17 October, 2024
Exclusive: C-Zero is raising $18M to make emission-free hydrogen using natural gas, filings reveal
Hydrogen startup C-Zero has raised $5 million of an $18 million funding round, according to an SEC filing.
The company is developing a way to strip hydrogen from methane without emitting carbon dioxide. The resulting hydrogen can be used in a range of industries today, including ammonia and petrochemical production, and potentially others in the near future, including transportation and steel production. The solid carbon waste product has the potential to be reused in everything from asphalt to lithium-ion batteries.
C-Zero raised a $34 million round valued at $124 million post-money in 2022, according to PitchBook data. The smaller target for the new round suggests the company is being realistic about its prospects following its sizable haul during the pandemic.
The company did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The process C-Zero employs is known as methane pyrolysis. C-Zero’s reactor heats natural gas in the presence of a proprietary catalyst to break hydrogen’s chemical bond with the central carbon atom in a methane molecule.
By using readily available natural gas as the feedstock, C-Zero hopes to produce emission-free hydrogen for less than other green hydrogen startups, which typically rely on expensive electrolyzers powered by low-cost renewable energy from wind and solar.
Tapping into existing natural gas infrastructure also makes methane pyrolysis a natural fit for petrochemical plants, which today use natural gas throughout their operations and also require large amounts of hydrogen to produce various chemicals.
The potential to sell low-cost, zero-emission hydrogen to large, established customers has caused a flurry of startup activity in the space, many of which use methane pyrolysis. A number of competing startups, including Modern Hydrogen, Molten Industries and ReCarbon, also use the process.
FCC rule would make carriers unlock all phones after 60 days
The FCC wants to make it significantly easier for consumers to unlock their phones from their carriers, proposing that all devices must be unlockable just 60 days after purchase. How this will mesh with current plans and phone-buying trends, however, is something the agency is hoping to learn before putting such a rule into effect.
Mobile phones purchased from a carrier are generally locked to that carrier until either the contract is up or the phone is paid off. But despite improvements to the process over the years (unlocking was flat-out illegal not long ago), it still isn’t quite clear to all consumers when and how they can unlock their phone and take it to the carrier (or country) of their choice.
To be clear, this is not about opening up your phone using a face, fingerprint or password, but changing settings in its software to allow it to work with different mobile networks.
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, or NPRM, in a press release Thursday. “When you buy a phone, you should have the freedom to decide when to change service to the carrier you want and not have the device you own stuck by practices that prevent you from making that choice,” she wrote. “That is why we are proposing clear, nationwide mobile phone unlocking rules.”
Specifically, the release says, carriers would simply have to provide unlocking services 60 days after activation. A welcome standard, but it may run afoul of today’s phone and wireless markets.
For instance, although the dreaded two-year contract is no longer forced on most consumers, many still opt for them to lock in the price and get other benefits. And perhaps more to the point, the phones themselves are often paid for in what amount to installment plans: You get a phone for “free” and then pay it off over the next few years.
The NPRM is the stage of FCC rulemaking where it has a draft rule but has not yet solicited public feedback. On July 18, the agency will publish the full document and open up commentary on the above issues. And you can be sure there will be some squawking from mobile providers!
Not knowing the specifics of the proposed rule, we can’t be sure how it would mix with these common pay-over-time details. But unlocking a phone doesn’t free someone from needing to pay off the device — they can just use it on other networks if they want. And if a carrier lets you buy a phone outright from it but locks it to the bands for six months or a year out of sheer greed, this would offer an early exit.
As Rosenworcel said, the point of the rule is to offer consistency and transparency: a simple, national rule from regulators setting a reasonable limit on how and whether carriers can lock down devices. We’ll know more in July when the full NPRM is published.
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Mitti Labs aims to make rice farming less harmful to the climate, starting in India
Rice is the staple crop of more than half of the world’s population. Demand is growing with the rising population in South and Southeast Asia. However, a significant portion of rice farming still relies on traditional cultivation methods that lead to substantial methane emissions, which are a major contributor to climate change — methane is nearly 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide when it comes to warming the atmosphere, although it dissipates faster. Growing rice also requires a considerable amount of fresh water, around 3,000 liters for every kilogram of rice, or 20 million liters for every hectare of a rice farm.
Mitti Labs aims to limit methane emissions and water wastage in rice farming using its technology solutions. Cofounded by Harvard Business School graduates Xavier Laguarta and Devdut Dalal, the firm has now raised $3 million in an equity investment as it aims to reduce methane emissions by 50% and water consumption by 30% with tech such as high-resolution satellite imagery and on-ground gas chambers.
The New York City-headquartered startup, with a subsidiary based in India’s Bengaluru, launched in May last year and has chosen India as its primary market. India is the world’s second-largest rice producer, yet the livelihoods of its rice farmers face imminent threats from climate change, which has resulted in a significant decline in water levels and an increasing amount of methane in its atmosphere.
Laguarta and Dalal conceptualized Mitti Labs last year after meeting during their master’s in business administration at Harvard Business School. Before beginning the startup, Laguarta had experience in sustainability consulting, while Dalal worked in the food and agricultural supply chain. A third cofounder, CTO Nathan Torbick, also signed on.
“When you look at the agriculture space, there’s been so much done, and regenerative agriculture is something that people talk about all over the world. But when you look at the amount of people who are trying to tackle rice specifically, it is so much smaller than most other crops,” Laguarta said in an interview.
Measuring emissions, selling carbon credits
Rice produces about half the greenhouse gas emissions from croplands, including 30% of agricultural methane emissions. However, farms can cut methane emissions from rice cultivations to a large extent by improving water management or alternating wetting and drying.
Working with the not-for-profit Syngenta Foundation and Dr. Reddy’s Foundation, as well as Spanish food processing company Ebro Foods, Mitti Labs has launched five projects across India to help farmers adopt and implement sustainable farming techniques, avoid stubble burning and use limited water. These rice projects cover 30,000 hectares in area and will help cut 120,000 metric tonnes of CO2e emissions, the startup said.
Mitti Labs aims to work with more than 40,000 smallholder farmers to embed and measure sustainable agricultural practices that will not only improve the environmental aspect of rice farming but also help farmers raise their annual incomes by up to 30%, as the startup will enable them to earn money from carbon credits it will sell on their behalf in the market.
Convincing smallholder farmers to embrace new techniques sometimes becomes challenging, as they often hesitate to move away from their traditional practices. However, Dalal told TechCrunch that Mitti Labs provides support and advice to farmers and offers them regular touchpoints through its on-ground implementation partners.
“Our team works with implementation partners, continuously refining the pitch to farmers; what works in one village, might not work in another. So the behavior change element has to be very targeted, and completely aligned with the local communities’ needs,” he said.
On the tech side, Mitti Labs uses a remote-sensing platform which helps measure climate impact using satellite imagery. The startup buys high-resolution imagery captured using synthetic aperture radars from SAOCOM and Umbra and fuses it with openly available satellite imagery to understand farmers’ practices. The high-resolution imagery comes through SARs penetrating objects on Earth’s surface using different wavelengths to measure characters such as water level, soil moisture and plant growth.
Alongside satellite imagery, Mitti Labs uses greenhouse gas chambers on ground to capture methane and nitrous oxide fluxes coming out in the field. The data from these chambers goes into a software model and is processed by third-party labs to calculate emissions.
In terms of carbon credits, Mitti Labs worked with Cornell University, the International Rice Research Institute and the U.S. Department of Agriculture for about 12 months, running experiments with satellite imagery and gas chamber data to test and advance its measurement practices. This in turn is meant to help buyers in Europe and the U.S. purchase carbon credits with confidence.
Mitti Labs currently works with Gold Standard for issuing carbon credits. However, Laguarta told TechCrunch that the startup may expand to Verra as it scales the business.
Converting carbon credits into real money takes some time. Laguarta said Mitti Labs is currently in the due diligence stages with the projects it has launched. The startup aims for at least 70% of the profits it garners from carbon projects to be distributed among farmers that transitioned their rice farming practices. This will be an additional revenue stream for these farmers. The remaining amount will be divided among Mitti Labs’ partners and the startup itself, the co-founder said.
The success of its first five projects will help Mitti Labs to scale its presence. The startup already has 10 more projects in the works, and plans to expand geographically and enter Bangladesh, Thailand and Vietnam.
Laguarta told TechCrunch that Mitti Labs has already found the “right local partners” in the new markets and is discussing financing local projects with project investors and carbon offset buyers. The plan is to start them by the end of 2024 or sometime in 2025. Nevertheless, the startup considers India to remain its focused market.
“India is our first market, and India is the market that we think we have a very strong passion to make an impact on,” Laguarta said.
Mitti Labs is not the only startup enabling sustainable farming in India. RTP Global-backed Varaha is among the existing players in that domain. However, Laguarta said most of these startups do not specifically focus on one crop.
“If you’re trying to do five different things, I think that’s a good strategy for some people. For us, the importance is we want to be the best in rice farming, and we believe that there should be someone who’s the best at agroforestry and someone who’s the best at biochar and other things,” he said.
Mitti Labs’ maiden funding was co-led by Lightspeed and Voyager, along with early support from Harvard Innovation Labs.
Artificial Agency raises $16M to use AI to make NPCs feel more realistic in video games
A group of former Google DeepMind researchers has created an AI behavior engine that aims to transform traditional video games into a more dynamic experience by improving how non-playable characters (NPCs) behave and interact with gamers.
There’s no shortage of companies using AI to generate NPCs that feel more realistic, but Canada-based Artificial Agency, fresh out of stealth with $16 million in funding, is betting its behavior engine will help it stand out from the pack.
Traditionally, NPCs are guided by decision trees and pre-written scripts, which often limit the number of outcomes a player can experience. For example, most NPCs in games respond to player behavior with a few repetitive dialogues, which can often feel unrealistic and boring.
Artificial Agency’s behavior engine throws this framework out the window, turning the game developer into more of a stage manager. The engine requires developers to give each NPC a set of motivations, rules and goals to live by, which then dictates how the NPC will respond to the player. The technology can plug into existing video games or serve as the basis for completely new ones.
The startup, based out of Edmonton, Alberta, is entering an increasingly crowded space. Competitors include Inworld, which also offers AI-generated behaviors for NPCs, as well as Nvidia, which has been working on AI-powered NPCs for some time now.
Artificial Agency, for its part, believes that integrating AI-generated NPCs into a video game’s design is the way forward.
“The conversations we often have with these studios are not about if, it’s about when,” co-founder and CEO Brian Tanner told TechCrunch. “This sort of dynamic interaction and dynamic response that our system allows is going to be table stakes in the games industry just a few years from now.”
The startup recently raised $12 million in a seed round co-led by Radical Ventures and Toyota Ventures, the founders told TechCrunch. It had previously raised $4 million in an undisclosed pre-seed round from Radical Ventures, bringing its total raised to $16 million. Other participants in the latest seed round were Flying Fish, Kaya, BDC Deep Tech and TIRTA Ventures.
Who wants AI NPCs?
A big question for many of these startups is whether gaming studios will even adopt their AI technology. Some worry that the big studios will develop the technology themselves or may hesitate to add generative AI to their flagship games, especially given the risk of hallucinations and how untested the technology still is.
While it wouldn’t name them, Artificial Agency says it’s working with “several notable AAA studios” to develop its behavior engine, and expects the technology to be widely available in 2025.
“When we reached out to gaming studios, some were starting to build some of these behaviors themselves, when in reality, they’re just trying to build games,” said Radical Ventures investor Daniel Mulet. “Once you see like 20, 30 groups that are trying to build this themselves, there is an opportunity to build a platform and make it available to everyone.”
Generally, game developers seem to be open to using generative AI to build games, but there’s still some hesitancy. Nearly half of the 3,000 game developers surveyed by GDC and Game Developer for the 2024 State of the Game Industry report said they use generative AI in some aspect of their development process, particularly for repetitive tasks. Still, only about 21% of those surveyed expect generative AI to have a positive impact on the industry, and 42% of respondents were “very concerned” about the ethics of using generative AI.
Mulet said Artificial Agency’s founding team, with decades of experience in Google DeepMind, gave him confidence that it can build a best-in-class tooling layer to improve how NPCs behave. DeepMind, after all, has a long history of developing the cutting edge in AI that can play games — it built AlphaGo, the first computer program to beat a world champion at Go.
Around the time Google was shifting focus toward the Gemini model, Tanner and his team broke away to develop video game agents that could replace NPCs.
From NPC to co-op companion
In a demo of the technology the startup shared with TechCrunch, co-founder Alex Kearney created an NPC powered by the behavior engine in Minecraft (the startup would not reveal the games it’s currently working on). The NPC, named Aaron, was instructed to be friendly and helpful, and was given access to basic functions such as movement, opening chests, digging and placing blocks.
At one point, Kearney’s in-game character asked Aaron to gather supplies for a scary mining adventure, and though it wasn’t programmed to do so, the NPC visited multiple chests to gather armor, helmets, tools and food, and delivered the supplies back to Kearney’s character. And when Kearney told Aaron she was gluten-free after it brought back some bread, the NPC apologized, and offered a gluten-free option instead: cooked chicken.
The simple demo showed how Artificial Agency’s AI NPCs could not only talk, but perform complex actions without being explicitly told to do so. Aaron showed some level of awareness, and the NPC created a unique experience with no script writing or programming required. At the very least, the technology could likely save game developers some time.
Will gamers pay the price for AI?
Tanner estimated this roughly five-minute demo cost $1 in AI inferencing costs, but he pointed out that a year ago, it would have cost $100. Artificial Agency expects costs to continue coming down, both thanks to improvement in GPU efficiencies and AI model optimizations. Currently, the startup uses open source models, including Meta’s Llama 3. A year from now, Tanner expects the five-minute demo to cost one cent or less.
But whether it costs a penny or $100, who’s going to end up paying for these inferencing costs? Artificial Agency says AI NPCs probably won’t make video games more expensive for an end user, but Radical Ventures’ Mulet wasn’t so sure. He said his venture firm is confident game studios are willing to pay to license Artificial Agency’s technology, but once it’s deployed, it could result in a monthly fee for gamers.
“The fact that there’s inference costs associated with running these systems means that it has to be a bit of a premium feature,” said Mulet. “Will you, as a gamer, pay $2.99 a month or $12.99 a month? That’s a little bit early to tell.”
Noded AI wants to make your notes the center of your work world
Let’s start with the premise that many people take notes as they work with customers as part of their jobs. As they take notes, they may need to access a customer record in Salesforce or open a Jira ticket to get IT involved with a customer problem, but to do that, they must undertake the dreaded task switching, where you switch out of the application you’re working in and open another application to complete a different job or access additional information.
Noded AI, a new startup, wants to change that by making all your work tools available from where you take notes in an automated fashion, eliminating the need to task switch. Today, the company emerged from stealth with a $4 million investment.
“We are reinventing the note-taking space and using AI and a bit of automation data science to basically put notes at the center of the enterprise,” Noded CPO and co-founder Steve Wood told TechCrunch.
The Noded name, aside from a clever play on words, comes from the fact that the company sees notes not as a large document, but as bits of information that fit together in a knowledge graph. “The note becomes a graph where each fragment of information is a node on the graph, so if I were say, in a meeting with you, I can see all the tasks and context around you, and it would just filter through all of my notes across weeks, months, whatever,” he said.
And you can access all the information you need from within Noded without having to switch programs because it’s all designed to bring the apps you need to you automatically within the context of your work.” So rather than having your notes in one place, and all your applications in another, it’s making your notes part of the flow of work where, as you type your notes, Noded will help you get it into the right system. So you don’t have to double enter all the time,” he said.
Wood was previously VP of product and platform at Slack, another company that has tried to be the center of work, but using communications instead of notes as the centering mechanism. Wood says that one of the things he realized helping build the Slack platform, was it required more context, and he feels like the notes metaphor provides that.
“Part of the realization from Slack was that without having the context around the customer or the other business objects, all we could do was just push alerts to you, which kind of just made your life more confusing because it’s hard to track,” he said. “Why do I care about that Zendesk ticket? Oh, yeah, it’s because Acme was asking about it. So we can give you that context, it makes it easier for you to do your work, but it also makes things a lot less noisy.”
AI plays a role in the way work is pulled from the notes and linked to an application, but for their purposes, Wood says it doesn’t have to be super sophisticated. “Today’s LLMs are perfectly fine for our purposes,” he said. “It’s kind of like having an administrator who’s sitting there doing the really tedious work that you don’t want to do,” he said.
His co-founder and CEO, Chris Port, came from Dell Boomi. The two co-founders actually worked together at Boomi, prior to Wood joining Slack in 2020.
It’s early days. The company launched in September and began building in earnest after the first of the year. “And this will be our ‘Hello World’ moment where we announced the company,” Port said. The startup is working with some early customers and working toward a formal beta some time this year.
Today’s $4 million investment was led by Boldstart Ventures with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, 20VC and First Hand Ventures. Wood’s old bosses at Slack, co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, also participated, as well as Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest.
GM-backed Addionics aims to make lithium-ion batteries cheaper with wavy foil
In the lithium-ion battery world, the race to the bottom isn’t as ominous as it sounds.
Battery manufacturers are under pressure from automakers to lower prices while maintaining or improving performance. They’ve largely delivered, with battery pack costs dropping from $780 to $139 per kilowatt-hour over the last decade, according to BNEF. That’s allowed electric vehicles to rapidly gain market share.
But recently, battery pack costs have begun to stagnate. If they don’t start dropping again, EVs might remain too expensive for the majority of consumers. One startup, Addionics, thinks a solution might be hidden in a part of the battery that’s often ignored: the foil current collector.
Today, current collectors resemble the aluminum foil you might have in your kitchen, and they serve to gather electrons from the active materials, the stuff that stores the ions that generate power. “It hasn’t changed dramatically in the last 30 years,” Moshiel Biton, co-founder and CEO of Addionics, told TechCrunch.
Biton’s company thinks the humble foil just needs a little texture. “The concept is not new,” he said, “but no one managed to commercialize it at scale.”
Previous attempts at modifying the collectors were either simplistic — punching them full of holes — or complex — growing spongy materials. The Israel- and U.K.-based startup has developed a way to create copper and aluminum foils that are laced with tiny holes and riddled with undulating peaks and valleys.
In the case of copper, the material used for the current collector on the anode, the negative terminal, Addionics uses electricity to deposit copper ions in the proper configuration. For aluminum, the material used to collect electrons from the cathode, the positive terminal, the startup is using electroetching. At a basic level, both techniques are similar to what’s used in the semiconductor industry.
Addionics’ wavy additions create a three-dimensional current collector that increases contact between the foil and active material. The result, the company claims, is a complex material that’s easy to manufacture and improves battery performance and efficiency while potentially doubling life span. It can also work with a wide range of battery chemistries, though Biton added that in the future it might tailor its collectors to different chemistries to squeeze out a bit more performance.
The startup recently raised a $39 million Series B led by GM Ventures and Deep Insight with participation from Scania, the Swedish commercial vehicle manufacturer. The company plans to use the funding to speed delivery of its current collectors and explore new markets and geographies “in order to reduce risk, to get more data points, to get more traction, and to make a faster route for commercialization,” Biton said.
Earlier this year, Addionics announced that it was planning to build a $400 million factory in the U.S. to produce its current collectors. The move would allow battery packs and EVs containing the materials to claim more incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act, which mandates increasing domestic content through the end of the decade.
Alongside the announcement of the factory, Addionics said it has letters of intent from U.S. automakers, though it didn’t say which ones those were. “We are going to announce it at a later stage with the factory announcement,” Biton said. “But in this round, you have the names of two OEMs that have invested in us. So it can give you some insight about customers that we are engaging with.”
Openmart wants to make it easier for enterprises to sell to local businesses
In 2020, Kathryn Wu launched a side hustle while she was working as a product engineer at Pinterest. Wu started a milk tea company, OhTea, with the hopes of connecting with local grocery stores and gift shops to get them to carry the tea. She quickly realized how difficult it was to not only be able to locate all of the potential retailors but also to find the point of contact at each place. The fragmented market was so hard to navigate, it ended up playing a role in the company’s demise.
“I failed to reach product market fit,” Wu told TechCrunch. “It’s just very hard to find that retail information. I needed to pull from several tools, pull up a big spreadsheet and I thought maybe I should just solve my own pain point.”
That experience was the basis for the startup she co-founded three years later, Openmart. Openmart calls itself the AI alternative to Zoominfo. The company uses AI to scrape data from public business filings, maps, customer reviews and other sources to aggregate a database of local businesses organized by type. Users give Openmart a prompt of what kinds of businesses they are looking to sell to and the startup pulls them a list of potential sales leads with details like each business owners’ name and contact information.
Wu founded the startup alongside Richard He. The pair met while working at Pinterest as interns and later reconnected with each other as part of an Asian entrepreneurship community. The pair bonded over their dogs: Wu has a golden retriever while He has a lab. When He saw that Wu was thinking about starting a company, he wanted in.
While the original idea sparked from Wu being unable to get her small side-hustle business into local business, the resulting mission behind Openmart looked a little different. He said they were doing research into this idea and discovered that large enterprises struggled to navigate selling to local businesses too and decided to focus on building a product for that group first.
“Our core focus is still local business,” He said, regarding the businesses Openmart’s database covers. “We know it is a huge pain point. We are confident this AI agent can generate to all outbound sales as we grow into more sectors, not just physical business. AI in the first wave is not replacing lawyers or doctors, it’s more replacing lower intelligence, lower logical orders of reasoning tasks.”
The company was founded late last year and was a member of Y Combinator’s W24 cohort. Openmart garnered a handful of paying customer trials while in beta that range from Fortune 500 companies to Series B and Series C startups. Their fellow YC founders were some of their first customers. Wu said the plan is to focus on generating these kinds of leads for enterprise clients to start with the intent to develop a tier for medium-sized enterprises down the line.
Openmart just raised a $2.75 million seed round and is exiting beta mode. The startup raised from investors including Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Afore Capital and several other VC firms. He said the company was careful to set a reasonable fundraising goal and turned down investors pushing them to raise an oversubscribed round. He said the company is following the fundraising advice of its YC group partner, Gustaf Alstromer, to try to maintain 50% ownership through the Series B.
“It’s a pretty simple math problem,” He said. “You want to dilute as little as possible. You only need [to raise] as much capital as you need to survive to the next round. How much money we need is a bottom-up calculation rather than I want as much money as possible.”
He added that with AI helping engineers be more productive they don’t need as much capital for hiring as they can instead concentrate on a small, more efficient engineering team.
Openmart is really focused on aggregating this data on local businesses to start but plans to expand into other areas in the future, He said. While it makes sense for many startups to expand horizontally, or to offer the same service to a different vertical or business category, the company may want to be mindful of which areas they expand to. Some areas like B2B software have pretty established sales lead-generation software players like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Crunchbase.
He said that even with the company’s plans to expand in the future, they will still focus on their roots: small businesses. Wu added that they want to be thought of as the experts at finding contacts for small and medium-sized businesses.
FCC rule would make carriers unlock all phones after 60 days
The FCC wants to make it significantly easier for consumers to unlock their phones from their carriers, proposing that all devices must be unlockable just 60 days after purchase. How this will mesh with current plans and phone-buying trends, however, is something the agency is hoping to learn before putting such a rule into effect.
Mobile phones purchased from a carrier are generally locked to that carrier until either the contract is up or the phone is paid off. But despite improvements to the process over the years (unlocking was flat-out illegal not long ago), it still isn’t quite clear to all consumers when and how they can unlock their phone and take it to the carrier (or country) of their choice.
To be clear, this is not about opening up your phone using a face, fingerprint or password, but changing settings in its software to allow it to work with different mobile networks.
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, or NPRM, in a press release Thursday. “When you buy a phone, you should have the freedom to decide when to change service to the carrier you want and not have the device you own stuck by practices that prevent you from making that choice,” she wrote. “That is why we are proposing clear, nationwide mobile phone unlocking rules.”
Specifically, the release says, carriers would simply have to provide unlocking services 60 days after activation. A welcome standard, but it may run afoul of today’s phone and wireless markets.
For instance, although the dreaded two-year contract is no longer forced on most consumers, many still opt for them to lock in the price and get other benefits. And perhaps more to the point, the phones themselves are often paid for in what amount to installment plans: You get a phone for “free” and then pay it off over the next few years.
The NPRM is the stage of FCC rulemaking where it has a draft rule but has not yet solicited public feedback. On July 18, the agency will publish the full document and open up commentary on the above issues. And you can be sure there will be some squawking from mobile providers!
Not knowing the specifics of the proposed rule, we can’t be sure how it would mix with these common pay-over-time details. But unlocking a phone doesn’t free someone from needing to pay off the device — they can just use it on other networks if they want. And if a carrier lets you buy a phone outright from it but locks it to the bands for six months or a year out of sheer greed, this would offer an early exit.
As Rosenworcel said, the point of the rule is to offer consistency and transparency: a simple, national rule from regulators setting a reasonable limit on how and whether carriers can lock down devices. We’ll know more in July when the full NPRM is published.
Read more on TechCrunch:
HubSpot says it’s investigating customer account hacksDEI? More like ‘common decency’ — and Silicon Valley is saying ‘no thanks’Startups scramble to assess fallout from Evolve Bank data breachRemote access giant TeamViewer says Russian spies hacked its corporate network
Startups scramble to assess fallout from Evolve Bank data breach
Mitti Labs aims to make rice farming less harmful to the climate, starting in India
Rice is the staple crop of more than half of the world’s population. Demand is growing with the rising population in South and Southeast Asia. However, a significant portion of rice farming still relies on traditional cultivation methods that lead to substantial methane emissions, which are a major contributor to climate change — methane is nearly 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide when it comes to warming the atmosphere, although it dissipates faster. Growing rice also requires a considerable amount of fresh water, around 3,000 liters for every kilogram of rice, or 20 million liters for every hectare of a rice farm.
Mitti Labs aims to limit methane emissions and water wastage in rice farming using its technology solutions. Cofounded by Harvard Business School graduates Xavier Laguarta and Devdut Dalal, the firm has now raised $3 million in an equity investment as it aims to reduce methane emissions by 50% and water consumption by 30% with tech such as high-resolution satellite imagery and on-ground gas chambers.
The New York City-headquartered startup, with a subsidiary based in India’s Bengaluru, launched in May last year and has chosen India as its primary market. India is the world’s second-largest rice producer, yet the livelihoods of its rice farmers face imminent threats from climate change, which has resulted in a significant decline in water levels and an increasing amount of methane in its atmosphere.
Laguarta and Dalal conceptualized Mitti Labs last year after meeting during their master’s in business administration at Harvard Business School. Before beginning the startup, Laguarta had experience in sustainability consulting, while Dalal worked in the food and agricultural supply chain. A third cofounder, CTO Nathan Torbick, also signed on.
“When you look at the agriculture space, there’s been so much done, and regenerative agriculture is something that people talk about all over the world. But when you look at the amount of people who are trying to tackle rice specifically, it is so much smaller than most other crops,” Laguarta said in an interview.
Measuring emissions, selling carbon credits
Rice produces about half the greenhouse gas emissions from croplands, including 30% of agricultural methane emissions. However, farms can cut methane emissions from rice cultivations to a large extent by improving water management or alternating wetting and drying.
Working with the not-for-profit Syngenta Foundation and Dr. Reddy’s Foundation, as well as Spanish food processing company Ebro Foods, Mitti Labs has launched five projects across India to help farmers adopt and implement sustainable farming techniques, avoid stubble burning and use limited water. These rice projects cover 30,000 hectares in area and will help cut 120,000 metric tonnes of CO2e emissions, the startup said.
Mitti Labs aims to work with more than 40,000 smallholder farmers to embed and measure sustainable agricultural practices that will not only improve the environmental aspect of rice farming but also help farmers raise their annual incomes by up to 30%, as the startup will enable them to earn money from carbon credits it will sell on their behalf in the market.
Convincing smallholder farmers to embrace new techniques sometimes becomes challenging, as they often hesitate to move away from their traditional practices. However, Dalal told TechCrunch that Mitti Labs provides support and advice to farmers and offers them regular touchpoints through its on-ground implementation partners.
“Our team works with implementation partners, continuously refining the pitch to farmers; what works in one village, might not work in another. So the behavior change element has to be very targeted, and completely aligned with the local communities’ needs,” he said.
On the tech side, Mitti Labs uses a remote-sensing platform which helps measure climate impact using satellite imagery. The startup buys high-resolution imagery captured using synthetic aperture radars from SAOCOM and Umbra and fuses it with openly available satellite imagery to understand farmers’ practices. The high-resolution imagery comes through SARs penetrating objects on Earth’s surface using different wavelengths to measure characters such as water level, soil moisture and plant growth.
Alongside satellite imagery, Mitti Labs uses greenhouse gas chambers on ground to capture methane and nitrous oxide fluxes coming out in the field. The data from these chambers goes into a software model and is processed by third-party labs to calculate emissions.
In terms of carbon credits, Mitti Labs worked with Cornell University, the International Rice Research Institute and the U.S. Department of Agriculture for about 12 months, running experiments with satellite imagery and gas chamber data to test and advance its measurement practices. This in turn is meant to help buyers in Europe and the U.S. purchase carbon credits with confidence.
Mitti Labs currently works with Gold Standard for issuing carbon credits. However, Laguarta told TechCrunch that the startup may expand to Verra as it scales the business.
Converting carbon credits into real money takes some time. Laguarta said Mitti Labs is currently in the due diligence stages with the projects it has launched. The startup aims for at least 70% of the profits it garners from carbon projects to be distributed among farmers that transitioned their rice farming practices. This will be an additional revenue stream for these farmers. The remaining amount will be divided among Mitti Labs’ partners and the startup itself, the co-founder said.
The success of its first five projects will help Mitti Labs to scale its presence. The startup already has 10 more projects in the works, and plans to expand geographically and enter Bangladesh, Thailand and Vietnam.
Laguarta told TechCrunch that Mitti Labs has already found the “right local partners” in the new markets and is discussing financing local projects with project investors and carbon offset buyers. The plan is to start them by the end of 2024 or sometime in 2025. Nevertheless, the startup considers India to remain its focused market.
“India is our first market, and India is the market that we think we have a very strong passion to make an impact on,” Laguarta said.
Mitti Labs is not the only startup enabling sustainable farming in India. RTP Global-backed Varaha is among the existing players in that domain. However, Laguarta said most of these startups do not specifically focus on one crop.
“If you’re trying to do five different things, I think that’s a good strategy for some people. For us, the importance is we want to be the best in rice farming, and we believe that there should be someone who’s the best at agroforestry and someone who’s the best at biochar and other things,” he said.
Mitti Labs’ maiden funding was co-led by Lightspeed and Voyager, along with early support from Harvard Innovation Labs.