Sustain 100: the European sustainability startups to watch in 2021

Launched in 2017, the German challenger bank claims to be the first mobile current account that centres around sustainability. Each transaction and payment helps a social business, a climate change initiative or a renewable energy project — kind of like the search engine Ecosia. Currently it’s only available in Germany, though rumour has it expansion is on the cards soon.

It works with fellow German fintech and infrastructure company solarisBank, was backed by the Environmental Technologies Fund in 2019, and recently raised €3m in a seed funding round led by Wiwin.

The Too Good To Go app connects customers with restaurants and shops that want to sell their surplus food for a 70% discount.

The startup claims to have saved 66.2m meals globally Mette Lykke, CEO of Too Good To Go recently told Sifted that “this translates intto 162,500 tonnes of CO2 emissions.”

Since being founded in 2015, the startup now operates in 15 markets in Europe as well as New York and Boston. It last wooed investors in January 2021 for its $31m Series A round.

Steel is one of the most environmentally destructive resources, producing around 8% of global carbon emissions — and Vanilla Steel, though low on its sustainability messaging — is tackling the steel industry head on.

Its ecommerce platform allows suppliers and buyers to sell and buy non-prime steel (excess steel produce) — a market worth €9bn in annual gross merchandising value.

Between its launch in June 2020 and October that year, it handled 1k tonnes of steel. Currently bootstrapped, it’s primed for some investment this year.

If you measure success by association, Verkor's already big news — the startup's partnered with EIT InnoEnergy and Schneider Electric, and backed by the IDEC Group. It's focused on locally produced, low-carbon batteries to support a move toward electric vehicles in particular.

Verkor's another startup scaling fast — it's announced a gigafactory which is scheduled to start operations in 2023 and requires around €1.6bn in investment. According to Europa, demand in the 2020s for batteries will require two to three gigafactories in France alone.

Last month the company announced a partnership with software company and consultancy Capgemini to create data collection systems to make the factory über-efficient.

Vestiaire Collective is now a hallmark of the European sustainable and ‘circular fashion’ subsector. Based in Paris, the company has received backing from Balderton Capital, Bpifrance and Condé Nast, the fashion-focused media company.

Its Series G round in April 2020 raised €59m from the latter two, as well as six other firms and angel investor Maximilian Bittner. It also told Sifted that despite an initial dip in sales during the first Covid-19 lockdown, sales have surpassed those before the pandemic. In April it experienced its biggest sales day since launching in 2009.

Vestiaire boasts over 9m users in 90 countries, but still, it’s competing against Lithuania’s Vinted and the UK’s Depop. It also dropped from La French Tech’s Next40 list (2020) to the FT120 in this year’s rankings.

WeDontHaveTime claims to be the world’s largest social network for climate action — with 700k members.

In March 2021, it closed a $3m Series A that included angel investors Fabrice Grinda, Jan Ståhlberg and Marco Rodzynek. In 2020 it partnered with accelerator programme Sting to find climate ideas for its newest startup programme.

Based in Inverness, the ad-free app allows users to access climate news and contact climate leaders — and it runs on renewable energy.

The plant protein market is developing fast, with companies developing plant-based products in all sorts of ways.

Xampla, a three-year-old Cambridge University spinout, is creating a plant-protein alternative to single-use plastics. 

It kicked off 2021 with £6.2m of fresh funds in a round led by Horizon Ventures.

Growing global demand for food is putting a squeeze on available land and one French startup says it has the answer: indoor insect farming.

In 2020, Ynsect raised $224m from investors including Hollywood star Robert Downey Jr.’s Footprint Coalition to build a second insect farm in Amiens in northern France.

The company breeds mealworms that produce proteins for livestock, pet food and fertilizers, and will use the funds to build what it says will be the world’s largest insect farm.

The idea of eating bugs has been getting some consumer traction with a few supermarkets stocking grub-based food. But Ynsect has its sights mainly on the more prosaic $500bn animal feed market at the moment.

The challenge for Ynsect is regulation (weirdly the rules on what animals are allowed to eat are even stricter than the ones for humans) but also economics, as for now it’s reasonably expensive as a protein source.

Ynsect’s market at the moment is mainly hypoallergenic dog food because pampered pets are an area where the cost of the product is less of a consideration.

Further reading: Ynsect CEO Antoine Hubert on entrepreneurship & edible insects

Insect-farming startup Ÿnsect extends Series C funding to $372m