Not yet an adult, no longer a child... 🍼 This is what came to mind when reading the recent "State of Climate Tech 25" from Net Zero Insights. Let's first define climate tech: the technologies that are specifically aimed at addressing or mitigating climate change-related problems and therefore focus on - reducing GHG emissions - Removing carbon from the atmosphere - improve human adaptation to climate change Climate tech saw a boom of VC investments in 2021-2022 (due to a variety of reasons) and since then the sector has strongly evolved. As the graph below shows, which looks at the number of company by TRL stage, the field is moving from early stage to commercial readiness and deployment. This actually creates a "pre-seed vacuum" but is also a good news for the climate because the impact of those companies start when they can scale and take market shares. But scaling is hard: the gap between pilot success and commercial readiness (the "valley of death") is widening, with companies facing longer engineering cycles and financing shortages at the demonstration stage. Interest in adaptation is growing but remains really small, and carbon removal is struggling due to the lack of clear political signals to create demand. Europe has en edge at the early stage where it generates a higher volume of hard tech companies than the US, but it then struggles to get them to scale- due to the low volume of risk-taking growth capital Link to the report in comments