Cambrian Innovation is a water treatment solutions company that focuses on transforming wastewater into clean water and renewable energy, enabling clients in resource recovery, energy circularity, and environmental responsibility. It offers several wastewater treatment infrastructure options, which leverage biological processes and microbes to naturally break down organic pollutants in the wastewater, making it cleaner and safer for release and reuse. Its flagship offering, the EcoVolt system, utilizes bioelectrically-active microbes which do not only treat wastewater but also produce electricity, reducing reliance on conventional energy sources. All infrastructure is remotely connected and operated via its AVEVA Insight managed cloud solution, which gathers, stores, visualizes, and analyzes plant performance.
- as a service
- bioremediation
- circular economy
- material science
- microbes
- renewables
- water conservation
- water treatment
Liquidonate is a digital platform which helps retailers sustainably manage excess inventory and facilitates donations of unsold products to nonprofits, schools, or upcyclers. The platform offers retailers matching algorithms based on inventory and customer return information, a personalized dashboard and API integration into their existing systems, tax reciept automation, negotiated shipping rates, as well as a dedicated customer support agent. By facilitating the donation of excess inventory, Liquidonate’s approach benefits both retailers, who save on disposal costs and reduce environmental harms, and non-profit recipients, who gain access to valuable resources for their programs and beneficiaries.
- charities
- circular economy
- donations
- inventory management
- liquidation
- nonprofits
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
Hylo is a community-led, prosocial coordination platform for purpose-driven groups. It is open-source, non-profit, and driven by participatory design with real-world groups at the forefront of regenerative agriculture, community resilience, peer learning, equity, inclusive capital, and place-based organizing. Hylo features a resilient constellation of relationships marked by trust and accountability, with clear agreements including protocols for decision making, distributing resources, and handling conflict. The platform has many unique aspects such as nested groups and cross-group posting, which lead to emergent cooperation between groups, generating broader coalitions with more power to address common goals. Hylo's community leaders and facilitators help guide member groups on best practices in community stewardship. Hylo is built through relationship-driven development, involving collaboration with the community to co-design tools to amplify their work.
- cloud
- community
- data
- digital platforms
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
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
Houdini sportswear caters to adventurers and athletes with a focus on eco-conscious, high-performance clothing. They craft technical apparel that combines durability, functionality, and minimalist design for activities like hiking, climbing, skiing, and trail running. Houdini prioritizes sustainability throughout their production process, using recycled materials whenever possible and employing practices that minimize environmental impact. Beyond performance and eco-friendliness, Houdini is known for innovation in material science and garment design, creating lightweight, weather-protective, and versatile pieces for dedicated outdoor enthusiasts.
- circular economy
- clothing
- digital platforms
- marketplaces
- material science
- textiles
Fairbnb is a short-term rentals marketplace platform that aims to provide an alternative to traditional vacation rental platforms like Airbnb. It focuses on promoting sustainable tourism, social impact, and community development. Fairbnb prioritizes properties that are owned by locals rather than investors, and it allocates a portion of its revenue to support local community projects chosen by residents. The platform aims to address concerns related to overtourism, gentrification, and the negative impacts of short-term rentals on local communities by fostering a more responsible and sustainable approach to travel.
- community development
- cooperative
- hospitality
- tourism
NatureQuant delivers technology solutions to assess and promote exposure to nature and to combat nature deficit with proactive tech tools designed to improve overall wellbeing. NatureQuant achieves this mission via their two apps, NatureScore and NatureDose. NatureScore® measures the amount of natural elements that optimize your health within a one-km radius of your location. NatureDose® is a personalized nature prescription mobile app that monitors your aggregate time inside, outside, and exposed to nature. Through new tech tools, machine learning, and big-data, NatureQuant provides tools designed to fully leverage nature's impact.
- artificial intelligence
- data
- digital platforms
- nature tech
Reef Relief Sunscreen protects people's skin while also nourishing coral reefs. The company was inspired by the dangers of chemical sunscreen ingredients to coral health, as Oxybenzone, a chemical found in 80% of sunscreens, has been proven to have a lethal effect on sea-life and can kill coral and coral larvae in even very small doses. Reef Relief's sunscreen was developed in collaboration with cosmetic chemists and marine experts to create a unique formula, containing nutrients used by coral farmers to help coral thrive. It has undergone university testing and boasts increased coral growth with their formula, and has developed the Reef Protection Factor (RPF) as a new certification for the sunscreen market.
- bioremediation
- coral
- sunscreen
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
OCN unites the world's ocean data sets and creates products and technology to encourage and incentivize practical citizen data collection. Their Ocean AI and BlueSense platfors use machine learning to centralize, visualize, translate, and provide insights on ocean data from all over the planet in one dashboard. Some use cases for the data include discovery of anomalies and danger zones, holding entities accountable, encouraging healthier business practices, engaging coastal communities, improving conservation efficiencies, and informing policy design. Beyond just creating ways to combine and collect more data, OCN designs products, systems and communities to collect the data necessary to interpret overall ocean health and restore marine ecosystems.
- artificial intelligence
- bioremediation
- citizen science
- conservation
- crypto/ complementary currencies
- data
- nature tech
- oceans
