Funding Friday: Stretching the Limits of Climate Tech

It’s been a busy week for funding, with several of the most high-profile deals featured in our daily AM newsletter, including Slate Auto’s $650 million fundraise for its stripped-down electric truck and Rivian’s partnership with Redwood Materials to repurpose the electric automaker’s battery packs for grid-scale storage.

These are clearly companies with direct decarbonization implications, but one of the week’s other biggest announcements raises the question: Is this really climate tech? That would be quantum computing startup Sygaldry, which recently nabbed $139 million in a round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures to build quantum AI infrastructure. Huh.

Elsewhere in the ecosystem, the climate connection is a little more straightforward, with new funding for advanced surface materials designed to improve insulation and fire-protection, capital for microgrids that can integrate a diverse mix of generation and storage assets, and federal support for next-generation geothermal tech.

Sygaldry Snags $139 Million to Build Quantum-Powered AI

Quantum computing offers a futuristic paradigm for high-powered information processing and problem solving. By leveraging the principles of quantum mechanics, these systems operate in fundamentally different ways than even today’s most advanced supercomputers, encoding information not as ones and zeros, but as quantum units called “qubits.” Naturally, there is significant interest in applying this novel tech — which today remains error-prone and not ready for prime time — to artificial intelligence, with the aim of exponentially accelerating certain training and inference workloads.

Perhaps less intuitively, however, these next-generation computers are now viewed, at least by one prominent venture capital firm, as a key climate technology.

This week, quantum computing startup Sygaldry raised a $139 million Series A round led by Bill Gates’ climate tech VC firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures to build “quantum-acclerated AI servers” for data centers, which could reduce the cost and power required to train and operate large models. “The AI industry is advancing faster than ever and needs a breakthrough in performance per watt,” Carmichael Roberts, Breakthrough Energy Ventures’ chief investment officer said in the press release. “Sygaldry’s vision for bringing quantum directly to the AI data center has the potential to deliver exactly that, bending the cost and energy curve at the moment it matters most."

Certainly Sygaldry’s ultra-high-powered computers could help lower the energy intensity of AI workloads, but that is no guarantee that it will reduce AI and data center emissions overall. As was widely discussed when the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek released its cheaper, more energy-efficient model early last year, efficiency gains could reduce emissions in the sector at large, but they are perhaps just as likely — or some argue even more likely — to drive greater proliferation of AI across a wide array of industries. This unfettered growth could offset efficiency gains entirely, leading to a net increase in AI power demand.

NanoTech Materials Raises $29 Million for Heat- and Fire-Resistant Coatings

Buildings account for nearly 37% of domestic energy consumption, with heating and cooling representing the largest share of that load. But while energy efficiency strategies typically focus on upgrading insulation or adjusting the thermostat, there’s another approach — essentially painting the roof with sunlight-reflecting material — that has the potential to reduce AC demand and thus cut a building’s cooling-related energy use by up to 50%.

Just such a “paint” is one of the unique ceramic coatings developed by NanoTech Materials, which this week raised a $29.4 million Series A to scale its infrastructure materials business. Beyond roofing, the company also offers a fire-protective coating for wooden infrastructure such as utility poles, fences, highway retaining walls, and other transportation assets, as well as an insulative coating for high-heat industrial equipment such as pipes and storage tanks designed to slow heat loss and prevent burn risk.

“Today’s built environment demands materials that don’t just meet code, but can also outperform the extreme conditions we’re now facing,” said D. Kent Lance, a partner at HPI Real Estate Services & Investments, which led the Series A. Nanotech Materials currently operates a manufacturing facility in Texas and plans to use this new capital to further expand its operations as it conducts market research for its various product lines.

Critical Loop Lands $26 Million to Build Microgrids For Faster Grid Interconnection

Interconnection delays aren’t just a data center problem. Industrial developers working on everything from real estate and electric vehicle charging to manufacturing and aviation are also struggling to get timely and reliable access to power when building or expanding their operations. Enter Critical Loop. This modular microgrid company is building battery energy storage systems that can integrate batteries of varying sizes and specifications with a variety of power sources, including onsite solar, diesel generators, and grid power.

This week, the startup announced a $26 million Series A round, bringing total funding to $49 million across all equity and debt financing. Critical Loop’s approach combines a software platform with proprietary hardware — what it calls a “combiner” — which reduces the need for the many custom components typically required to connect a diverse mix of batteries and generation sources. “There’s a lot of power problems that are not getting solved because of limitations on an understanding of how to integrate different systems at a site,” Critical Loop’s CEO Balachandar Ramamurthy, told me last month.

The company’s initial product is a modular single-megawatt battery system that can be transported in shipping containers for rapid deployment in capacity-constrained locations. To date, Critical Loop has deployed about 50 megawatt-hours of microgrid assets, with plans to scale to over 100 megawatt-hours by year’s end.

DOE Announces $14 Million for Enhanced Geothermal Project in Pennsylvania

It’s been another exciting week for one of the few bipartisan bright spots in clean energy — geothermal development. My colleague Alexander C. Kaufman reported in this morning’s AM newsletter that the AI-native geothermal company Zanskar secured $40 million through one of the first development capital facilities for early-stage geothermal development, and now the technology has secured fresh capital from the fickle U.S. Department of Energy. Today, the DOE announced a $14 million grant to support an enhanced geothermal demonstration project in Pennsylvania that will convert an old shale gas well into a geothermal pilot plant.

Conventional geothermal systems depend on a highly specific set of subsurface conditions to be commercially viable, which includes naturally occurring underground reservoirs where fluid flows among hot rocks. By contrast, developers of enhanced geothermal systems effectively engineer their own reservoirs, hydraulically fracturing rock formations and then circulating water through those man-made fractures to extract heat that’s then used to generate electricity. A number of well-funded startups are advancing this approach using drilling techniques adapted from the oil and gas industry, such as Fervo Energy — which has an agreement with Google to supply electricity for its data centers — and Sage Geosystems, which has a similar tie-up with Meta.

“As the first enhanced geothermal systems demonstration site located in the eastern United States, this project offers an important opportunity to assess the ability of such systems to deliver reliable, affordable geothermal electricity to Americans nationwide,” Kyle Haustveit, the Assistant Secretary of the Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office, said in the DOE release. If successful, the Energy Department says the project could provide a replicable model for scaling the deployment of enhanced geothermal systems across a broader range of geographies.

Bonus: XPRIZE and Amazon Launch Critical Minerals Circularity Challenge

This week, the nonprofit XPRIZE organization announced that it’s partnering with Amazon to launch a new global competition focused on critical mineral circularity — redesigning how minerals such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel are recovered, processed, and reused. Demand for these minerals is projected to quadruple by 2040, but their supply chains remain largely concentrated in China, especially across refining, processing, and battery manufacturing.

The competition aims to catalyze breakthroughs in mineral recovery and recycling, materials solutions, and lower-impact extraction methods. It’s not yet open to submissions as organizers are still seeking philanthropic and corporate funding before entrepreneurs, startups, and research teams can submit their ideas for consideration. XPRIZE has been running challenges for three decades now, with past competitions revolving around carbon removal, adult literacy, and lunar exploration.