The NatureBacked Podcast

Tom Bosschaert, founder of Except Integrated Sustainability, unveiled in the episode how the consultancy is transforming itself towards creating entities that will kickstart thorough, long-term societal transformations. "Time is no longer on our side and we can't just keep playing in the sandbox anymore. We have to take serious, serious action," Bosschaert said in the episode. "We've pinpointed fi...

Len Bland from Nano Gas Environmental introduced the technology to clean wastewater with nanobubbles. The topics we covered: How did it come up with the idea of cleaning wastewater? Role of patents. The next milestones for the company Competition in the market Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

CUR8 co-founder Marta Krupinska, a passionate advocate for carbon removal, believes that carbon removal is essential to addressing climate change, while it can also be a profitable business. CUR8 is building a marketplace for carbon removal credits. These projects can include planting trees, capturing carbon dioxide from the air, or storing carbon dioxide underground. In this episode, Marta and I...

In this episode, Tarmo Virki talks with Danny Flood, the founder of School of Growth Hacking, a platform that teaches entrepreneurs how to grow their businesses faster and smarter. Danny is also the author of several books on entrepreneurship, marketing, and productivity, such as Hack Sleep, Hack Email, and Buy Your Own Island. Tarmo and Danny discuss the following topics: • How to apply AI for gr...

In this episode, we talk to Nick Piromsawat, a senior investment associate at ExpresSo, the venture capital and venture building team at PTT, the Thai national oil company. Nick shares how ExpresSo is driving the transition from oil and gas to renewable energy and decarbonisation, by investing in and partnering with startups with innovative technologies and solutions for a greener future. He also...

Wildchain aims to address the lack of financial support for real endangered animals by combining the concept of adoptable NFTs featuring endangered animals and threatened species. The team behind this initiative has spent two years developing the project, which has been self-funded without any external investments. Their approach involves building a working product before launching a token, and th...

Our host Tarmo visited Startup Tank Climate Investor Pitch Show as a panellist. You can hear six interesting startups pitching. - InnoCSR: eco-friendly brick manufacturing  - Sophie’s Bionutrients: Food Grade Protein from Microalgae - Rightcharge: Simplified EV charging solutions - UpShift Cars: Fractional EV car subscription - PingThings: Revolutionary Predictive AI Grid Management - Concrete4Cha...

Djoann Fal, the founder of Atlas Capital, believes that Southeast Asia is a region with enormous potential for innovation and implementation in ClimateTech. In this episode, our host Tarmo Virki speaks with Fal, a passionate advocate for climate tech, about the challenges and opportunities in Southeast Asia, we hear about some of the companies that his investment firm Atlas Capital is backing, and...

Introduction: Host Tarmo Virki welcomes listeners to "NatureBacked," a show discussing the green economy. Guest speaker Frank Meehan from openESG, joins the conversation. Frank Meehan is a seasoned investor and co-founder of SPARKlabs, an investment firm focused on climate, food, and agricultural tech solutions. He also co-founded Equilibrium.ai, acquired by Fiscal Note, and works with openESG, a...

Green is a crucial part of the offering, but not the only benefit microgrid clients are seeking, said Rod Matthews from San Diego, California-based microgrid producer Brevian Energy. "We're looking at ways to help make power much more affordable for people and resilient because you are generating it yourself. So you're not relying on the grid. So when the grid goes down a lot of times you don't ev...

For sustainable investing one has to make clear changes, looking beyond lowering the share of fossil fuel companies in the portfolio, said Peter Krull, Partner at Earth Equity Advisors. “We don't have to accept less bad. We can just simply make transitions,” Krull said. “So sustainable investing to me is investing in companies that are going to reduce our exposure to carbon emissions, but also res...

Sazmining is building a platform for green, even carbon-negative, bitcoin mining, said founder William Szamosszegi. Looking at the big picture, the environmental effects of Bitcoin are considerable, partly because Bitcoins are made using electricity partially generated by gas and coal-fired power plants.  However, replacing the energy source, and working with methane could turn the situation upsid...

When Eden Project North, an environmental visitor attraction in northern England, opens in a few years, a lot of the work will be done by local enterprises, said Adam Beaumont, trustee and non-executive director at Eden. The project will be located at Morecambe, once a thriving coastal town, which has lost a lot of its holiday travellers to southern competition. "When we announced that we intended...

Nascent European Web3 Organization is seeking to connect the web3 community on the old continent, starting with education and information-sharing projects, said Armin ZadakBar, one of the founders of the Brussels-headquartered organisation. The jury is still out to determine the leading forces in web3, and Europe’s decentralised decision-making could well play in its favour, ZadakBar said. “This i...

Next year, 100 Thousand Million aims to start building the world’s first truly sustainable city in northern Chile, and several countries are keen to see the next project’s on their soil, said founders Alberto Scherb and Jaime Alvarez. “In the short term, our vision or mission is to create a lifestyle that is truly human-centred, nature-focused, and of course, sustainable,” Scherb said.  “So in a m...

Sam Kamani, VP of Growth at web3 tools maker Cookbook, said he was looking ahead optimistically despite crypto winter in the episode where we delved deep into the world of Web3 and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs). “I’m not too worried, not too worried at all, even though I work in this space. I’ve seen, and I’ve lived through, at least three or four of these upswings and downturns. E...

It will be a long road to broad adoption of new currency BEACH, but living well should not cost us the planet, said Robert Cobbold, head of operations at Beach Collective, a blue circular economy platform behind the token. “A beach token is a currency which internalizes the health of the planet into every single transaction,” Cobbold said. Most of every transaction cost goes to funding ocean regen...

Transparency and trust built into Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) should be an example for any corporation, said founders of Internet Native Organisation (INO). "The future of organisations is digital - we have seen that in Estonia, but the rest of the world is not yet there," said Astra Tikas. Internet Native Organisation said it seeks to bring tools and solutions of DAOs to the mai...

Reneum seeks to boost solar and wind farm investments by tokenizing renewable energy certificates. “It’s a vehicle to bypass traditional capital market failures or inefficiencies to reach the corners of the world that struggle to access funding and deploy more renewable energy,” said Chief Executive Brianna Welsh. “I see legacy market providers shifting into blockchain quite quickly because they r...

To solve the challenge of increasing plastic waste in oceans, we need to go to the source and find alternative materials to the plastics, said John Felts, CEO and co-founder of California-headquartered materials startup Cruz Foam. "It’s nearly impossible to play catch up on an increasingly flowing faucet of trash. We, obviously, need to try to get out what’s already in there. But the greater avenu...

Barcelona-based TAPP Water seeks to change consumers’ habits and fights against billions of dollars spent on marketing bottled water through its filter systems for tap water, said Magnus Jern, founder and Chief Executive of TAPP Water. The consumption of plastic water bottles has increased over the last few years, when knowledge of the health problems of bottled water and knowledge of plastic wast...

U.S.-based green investment platform Raise Green is looking to drive more capital into climate solutions, boosting entrepreneurship in the sector, said founder and CEO Franz Hochstrasser. “We take a grassroots approach to climate action -- we want more people involved in investing and innovating in this space,” Hochstrasser said. Millennials’ interest in sustainable investment has continued to inc...

Teaming up with other investors to push for a change towards greener and healthier products from global firms is gaining traction, and industry behemoths like Unilever and Nestle are listening, said Alejandro Jimenez, head of investments at Estonian green investment platform Grünfin. “Part of our goal is to make you feel you have the power; this is democratized. You have accessibility, and your mo...

Mushrooms will open a new nature-backed market for turning construction waste into new raw materials, said Joanne Rodriguez, founder of MycoCycle. “There is no waste in nature - that’s a manmade construct. And so, looking for solutions in nature to solve these problems is critical to how we battle this climate change,” Rodriguez said. Learn more about: Where mushrooms and cannabis meet The opportu...

Making potatoes and other crops more resistant to climate change and growing them faster using gene-editing techniques is the challenge ClimateCrop is looking to solve over coming years, said Yehuda Borenstein, founder of ClimateCrop. “We have an opportunity to upgrade plants and give them more resilience without a lot of investment in capex which is quite rare when you fight climate. Usually, you...