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Two technology billionaires are coming together to back a startup trying to reinvent wind energy.
What’s happening:
- Wind turbine startup Airloom Energy has raised $13.75M USD in new funding
By the numbers:
- $7.5M USD came from a seed round financing which was led by Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital, with participation from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures
- $5M USD came from non dilutive funding in Energy Matching Funds from the state of Wyoming and $1.25M USD came from the United States Department of Defense
The big idea:
- Airloom Energy is building lower cost wind turbines through using readily available manufacturing components as opposed to traditional wind turbines which rely on specialized materials
- Instead of building larger and larger wind turbines, Airloom Energy is focused on smaller wind turbines that can be deployed anywhere, require less infrastructure to install and are functional even in mountains or remote islands
Why it matters:
- The architecture and design of Airloom’s wind turbines is significantly more efficient at converting kinetic wind energy into mechanical energy and is more capable of providing ultra low cost reliable power in areas that previously wouldn’t have been able to leverage wind energy due to a lack of surrounding infrastructure
Going deeper:
- Breakthrough Energy Ventures has been ramping up their bets on climate tech, previously raising their latest venture capital fund of just under a billion dollars
- Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) also previously cut the largest renewable energy deal ever done by a publicly traded company with Brookfield to massively scale up their access to solar and wind energy to power their new data centres for high performance computing
The intrigue:
- Airloom Energy is building their first pilot project in Wyoming, which is also where Bill Gates founded nuclear energy company TerraPower previously began construction of their flagship Natrium nuclear power plant
