Meet the founders building new categories of nature intelligence, circular economies in the arts, and carbon capture - Climate Tech Time
Tube strikes who? Last month, we opened the doors to the 35th edition of Climate Tech Time in the Conduit, unsure who would make it through the strikes.
Yet it turned out that London’s climate community is a resilient bunch, and our founders spoke once again to a packed-out room.
Sebastian Leape, the CEO of Natcap, Tim Brown, the CCO and Co-Founder and Jo Kotas, CEO and Co-Founder of Used Creative, and Mohammed Khan, the CEO of Immaterial, spoke from the heart on the power of gut decisions, the potential of circular economy technology to reduce waste in the creative industry, and how we might use forensic examination of the cost-stack in a wicked problem.
This is what London’s climate tech ecosystem does so well: building the connective tissue that helps capital find companies solving hard problems.
Read on for the full roundup.
Trusting your gut when building a climate tech company
Sebastian Leape, CEO of Natcap, opened by setting the scene. While most corporates have spent the last two decades focused on climate change – setting net zero targets, measuring scope emissions, and understanding climate risk – it is only one of the planetary boundaries businesses are breaching. Fresh water, pollution, and deforestation: these crises are equally, if not more, material for many companies.
NatCap helps corporates measure their impacts on nature, their dependencies on it, and what it means for real business risk and opportunity. Their clients include Tesco, GSK, Amazon, and Starbucks, and the conversation with sustainability teams has shifted noticeably in recent years, away from reporting and targets, and toward demonstrating ROI to CEOs and CFOs. High-quality nature data, in other words, has to earn its place in the boardroom.
But Sebastian didn’t spend the evening pitching Natcap. Instead, he shared what building a climate tech company has taught him about gut instinct as a leadership tool.
The lessons came from a difficult early experience. Under pressure from investors, he used his gut to hire and structure a team, and it didn’t work. Smart people, but not enough trust, accountability, or clarity on roles. The results didn’t follow.
That failure prompted a deeper question: when should you trust your gut, and when should you override it?
For Natcap, getting this right has led to a major product update in January, automating biodiversity impact and risk assessment, a new supply chain traceability tool, and an incredible customer roster.
Connect with Sebastian on LinkedIn to follow his journey, or visit Natcap to learn more about integrating nature intelligence into business decisions.
“Everything in a climate tech startup is downstream of having an effective team – one that trusts each other, holds each other to account, and can have productive conflict.”
– Sebastian Leape, CEO of Natcap
Turning production waste into a circular marketplace
Jo Kotasand Tin Brown, co-founders of Used Creative, followed with a contrast: the creative industries are worth £1.1 trillion and are celebrated for spectacular productions and experiences. But £4.6 billion of waste is generated every year when sets, props, costumes, and installations are struck and discarded.
Both trained designers who came up through theatre, film and TV, Jo and Tin lived this problem before they decided to fix it. They met at Sky, where they built brand experiences for properties like Game of Thrones, including a towering wall of 3D-printed faces dripping with blood to announce Series 7. It was extraordinary to build, and impossible to repurpose - as back then little or no circular infrastructure existed.
In 2019, they left to start their own creative venture, keeping sustainability at the heart of their process. When a high street brand commissioned a seven-metre Christmas tree installation at Spitalfields, they built it from Steel and Perspex – and when it came down, instead of sending the custom-made baubles to recycling, they tracked down an artist who created pieces for Lady Gaga, and donated others to a primary school building a memorial corner for a boy who had passed away.
And that’s when they realised just how big the problem really was. In London alone, around 200,000 tonnes of creative assets are wasted each year (the equivalent of 14,000 double-decker buses). £112 billion of creative assets are built annually, and £4.6 billion of that is discarded at the end of the production. To put it into perspective, a period drama recently wrapped its third series, leaving 18 shipping containers worth of intact sets, costumes and furnishings.
Used Creative is modelled on Vinted’s direct seller-to-buyer circular economy to let sellers list items, earn commission on what would otherwise be waste, and if items don’t sell within three months, charity partners ensure nothing goes to landfill.
Since launching on 21 January, they have already begun pilots with key partners, including brands associated with Paul McCartney, Speedo and Berghaus.
Follow Jo and Tin’s journey on LinkedIn or visit Used Creative to find out more.
“Behind every great production there’s always a question that’s rarely asked: at the end of it all, what happens to everything?”
– Tin Brown, CCO and Co-Founder of Used Creative
Making carbon capture affordable
Mohammed Khan, CEO of Immaterial, began by saying that to hit global targets by 2050, the world needs to capture 40 billion tonnes of CO2. The price tag for that carbon capture alone currently stands at $30 trillion. And yet the technology available today is so expensive, bulky, and often toxic that it simply isn’t being adopted at any meaningful scale.
Immaterial is one of the startups founded to solve this. But unlike many, they are coming to this wicked problem from a different angle. Rather than asking whether they can build it, they’re focusing on whether it makes financial sense. Because without the economics, there is no uptake. You can build all the pipeline and offshore infrastructure, but if the carbon capture unit itself is unaffordable, the whole system is untenable. Industries like cement, steel and chemicals already operate on wafer-thin margins in cyclical markets, where a single feedstock price increase can tip them into loss.
Their technology is built on two innovations working in unison. The first is Nobel Prize-winning chemistry that allows them to capture three times as much CO2 per unit, and the second is taking proven, at-scale engineering systems and innovating around them.
The result is a carbon capture unit compact enough to tuck into a congested industrial site, green rather than toxic in its chemistry, priced below existing market mechanisms, and dramatically lower in energy consumption. So far, Immaterial has completed small-scale industrial pilots with the technology proving robust across multiple use cases.
If even a fraction of the world’s decarbonisation runs through their technology, Mohammed believes they can give back $20 trillion of that $30 trillion cost.
“Your technology or your solution is really an enabler – and it’s got to make financial sense, because if it doesn’t, there is no investment. There is no uptake.”
– Mohammed Khan, CEO of Immaterial
Follow Mohammed on LinkedIn or visit Immaterial for a deep dive into their carbon capture technology.
Across all three talks, on nature intelligence, the circular economy in the arts, and carbon capture, each founder emphasised the importance of the business case. There has to be demonstrable ROI, which often comes only through sheer hard work and patience.
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