CLIMATEWIRE | A once-outlandish idea for reversing global warming took a major step toward reality Friday when Israeli-U.S. startup Stardust Solutions announced the largest-ever fundraising round for any company that aims to cool the Earth by spraying particles into the atmosphere.
Its plan to limit the sun’s heat raised $60 million from a broad coalition of investors that included Silicon Valley luminaries and the Agnelli family, an Italian industrial dynasty.
The disclosure, critics said, raises questions about involvement of venture capital firms in driving forward a largely untested, thinly researched and mostly unregulated technology that could disrupt global weather patterns and trigger geopolitical conflict.
The investors were “putting their trust in the concept of, we need a safe and responsible and controlled option for sunlight reflection, which for me is [a] very important step forward in the evolution of this field,” Stardust CEO Yanai Yedvab said during an interview this week in POLITICO’s London office. He and co-founder Amyad Spector, who also flew in for the interview, are both nuclear physicists who formerly worked for the Israeli government.
The startup’s fundraising haul was led by Lowercarbon Capital, a Wyoming-based climate technology-focused firm co-founded by billionaire investor Chris Sacca.
It was also backed by the Agnellis’ firm Exor, a Dutch holding company that is the largest shareholder of Chrysler parent company Stellantis, luxury sports car manufacturer Ferrari and Italy’s Juventus Football Club. Ten other firms — hailing from San Francisco to Berlin — and one individual, former Facebook executive Matt Cohler, also joined Stardust’s fundraising round, its second since being founded two years ago.
The firm has now raised a total of $75 million. It is registered in the U.S. state of Delaware and headquartered outside Tel Aviv but is not affiliated with the state of Israel.
The surge of investor enthusiasm for Stardust comes amid stalled political efforts in Washington and other capitals to reduce the use of oil, gas and coal — the main drivers of climate change. Meanwhile, global temperatures continue to climb to new heights, worsening wildfires, floods, droughts and other natural disasters that some U.S. policymakers have baselessly blamed on solar geoengineering.
The new influx of cash is four times the size of the startup’s initial fundraising round and, Yedvab argued, represents a major vote of confidence in Stardust and its strategy to land government contracts for deploying its technology at a global scale. It also shows that a growing pool of investors are willing to bet on solar geoengineering — a technology that some scientists still consider too dangerous to even study.
Even advocates of researching solar geoengineering question the wisdom of pursuing it via a for-profit company like Stardust.
“They have convinced Silicon Valley [venture capitalists] to give them a lot of money, and I would say that they shouldn’t have,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School and author of the book “Geoengineering: The Gamble.” “I don’t think it is a reasonable path to suggest that there’s going to be somebody — the U.S. government, another government, whoever — who buys Stardust, buys the [intellectual property] for a billion bucks [and] makes the VC investors gazillions. I don’t think that is, at all, reasonable.”
Lowercarbon Capital did not respond to emailed questions.
Stardust claims to have created a particle that would reflect sunlight in the same way debris from volcanic eruptions can temporarily cool the planet. The company says its powder is inert, wouldn’t accumulate in humans or ecosystems, and can’t harm the ozone layer or create acid rain like the sulfur-rich particles from volcanoes.
It plans to seek government contracts to manufacture, disperse and monitor the particles in the stratosphere. The company is in the process of securing patents and preparing academic papers on its integrated solar geoengineering system.
The startup would use the money it has raised to begin “controlled outdoor experiments” as soon as April, Yedvab told POLITICO. Those tests would release the company’s reflective particles inside a modified plane flying about 11 miles (18 kilometers) above sea level.
The idea, Yedvab explained, is that “instead of displacing the particles out to the stratosphere and start following them, to do the other way around — to suck air from the stratosphere and to conduct in situ experiments, without dispersing essentially.”
He said the company could have raised more money but only sought the funding it believes is necessary for the initial stratospheric testing. Stardust only took cash from investors who are aligned with the company’s cautious approach, he added.
The fundraising round wasn’t conducted “from a point of view of, let’s get as much money as we can, but rather to say, this is what we need” to advance the technology, Yedvab said.
Stardust’s new investors include the U.S. firms Future Ventures, Never Lift Ventures, Starlight Ventures, Nebular and Lauder Partners, as well as the British groups Attestor, Kindred Capital and Orion Global Advisors. Future Positive Capital of Paris and Berlin’s Earth.now also joined the fundraising round.
Corbin Hiar reported from Washington. Karl Mathiesen reported from London.
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