Tarmo Virki Podcasts

In the episode, we deep-dived into saving the old forests with Rimante Paulaskaite-Digaitiene from the Sengire Fondas (The Ancient Woods Foundation), which aims to acquire the first 100 hectares of old forests in Lithuania by the end of this year and leave them for nature. "So the organisation was founded in 2020 aiming to protect the last remainin…

Tom Bosschaert, founder of Except Integrated Sustainability, unveiled in the episode how the consultancy is transforming itself towards creating entities that will kickstart thorough, long-term societal transformations. "Time is no longer on our side and we can't just keep playing in the sandbox anymore. We have to take serious, serious action," Bo…

Len Bland from Nano Gas Environmental introduced the technology to clean wastewater with nanobubbles. The topics we covered: How did it come up with the idea of cleaning wastewater? Role of patents. The next milestones for the company Competition in the market Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

CUR8 co-founder Marta Krupinska, a passionate advocate for carbon removal, believes that carbon removal is essential to addressing climate change, while it can also be a profitable business. CUR8 is building a marketplace for carbon removal credits. These projects can include planting trees, capturing carbon dioxide from the air, or storing carbon …

In this episode, Tarmo Virki talks with Danny Flood, the founder of School of Growth Hacking, a platform that teaches entrepreneurs how to grow their businesses faster and smarter. Danny is also the author of several books on entrepreneurship, marketing, and productivity, such as Hack Sleep, Hack Email, and Buy Your Own Island. Tarmo and Danny disc…

In this episode, we talk to Nick Piromsawat, a senior investment associate at ExpresSo, the venture capital and venture building team at PTT, the Thai national oil company. Nick shares how ExpresSo is driving the transition from oil and gas to renewable energy and decarbonisation, by investing in and partnering with startups with innovative technol…

Wildchain aims to address the lack of financial support for real endangered animals by combining the concept of adoptable NFTs featuring endangered animals and threatened species. The team behind this initiative has spent two years developing the project, which has been self-funded without any external investments. Their approach involves building …

Our host Tarmo visited Startup Tank Climate Investor Pitch Show as a panellist. You can hear six interesting startups pitching. - InnoCSR: eco-friendly brick manufacturing - Sophie’s Bionutrients: Food Grade Protein from Microalgae - Rightcharge: Simplified EV charging solutions - UpShift Cars: Fractional EV car subscription - PingThings: Revolutio…

Djoann Fal, the founder of Atlas Capital, believes that Southeast Asia is a region with enormous potential for innovation and implementation in ClimateTech. In this episode, our host Tarmo Virki speaks with Fal, a passionate advocate for climate tech, about the challenges and opportunities in Southeast Asia, we hear about some of the companies that…

Introduction: Host Tarmo Virki welcomes listeners to "NatureBacked," a show discussing the green economy. Guest speaker Frank Meehan from openESG, joins the conversation. Frank Meehan is a seasoned investor and co-founder of SPARKlabs, an investment firm focused on climate, food, and agricultural tech solutions. He also co-founded Equilibrium.ai, a…

Green is a crucial part of the offering, but not the only benefit microgrid clients are seeking, said Rod Matthews from San Diego, California-based microgrid producer Brevian Energy. "We're looking at ways to help make power much more affordable for people and resilient because you are generating it yourself. So you're not relying on the grid. So w…

For sustainable investing one has to make clear changes, looking beyond lowering the share of fossil fuel companies in the portfolio, said Peter Krull, Partner at Earth Equity Advisors. “We don't have to accept less bad. We can just simply make transitions,” Krull said. “So sustainable investing to me is investing in companies that are going to red…

Sazmining is building a platform for green, even carbon-negative, bitcoin mining, said founder William Szamosszegi. Looking at the big picture, the environmental effects of Bitcoin are considerable, partly because Bitcoins are made using electricity partially generated by gas and coal-fired power plants. However, replacing the energy source, and wo…

When Eden Project North, an environmental visitor attraction in northern England, opens in a few years, a lot of the work will be done by local enterprises, said Adam Beaumont, trustee and non-executive director at Eden. The project will be located at Morecambe, once a thriving coastal town, which has lost a lot of its holiday travellers to souther…

Nascent European Web3 Organization is seeking to connect the web3 community on the old continent, starting with education and information-sharing projects, said Armin ZadakBar, one of the founders of the Brussels-headquartered organisation. The jury is still out to determine the leading forces in web3, and Europe’s decentralised decision-making cou…

Next year, 100 Thousand Million aims to start building the world’s first truly sustainable city in northern Chile, and several countries are keen to see the next project’s on their soil, said founders Alberto Scherb and Jaime Alvarez. “In the short term, our vision or mission is to create a lifestyle that is truly human-centred, nature-focused, and…

Sam Kamani, VP of Growth at web3 tools maker Cookbook, said he was looking ahead optimistically despite crypto winter in the episode where we delved deep into the world of Web3 and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs). “I’m not too worried, not too worried at all, even though I work in this space. I’ve seen, and I’ve lived through, at leas…

It will be a long road to broad adoption of new currency BEACH, but living well should not cost us the planet, said Robert Cobbold, head of operations at Beach Collective, a blue circular economy platform behind the token. “A beach token is a currency which internalizes the health of the planet into every single transaction,” Cobbold said. Most of …

Transparency and trust built into Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) should be an example for any corporation, said founders of Internet Native Organisation (INO). "The future of organisations is digital - we have seen that in Estonia, but the rest of the world is not yet there," said Astra Tikas. Internet Native Organisation said it see…

Reneum seeks to boost solar and wind farm investments by tokenizing renewable energy certificates. “It’s a vehicle to bypass traditional capital market failures or inefficiencies to reach the corners of the world that struggle to access funding and deploy more renewable energy,” said Chief Executive Brianna Welsh. “I see legacy market providers shi…

To solve the challenge of increasing plastic waste in oceans, we need to go to the source and find alternative materials to the plastics, said John Felts, CEO and co-founder of California-headquartered materials startup Cruz Foam. "It’s nearly impossible to play catch up on an increasingly flowing faucet of trash. We, obviously, need to try to get …

Barcelona-based TAPP Water seeks to change consumers’ habits and fights against billions of dollars spent on marketing bottled water through its filter systems for tap water, said Magnus Jern, founder and Chief Executive of TAPP Water. The consumption of plastic water bottles has increased over the last few years, when knowledge of the health probl…

U.S.-based green investment platform Raise Green is looking to drive more capital into climate solutions, boosting entrepreneurship in the sector, said founder and CEO Franz Hochstrasser. “We take a grassroots approach to climate action -- we want more people involved in investing and innovating in this space,” Hochstrasser said. Millennials’ inter…

Teaming up with other investors to push for a change towards greener and healthier products from global firms is gaining traction, and industry behemoths like Unilever and Nestle are listening, said Alejandro Jimenez, head of investments at Estonian green investment platform Grünfin. “Part of our goal is to make you feel you have the power; this is…

Mushrooms will open a new nature-backed market for turning construction waste into new raw materials, said Joanne Rodriguez, founder of MycoCycle. “There is no waste in nature - that’s a manmade construct. And so, looking for solutions in nature to solve these problems is critical to how we battle this climate change,” Rodriguez said. Learn more ab…

Making potatoes and other crops more resistant to climate change and growing them faster using gene-editing techniques is the challenge ClimateCrop is looking to solve over coming years, said Yehuda Borenstein, founder of ClimateCrop. “We have an opportunity to upgrade plants and give them more resilience without a lot of investment in capex which …

A trip to a refugee camp in Bangladesh led to a documentary and sowed the seeds for a material startup, which promises to cut plastics production costs and emissions using cellulose, said Alex Blum, founder of Applied Bioplastics. “What we’ve done by mixing cellulose with regular plastic in a way that is inexpensive to accomplish is that we’ve crea…

United Nations’ biodiversity summit COP15 finished with a historic deal earlier this week in Montreal. At NatureBacked, we discussed the essence of the agreement and how protecting biodiversity will become common. Nations agreed to protect 30% of the planet by 2030 and to protect vital ecosystems such as rainforests and wetlands and the rights of i…

There are numerous opportunities for a revolution in the coffee industry, said guests at Naturebacked’s holiday-season coffee episode. We talked first with Josh Ziegelbaum from Miami-based private equity firm and asset manager Legacy Group, the key investor behind Green Coffee Company, the largest coffee producer in Colombia, which it built from th…

Pressure from consumers will likely be the key driver pushing climate tech towards the mainstream over the coming years, said James Vincent, co-founder of brand advisory and investment firm FNDR. “We’re a few years off from that because we haven’t done the homework yet. We haven’t shock-absorbed the need for culture to absorb the new metrics of wha…

Surging growth in distributed energy production, driven by innovations in solar and battery technologies, is helping the energy sector to cope with climate change, said Tim Hade, COO and co-founder of Scale Microgrid Solutions. “We’re getting to the point right now where distributed energy is starting to displace coal and gas - that’s going to be s…

Industries have too often left the control over the end of the product lifecycle to individuals at a time when it could open many opportunities for the reuse of materials, said Joe Macleod, founder of andend, the world’s first customer-ending business. “There’s a massive gap at the end of the consumer lifecycle that holds circularity,” Macleod said…

Climate investing and the climate, in general, is the biggest opportunity we’ve ever had, said Matt Ward from early-stage climate investment syndicate 4WARD.VC. “Either we pull it off and succeed or pretty much we all effing die and go to war, and the world goes to absolute s-h-i-t. So what would you rather bet on? Would you rather bet on humanity …

A universal basic dividend that would distribute some of the profits generated by corporates in industrialized countries to the citizens in low-income countries would be a step forward in the current troubled situation, said Anders Wijkman, Honorary President of the global think tank Club of Rome. “If you look at the world at large, we are moving i…

Action and information sharing are keys for fighting climate anxiety, said Itamar Weizman, the head of climate investments at Israeli investment firm Firstime who suffers from self-diagnosed climate anxiety. He said the five stages of climate anxiety are similar to the five stages of grief. "A lot of people are stuck in denial, especially in Americ…

Industrial agriculture, one of the most significant contributors to climate change, is facing a revolution that will move meat production to factories from farms, said Daan Luining, a co-founder and CTO at cultivated meat startup Meatable. The 2018-founded Dutch startup Meatable - one of the frontrunners in the new field of cultivated meat - has ra…

Rules of capitalism need changing to move the needle in the fight against climate change, said Yoann Berno, a partner at the Nordic investment firm Climentum. “Unfortunately, our leaders, political leaders, are too short-sighted. They’re just responding to this crisis as they responded to COVID. As they will respond to the next crisis, I think it w…

Oslo-headquartered Norselab looks for startups transforming resource-intensive industries like food, transport, and construction, said Maria de Perlinghi, a partner at the Norwegian impact investment firm. “We believe that the next frontier or the code that we have to crack now is in the major global industries, where we know that there are huge ch…

Climate tech is booming thanks to troubles in the European energy sector. Still, the proportion of investments in climate tech has to grow from very low levels, said Sebastian Heitmann, co-founder, and partner at Extantia Capital. “The goal is to significantly increase this over the coming years,” Heitmann said. “In our world, the current situation…

Making great cheese is the holy grail of plant-based milk products. This company is certain it has found the solution. "The product is identical to what the cow is producing," Sheriff Will Van den Tweel said in an interview on the sidelines of the Startup Day Festival in Tartu, Estonia. Those Vegan Cowboys is a Dutch-founded Belgian startup where s…

There's a good hype around climate tech, and some related sectors, like food tech, remain hot despite the downturn, said Helen Lin, a partner at Silicon Valley-based At One Ventures. "When there is an economic downturn, investors typically take a flight to safety. So the more you look ... like a brick of gold to an investor, that is, a stable store…

"Startups do not fail because they run out of cash. They run out of cash because the leaders fail," said Patrick Flesner, partner LeadX Capital Partners and author of the bestseller book FastScaling. Learn more about: How fast is too fast scaling? Should you build a plane while flying or before taking off? How investors should separate good and bad…

Nordics and Baltics boast one of the highest concentrations of unicorn startups, and several deeptech firms are set to follow the first unicorns, which have been digital software companies, said partner Juho Risku from investment firm Butterfly Ventures. "Those digital companies were made 10 years ago, 15 years ago, or even longer. I think there ar…

Scooters and carbon accounting firms grab a major share of climate-related startup investments, said Nina Gunell from Helsinki-headquartered investment firm OpenOcean. "Definitely there are areas that are getting a lot of investments, although there maybe doesn't need to be that many solutions in the end," she said. OpenOcean was founded in 2009 by…

Startups focusing on food, agriculture, biodiversity, and forestry offer some of the best opportunities to impact global carbon emissions significantly, said Max Bauchau, who runs Startup Wise Guys Sustainability program. The 2012-founded SWG has invested in around 300 startups over the years. Bauchau said the accelerator-investor, which boasts an …

The $450 million Kiko Ventures became the first evergreen climate fund when it launched in June 2022, said Founding Partner Arne Morteani. When IP Group launched Kiko Ventures, it said it plans to invest $240 million in climate tech startups over the next five years. Learn about: focus areas of the fund benefits of evergreen fund structure vs VC fu…

Single.Earth has minted the first tokens from the work nature does to owners of lands in Brazil and Europe, and has started to roll out MERIT tokens to the market, co-founders Merit Valdsalu and Andrus Aaslaid said in this special episode of the NatureBacked podcast. Learn about: the first over-the-counter deals upcoming consumer-launch the impact …

Sustainable technologies and sustainable business models are often intervened in today's world,, said Shahin Dashti, an investor at Frankfurt-based Futury Capital which is working on launching a new sustainability-focused fund. Learn more about the impact of market turmoil on startup investments and about the unique roots of sports and regional pol…

Companies of the future will naturally focus on the environment and impact to be able to make a business for hundreds of years, said Alex Felman from Felman Family Office. Learn more about family offices and what makes investment firms of family wealth different from venture capitalist investors from the episode recorded on the sidelines of the Tec…

Many startups are working on climate adaptation, but there are less-crowded opportunities around climate mitigation, said Dama Sathianathan, partner at Bethnal Green Ventures. London-headquartered Bethnal Green Ventures has invested for 10 years in #TechForGood companies like Fairphone and over 100 other firms. Learn more about open opportunities i…