraordinarily grateful that NitroVolt is part of Earthbound, because it boosts our productivity and capability, and gets us closer to making sustainable and decentralized ammonia a reality faster.
Apply to join the fellowship
There is currently one open case that is looking for an entrepreneur to join the team. If working on new solutions for energy storage and AI-based multiscale simulations sounds like the right adventure for you, please apply. Applications are open to entrepreneurs within the EU.
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