Commonplace is a digital platform for citizen/community engagement and co-design. Commonplace's enables communty leaders, organizations, and projects to reach their communities, engage them around ideas, suggestions, concerns, analyse their feedback, and collaborate on future ideas. Its tools support surveys, communications, geolocated sentiment mapping, translating diverse voices into key themes, dashboards and reporting capabilities. The platform aims to promote dialogue also speeds up projects by getting local buy-in faster. Commonplace has supported over 3500 projects across 8 million visitors and 60+ themes, from development consultations, to wind and solar farms, community services, infrastructure, local planning, transport, and many other areas.
- civic engagement
- community consultation
- development
- participatory governance
Newlight Technologies is a biotechnology company that captures greenhouse gases and transforms them into valuable products, specifically in foodware. Their technology uses microbes to convert methane and air into a bioplastic called AirCarbon. This plastic boasts similar performance to traditional plastics but has a net positive environmental impact. Newlight uses AirCarbon to create various consumer products, helping businesses reduce their carbon footprint with a sustainable alternative to traditional petrochemical-based materials.
- bioplastics
- bioremediation
- biotech
- circular economy
- computational biology & chemistry
- conservation agriculture
- nature tech
- plastics
BackMarket’s digital marketplace for refurbished electronics helps coordinate stakeholders to close the loop on e-waste and open up access to reliable tech for all. The platform connects buyers and sellers of smartphones, laptops, TVs, wearables, gaming, e-mobility, and countless other devices from all the leading manufacturers. Promising “better than new,” it partners with certified refurbishers to repair electronics for resale, at a ~70% lower price than new. The digital platform helps coordinate discovery, customer service, payment, logistics, tracking, a 25+ point quality assurance verification of authenticity, functionality, security, data erasure, battery, testing, cleaning, and more; and manages partners to refurbish products. Refurbished devices reduce an average of ~90% raw material extraction, emissions, water use, and waste relative to new devices.
- circular economy
- digital platforms
- e-waste
- electronics
- mobile devices
- refurbishment
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Relier is a company tackling plastic waste in the produce industry through the upcycling of grapevine shoots. Relier's unique approach transforms discarded grapevine shoots into a sustainable biomaterial for packaging. This innovative material offers several benefits, including delaying fruit ripening, inhibiting microbial growth, and protecting produce during transport. Relier uses AI to analyze different recipe mixtures and percentages to obtain thermal, mechanical, and rheological behavioral to model the behavior of the clamshell, resulting in thousands of possibilities depending on the “how much” and “how” the components are mixed. Relier's biomaterial aims to be a more eco-friendly alternative to traditional plastic clamshell containers.
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- agricultural tech
- artificial intelligence
- bioplastics
- bioremediation
- composting recycling
- data
- reduced food waste
Ecovative is a biomaterials company that develops sustainable alternatives to traditional plastics and other environmentally harmful materials using mycelium, the root structure of mushrooms. Ecovative’s AirMycelium platform grows more than 400 tons of furniture, goods, and packaging annually with clients in CPG, housing, packaging, fashion, food, beauty, sports, and more. The platform uses AI to optimize mushroom mycelium for scale, density, elasticity, and other industrial parameters. Ecovative's products are fully biodegradable and compostable, offering a more sustainable alternative to petroleum-based plastics.
- biofabrication
- biomaterials
- biotech
- digital platform
- manufacturing
- mycelium
- mycotecture
SunHydrogen is a clean energy company in the development stages of creating a new technology to produce clean hydrogen fuel using sunlight and water. SunHydrogen utilizes nanoparticles to mimic the process of photosynthesis, splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The process itself is powered by sunlight, making it a truly renewable energy source. Through this process, the company aims to create a highly efficient and cost-effective method for hydrogen production, which could significantly impact the emerging hydrogen economy, supplying clean fuel for vehicles, data centers, and countless other applications.
- biotech
- computational biology & chemistry
- energy storage optimization
Ascend Elements is company focused on large-scale EV battery recycling, providing solutions that help recover valuable materials from used batteries and e-waste, which are repurposed into new battery components through their proprietary Hydro-to-Cathode® technology. This closed-loop system results in up to 90% lower GHG emissions compared to than traditional methods, by reducing batteries going to the landfill, reducing reliance on virgin materials, enabling a cleaner manufacturing process, and lowering the environmental impact of battery production-- essential for driving the broader energy transition.
- batteries
- circularity
- electric vehicles
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[et_pb_column type="4_4"][et_pb_text admin_label="Text"]Gitcoin is a crowdfunding and collaboration platform that coordinates stakeholders to fund and innovate open source and digital public goods. Through blockchain-enabled infrastructure, it empowers communities and entrepreneurs to fund digital tooling for the commons. The platform also enables quadratic funding, a term for using unique mathematical formula that rewards funds based on the number of people who have donated, not only donation size. In effect, this prioritizes projects with a broad appeal from many funding parties over those with similar liquidity but reliant on fewer large donors. Gitcoin’s platform coordinates stakeholders across the ecosystem to submit ideas, vote on ideas, contribute funds, tokenize capital, collaborate on projects, allocate those funds digitally.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column]
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- blockchain
- crowdfunding
- digital platforms
- digital public infrastructure
- open source
- regenerative finance
- web3
Matriark Foods is a social impact business that upcycles farm surplus and fresh-cut remnants into healthy, low sodium vegetable products for schools, hospitals, food banks and other foodservices. Matriark works with farmers and aggregators to make use of the vegetables that would otherwise go to waste, to instead provide nutritious food for people and reduce the environmental harms of food waste. They are using technology to manage their supply chains, inventory, sustainability tracking, and data analysis to underpin auditability of Upcycle Certified products.
- certifications
- circular economy
- food waste
- foodtech
- supply chain traceability
DepolarizingGPT is a political AI chatbot that gives three answers to every prompt: one from a left-wing perspective, one from a right-wing perspective, and a third answer from a depolarizing or "integrating" perspective. DepolarizingGPT was created by data scientist David Rozado and political philosopher Steve McIntosh. DepolarizingGPT's left-wing responses have been fine-tuned with content from left-leaning publications and writers, while its right-wing responses have been fine-tuned with content from publications and writers. The model's depolarizing responses have been fine-tuned with content from the Institute for Cultural Evolution think tank, from McIntosh's inclusive political philosophy. The model's depolarizing responses are designed to transcend centrism and reach a "higher ground" balance by exposing users to multiple views across the political spectrum.
- civic engagement
- decision-making
- politics
- sensemaking
LoamBio is an agricultural tech company whose technology harnesses the power of microbes, specifically endophytic fungi, to create seed coatings which improve soil health and sequester carbon, which support greater crop yields, and potential income for farmers through carbon markets.. These coatings, applied during planting, boost the natural ability of plants to store carbon in the soil and promote their growth and resilience against environmental stressors like drought, disease, and high temperatures. Loam positions itself as a farmer-centric company offering programs like SecondCrop, which helps farmers earn additional income through carbon credits for the carbon sequestered in their soil, and CarbonBuilder, to enable farmers to integrate soil health analytics seamlessly with existing practices.
- agricultural tech
- bioremediation
- biotech
- computational biology & chemistry
- conservation agriculture
- nature tech
DoNotPay utilizes artificial intelligence to help consumers fight against large corporations and solve their problems, like beating parking tickets, appealing bank fees, and stopping robocallers. DoNotPay’s goal is to foster equity and equality by making legal information and self-help accessible
- artificial intelligence
- cloud
- data
- digital assets
- edge computing
