Fifty Years to help climate scientists turn research into solutions with new grants program

San Francisco enterprise agency Fifty Years is launching a brand new grant-making initiative to fund scientists working to translate their analysis into merchandise that may curb local weather change, or assist folks adapt to and survive it.

The initiative was impressed by one of many agency’s portfolio firms, a sustainable chemical substances startup known as Solugen, based on Fifty Years’ Special Operations chief Sara Kemppainen.

Solugen is now valued at round $2 billion, and operates a plant in Houston, Texas, the place it turns customized enzymes and renewable feedstock (like dextrose, a easy sugar) into chemical substances that have been historically made utilizing petroleum, pure fuel and phosphates, which contribute to water, air and soil air pollution.

When Solugen’s founders, Gaurab Chakrabarti and Sean Hunt, have been nonetheless engaged on their idea, that they had seemed into early-stage funding from enterprise and angel traders, and from authorities grant packages. They have been overwhelmed by the lengthy response time it will take to attain grants from authorities packages, and typically discouraged by potential traders who needed to see how their analysis would work in an actual world software.

They submitted a pitch and competed on the MIT 100K entrepreneurship competitors, and secured sufficient funding in prize cash from that occasion, about $10,000, to create a prototype reactor utilizing supplies out there for buy at any massive field retailer — wooden, PVC pipes and zip ties.

Kemppainen instructed CNBC that folks with deep experience in a technical or scientific topic shouldn’t need to really feel so restricted by funding, and that each one the nice analysis that may come from academia and completely different labs all over the world shouldn’t wind up caught on a shelf when it might make a distinction to folks and the planet.

The investor mentioned, “Often after the basic science is done, and understood, there’s just a bit more work to essentially show that the science has feasibility and potential. This could be prototype, techno-economic modeling, and things like that – but almost nobody funds that work.”

Applying for a Fifty Years Manifest Grant should not take entrepreneurial scientists greater than an hour, the investor mentioned, and her agency guarantees to make selections inside three weeks. A typical Manifest grant will quantity to $25,000 to $100,000, she added.

The grants are open to tutorial researchers as of Tuesday August 1 and the applying interval closes on August 31.

Fifty Years is operating the grant-making initiative with major funding from philanthropic backers the EQT Foundation and Automattic, the corporate behind net publishing platform WordPress.

Fifty Years and its companions won’t take fairness nor declare mental property rights over any firms or innovations that come up from the initiatives funded by the grants. Kemppainen emphasised that this program is meant to assist scientists translate their finest, deep tech analysis into real-world local weather options sooner moderately than later, with no strings connected.