It’s sometimes said Oslo is a city with a before and after. In the late 1960s, Norway found oil at the bottom of the North Sea. It made the country rich and the capital transformed from a city of wooden houses to one of sleek skyscrapers and progressive architecture.
But now there’s an after the after. If oil use continues unabated, it will accelerate global warming, intensify extreme weather events, raise sea levels and exacerbate ecological and human crises worldwide.
But can the country’s climate tech sector actually replace the economic engine oil once provided? And is there a will to do so?
Fjords to fermentation
On paper, Norway has lots of advantages: near-zero-carbon electricity, deep engineering expertise and one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. Climate tech is also a top priority for investors; 50% of all investments in 2023 in Norway were directed towards the sector, according to Oslo Business Region, despite a global decline in climate funding.
However, when compared to its Nordic neighbours, Norway's climate tech sector faces challenges in scaling and attracting investment. While Sweden and Denmark have established themselves as leaders in renewable energy and climate tech, Norway's progress has been more modest — so far.
Oslo Innovation Week, held this week, offered a glimpse of how its home-grown climate techs could scale beyond its borders.
NoMy, founded in 2020, won the event’s flagship innovation award. Its mycelium-based fermentation technology turns liquid by-products from the food industry into high-protein, nutrient-rich ingredients for food and animal feed.
Former Google executive Ingrid Dynna, the company’s cofounder and CEO, says NoMy tackles two problems: industrial food waste and a lack of diversified protein sources. It has raised $7m to date.
But while soft funding was “fairly easy to attract”, Dynna says there’s a gap when going from research to scaling commercially. To tackle this, NoMy has gone for partnerships, including one with Japan's largest sugar producer, Nippon Beet Sugar Manufacturing.
Dynna says this both keeps the capex light, as Nippon is building its capacity in-house, and increases the likelihood of adoption by end consumers.
“Fermentation is extremely well-known in Japan to produce sake and a lot of things. So for them, this is not really novel,” she says. “We think in terms of acceptance, that's going to be fairly easy.”
Using this partnership model, she wants NoMy to work at a big scale, “tens of thousands of tonnes.”
More with less
Also taking a pragmatic approach but in a completely different direction is Völur, an Oslo-based startup working with meat — animal meat.
“Studies say, and this is pretty well documented, that the demand for protein, animal protein, will have doubled by 2050, so it's an industry that isn't going away,” says Michael Farrand, chief commercial officer of Völur. ”Our position is, we need to make it more eco-friendly, give it a better reputation for carbon emissions, and Völur can do that through efficiencies.”
Founded in 2019, the company uses AI to connect supply and demand in the meat processing industry, taking measurements such as weight, age, grade and marbling score. It’s raised $9.3m to date and has expanded to Australia so far.
“The low-hanging fruit isn’t on the farm, it’s in the processing plants,” says Anna Turvoll, Völur’s CEO. “We help producers do more with less.”
Norway as a blueprint?
One Norwegian company that has raised over $75m is the online grocery chain Oda. It is profitable in Norway and has expanded to Sweden with the merger with Swedish competitor Mathem.
Following last year’s departure of founder and CEO Karl Munthe-Kaas and the layoff of 150 employees amid its withdrawal from several international markets, André Knüppel, current CEO of Oda, says its success is due to efficiency. The company recently celebrated its north star — passing a threshold of 300 units per hour, a first for the industry.
Knüppel also says Norway has been key because if a grocery company can be profitable with a high labour rate and a geography with mountains and snow, it shows a grocery company can be profitable elsewhere. Given online grocery shopping uses half the carbon emissions as going to a physical store, Knüppel hopes Oda can become a blueprint.
“We thought, if we're gonna make it in Norway, we will make it anywhere,” he says.
