If you’ve ever wanted to buy sandals made with leather from invasive lionfish, I’ve got some good news — you can!
Can you profit off nature without destroying it? These venture capitalists are betting on it.
Lionfish leather and AI to reduce bird collisions: See all the innovations that a new “biodiversity” VC firm is backing.
Benji Jones is an environmental correspondent at Vox, covering biodiversity loss and climate change. Before joining Vox, he was a senior energy reporter at Business Insider. Benji previously worked as a wildlife researcher.
A clothing and gear company called Grundéns is now selling flip-flops with a “panel” of scaly lionfish leather. The leather itself is made by a Miami-based startup called Inversa that produces the material from a number of invasive species, including Burmese pythons, lionfish, and iguanas in Florida, where these non-native and very prolific animals are known to damage the state’s native ecosystems.
The idea behind the venture is that, by turning invasive species into luxury products, you can make money while restoring ecosystems. It’s an obvious win for the environment and a win for the company’s bottom line.
It’s this tandem goal — to achieve both financial and ecological returns — that is the driving force behind a new venture capital firm that backs Inversa. The firm, known as Superorganism, calls itself the first VC firm dedicated to biodiversity.
Earlier this year, Superorganism announced that it raised nearly $26 million from funders, including the Cisco Foundation and Builders Vision, an investment firm founded by a Walmart heir. Superorganism has so far invested those funds in 21 startups, according to Kevin Webb, who cofounded the firm with Tom Quigley, an expert in technology for conservation.
“Fundamentally, we only really have to do two things,” said Webb, who comes from a family of venture capitalists. “We have to find businesses where we believe that there’s going to be outsized economic returns. And then we have to believe that there’s the opportunity for outsized ecological returns.”
The notion that profit-driven companies can play a role in protecting or restoring the environment seems, based on historical precedent, counterintuitive to say the least. The zeal for profit is why there’s a biodiversity crisis in the first place — agriculture and energy companies, for example, have razed enormous amounts of wildlife habitat, eroding many of the largely hidden services that ecosystems provide.
But Webb, who has a graduate degree in sustainability science, says there are clear opportunities to make money on innovations that reduce environmental harm. And some of those innovations are ripe for an infusion of venture capital. New technologies in the agriculture industry, for example, can help companies harvest crops more efficiently, Webb said. Those sorts of technologies can fulfill existing market needs in a new, more sustainable way, Webb said, making them strong targets for VC funds.
In addition to Inversa, the invasive leather-maker, Webb shared three of the other 21 companies in Superorganism’s portfolio that he’s especially excited about.
- Spoor builds technology to monitor birds and bats around wind turbines to help energy companies and their regulators measure the risk of collision. Powered by cameras and artificial intelligence, the tech helps those companies assess and limit — such as by lowering the speed of the blades — the environmental impact of their energy production. The company counts Orsted, Equinor, and other large energy companies as its customers, Spoor co-founder Ask Helseth told Vox.
- Ulysses builds and operates autonomous underwater vehicles — basically, mini non-piloted submarines — that can, among other things, efficiently plant meadows of seagrass, according to the company. That’s useful when, say, governments or companies are trying to restore critical undersea habitats harmed by their activities, which can be a costly endeavor. The technology will help “displace human-powered scuba divers,” Webb said, “which are just cost-prohibitive.”
- Funga reintroduces native fungi into forests used for timber production, which the company says help trees grow faster and absorb more planet-warming carbon dioxide. Webb says the company is basically “rewilding” soils. “When native, biodiverse communities of fungal microbes are reintroduced to the forest soil, forest health improves and growth can accelerate,” Funga says on its website.
Superorganism has bet on a wide range of other innovations, from seaweed-based plastics to efficient bug farming for alternative protein. One of the companies in its portfolio, called Thrive Lot, is paid by landowners to turn empty yards or lots into an oasis for native plants, including those that produce food. You can see the full list of the VC firm’s current investments here.
And Webb is still looking for new bets. He’d like to see someone figure out how, for example, to turn green roofs into a profitable enterprise; they’re good for urban biodiversity and offer benefits to the buildings themselves like reducing flood risk and cooling costs. Maybe putting green roofs on top of data centers is a way to make those buildings more sustainable, he says. “Green roofs are a really interesting way to maybe turn some of these centers into parklands,” Webb said.
Over the next two years, Superorganism expects to back another 14 or so companies, Webb says. Yet it will likely be a while for any of Webb’s wagers to win out — typically, VC firms want the companies they back to be bought by a bigger firm or go public within 10 years, he said.
In the meantime, for better or worse, it looks like those lionfish sandals are on sale.
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