Augment Ventures August 2021 Update
Augment Ventures’ ClimateTech Portfolio Impact
Previously, Cloud’s soil carbon models relied on hyperspectral data, collected through a proprietary hardware and software package from manned aircraft. Their new approach includes a suite of satellite remote sensing data, environmental data, and physical samples which enable Cloud to decrease COGS and eliminate the operational risk of both collecting and analyzing data. This approach has been validated by peer-reviewed literature. This breakthrough enables Cloud to quantify soil carbon for every field in a country while still providing granularity of how soil carbon changes within individual fields.
If you are interested in joining the Cloud Agronomics team, please click here for more information on available positions.
The company had an exceptional couple of months with utility programs. With the drought in the West increasing awareness and concern over water usage, Flume has kicked off a number of new utility programs with over 30 programs currently active and 5 coming in the rest of Q3. One of its most popular programs, in Marin, CA, has sold over 2,000 devices and the utility is using Flume’s data to actively manage and track water use in order to meet a proposed 40% reduction in use. Overall, 92% of utility customers believe having a Flume has made them more aware of where they use water and 80% believe that the information provided through the Flume app has changed their water use behavior.
The State of Climate Change – The IPCC Report
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization of 195 governments, issued a new report this month based on a three-year analysis of 14,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies. It is the first major international assessment of climate change research since 2013. The results paint a disturbing picture of the current state of climate issues across the globe, including droughts, flooding, fires, and other weather events. It highlights the human causes for such issues and the long term impacts of further climate change. The full report and summaries can be found here.
Here are several other summaries of the IPCC report findings from The Economist, Yale, Axios, Bloomberg, and Quartz.