Tim De Chant
Venture capital as a whole might be in a bit of a funk, but that’s not true for every investor or sector.
Take Congruent, a climate tech-focused VC: last week, the firm filed paperwork with the SEC to start raising for a $250 million fund, TechCrunch+ has exclusively learned.
Congruent...
How do you know when a market has matured?
Often, you can simply look at the usual metrics: revenue, market capitalization, customer numbers, margins, and the like. But there’s one relatively new measure that doesn’t get a ton of attention: Is there a Y Combinator–backed SaaS startup for a...
Thrifting is back, though this time it has a tech spin on it.
An entirely new generation has discovered the pleasures of digging through other people’s discarded clothes in the hopes of finding the perfect piece. Hoping to cash in on the trend, companies have been embracing resale platforms,...
Consumers in the U.S. have the memory of a goldfish.
When gas prices are up, they seek out more fuel-efficient transportation. But when they’re down, they rush to buy the biggest truck possible. Just take a look at Ford F-Series sales data from the last decade juxtaposed with average...
Back in graduate school, Penelope Jones thought she was suffering alone, a not uncommon feeling among doctorate students. She was studying electrolytes, key parts of batteries, and a portion of her experiments involved programming specialized lab equipment.
“It was awful,” she told TechCrunch+. But after talking with industry scientists...
It’s not every day that a 50-year-old technology that was long since passed over gets a new lease on life.
Sodium-metal-halide batteries were first patented in the mid-1970s. The design showed promise: It was energy dense and cheap to make. Mercedes-Benz took an interest, investing heavily in research and...
Stick a fork in it, nuclear is done.
There’s a truism in climate circles that says solving global warming doesn’t require anything we don’t already have. Reasonable people can debate that, but the upshot is that electrifying buildings, transportation and industry is the best path forward, and we already...
Quick: What was the biggest failure of the clean tech bubble that burst over a decade ago? Was it Solyndra, the innovative solar panel company that went belly-up in the face of cheap competitors? A123 Systems, the pioneering lithium-ion startup that was eventually sold for pennies on the...
First it was California, which experienced year after year of deadly wildfires. Then came Hawaii’s deadly firestorm this year. Camp, Dixie and Lahaina aren’t just three of the deadliest, most destructive wildfires in U.S. history, they were also all caused by downed power lines or faulty equipment owned...
Flip through a random slideshow on Architectural Digest, and chances are you’ll see a kitchen with a massive range as the centerpiece. They usually have at least six gas burners, ideally two or more ovens, and enough cooking grates to look like a family of arachnids died atop...
