In a significant stride toward fostering climate tech innovation, our team at Blueridge Climate Ventures has developed an extensive Climate Tech Market Map highlighting North Carolina’s burgeoning startup ecosystem. This initiative, driven by the need to understand and showcase the climate tech landscape, has brought to light the tremendous growth of this sector, and the state’s potential to be a leader nationally in climate technology innovation.
We collected information on the number of climate tech startups, geographic location, growth stage, climate tech sub-sector, and amount of funding received. Working from this data, we created a market map to illustrate the volume of climate tech activity in our state, and demonstrate there is a viable investment pipeline.
We were surprised by how robust the North Carolina climate tech ecosystem is with 140 startups in seven sub-sectors from CTVC including Food, Land, and Water Use, Energy, Built Environment, Industrial, Transportation, Carbon, and Climate Management. We were encouraged to see the representation of startup activity in all of the sub-sectors, with the most concentration in Food/Land/Water Use and Industry, followed by Energy and the Built Environment.
We are using the map to educate the local and regional investor community about the climate tech sector, and how large the potential opportunity is. As reflected on the map, climate tech spans the broader economy and is not just a niche space. Several of the sub-sectors align well with our strengths in the state in agriculture, manufacturing, and clean energy, as well as emerging strengths in sub-categories like alternative proteins.
Creating a visualization of the data has been very helpful in introducing the climate tech sector, and showcasing the variety of startups we have across the state.