“I see three major trends shaping the next phase of climate tech.

First, new technologies enabled by modularity and declining cost curves. Modularity is one of the key reasons solar became the cheapest form of electricity humans have ever produced. It has the ability to mass-manufacture standardized units and deploy them rapidly.

Second, new sources of project financing and non-dilutive capital to support climate tech startups as they scale from first commercial plant to serial deployment. Access to these capital sources is becoming a key differentiator.

Third, shifting customer bases. It’s not just climate-focused buyers anymore. The Department of Defense and other sectors are increasingly interested in technologies that happen to have climate benefits — advanced rare earth element refining, next-generation uranium enrichment or distributed energy systems — because they deliver strategic advantages: better performance, lower cost and supply chain resilience.”

“On October 7th, the Virtual Biology Initiative (VBI), a project to collect the data needed to create predictive models of how cells behave and change, announced that it had received commitments worth $800m since its launch in April.

The VBI’s goals are medical. Predictive models will let researchers design more effective drugs that are more likely to pass successfully through clinical trials. But, if that works, future generations of models might be used to design modified versions of existing organisms, such as crop plants—and perhaps, eventually, entirely new living things.

The technology that has made such advances conceivable is deep learning, wherein large neural networks are trained to tackle complex problems. It is this technique that underpins the foundation models that power the chatbots marketed by firms such as Anthropic, Google and OpenAI. To such models, the long-chain molecules at the heart of biology (nucleic acids and proteins) are no different from the chains of words in human writing. Letting foundation models loose on them was thus an obvious idea. And it is proving extraordinarily productive.”