Korean Tech Solves Centuries-Old Challenge, Helping Secure Asia’s Potato Supply
Korean Tech Solves Centuries-Old Challenge, Helping Secure Asia’s Potato Supply
Potatoes are the world’s fourth-largest food resource1. Yet, only 10% of the global potato seed supply is certified as good-quality and disease-free2.
Disease and adverse weather conditions plague traditional seed-potato production, with many potato farmers experiencing significantly lower and more volatile yields.
Korean agritech company E Green Global (EGG) is the world’s first innovator to solve this problem, successfully growing high-quality, lower-cost, lab-grown microtubers at a commercial scale. EGG’s patented tissue culture technology allows it to harvest disease-free microtubers continuously throughout the year in bio-secured plant factories. The process enables faster, higher-volume production and significantly reduced costs compared to conventional methods.
The innovation has achieved global recognition. PotatoEurope recognized EGG with its prestigious Golden Innovation Award. EGG plans to develop similar technologies for sweet potato, cassava, onion, and garlic production.
ADB Ventures invested in EGG in December 2021 to help the company scale up in developing markets in the Asia-Pacific. By 2025, EGG intends to produce more than 6 million tons of disease-free potatoes while eliminating 1.8m tons of CO2, the equivalent of removing 900,000 cars from the road for one year.
Electrifying India’s light commercial vehicles represents a USD 7 billion opportunity. The country boasts electric vehicle (EV)-friendly regulations, which in combination with decreasing battery costs are positioning EVs to become India’s preferred last-mile delivery technology.
From there, India will be poised to respond to strong export demand from emerging economies.
Euler Motors is a Delhi-based designer and manufacturer of electric vehicles for last-mile commercial logistics. It leverages proprietary battery cooling technology, optimized vehicle design, integrated vehicle diagnostics, battery management technology, and charging and service station networks to deliver lowest-cost sustainable mobility for its partners. The company has marquee customers including Amazon, Flipkart, BigBasket, and Udaan.
ADB Ventures invested in Euler Motors to accelerate the company’s growth and position the company to expand into other markets in developing Asia. Euler Motors aims to replace 50,000 fossil fuel-powered light commercial vehicles by 2025, avoiding 160,000 tons of CO2.
Smart Joules is an Indian energy-efficiency-as-a-service solution for commercial and industrial buildings. The company guarantees energy savings to its customers, while enabling them to avoid large capex outlays, through a “pay-as-you-save” (PAYS) model.
Smart Joules is an Indian energy-efficiency-as-a-service solution for commercial and industrial buildings. The company guarantees energy savings to its customers, while enabling them to avoid large capex outlays, through a “pay-as-you-save” (PAYS) model. SmartJoules retrofits its customers’ facilities with best-in-class energy efficient equipment and IoT controllers, monitors and manages energy consumption using its proprietary DeJoule technology platform, and offers on-site operations and maintenance.
CEO Arjun Gupta joined Climatic to talk about about how Smart Joules reduces energy waste and plans to mainstream energy-efficiency practices across India and beyond.
Founded in 2014, Smart Joules serves top-20 Indian hospital chains including Fortis, Apollo, and CARE. Next up, the company wants to bring energy efficiency to India’s hotels and industrial and office buildings, which will help it hit its goal of eliminating 680,000 tons of CO2 equivalent by 2027.
ADB Ventures made an equity investment in Smart Joules in March 2021 after identifying the company’s potential to become a category leader in commercial and industrial energy-efficiency-as-a-service.
Enabling Credit Access for Indonesia’s Small Business Owners.
Enabling Credit Access for Indonesia’s Small Business Owners
Micro, Small, and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs) form the backbone of the Indonesian economy, contributing about 6 per cent of GDP and 97 per cent of total employment. Despite the sector’s importance, Indonesia has an estimated MSME credit gap of USD 166 billion.
Fairbanc, a fintech company with primary operations in Jakarta, partners with fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) distributors to allow unbanked or financially underserved MSME owners to make inventory purchases on a “Buy Now Pay Later” basis. The company enables this via its proprietary AI-powered credit scoring platform, which allows quick microcredit distribution to MSMEs.
Since its inception in 2019, Fairbanc has partnered with major FMCG firms including Unilever, L’Oréal, and Danone to help over 60,000 MSMEs, many of them women-owned businesses struggling amid the pandemic, grow their sales by 35 per cent.
ADB Ventures joined a fundraising round for Fairbanc in June 2021 to help contribute to financial inclusion and climate resilience in emerging Asia. Part of this funding will specifically support development of a product recommendation system to provide information alerts to MSEMs on in-demand products during climate events in addition to a business continuity program to build their capacity to be more resilient during such times including securing inventory, emergency lighting, and back-up suppliers.
Fairbanc will use the invested funds to create new distributor partnerships and strengthen its sales and marketing teams to reach more than 120,000 Indonesian MSME operators by 2025.
Climate-Friendly Alternative Mitigates World’s Most Harmful Greenhouse Gas.
Climate-Friendly Alternative Mitigates World’s Most Harmful Greenhouse Gas
As Asia’s electricity demand increases, power grid operators must continuously invest in gas-insulated switchgear (GIS). Unfortunately, the most common gas used to insulate this switchgear is Sulfur Hexafluoride (SF6), the world’s most potent greenhouse gas.
SF6 contributes 23,500 times more by to climate change by weight than carbon dioxide1. Leaks of SF6 across the European Union in one year alone (2017) contributed as much to climate change as 1.3 million new petroleum-fueled passenger cars2. SF6 can also persist in the atmosphere for up to 3,200 years.
Worldwide, the energy distribution industry contributes 80 percent of all SF6 emissions3. The use of SF6 is expected to grow more than 75 percent by 20304. Developing Asia, with its fast-rising demand for electricity, will contribute most of this increase.
Nuventura, an early-stage company, pioneered the world’s first SF6-free, dry-air, medium-voltage GIS technology. Nuventura replaces SF6 with pressurized air, maintaining the strength of traditional GIS switchgear while integrating smart sensors for continuous monitoring. Nuventura’s product can reduce switchgear operations and maintenance costs by up to 30 percent.
Nuventura’s technology has been fully type-tested against International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standards. It entered the commercialization phase at the end of 2020.
Nuventura deploys its technology by licensing local switchgear manufacturers to manufacture and sell SF6-free switchgear. This model gives Nuventura’s solution high potential to scale globally including in Asia-Pacific markets, where it is already in use in the People’s Republic of China.
ADB Ventures invested in Nuventura in December 2021 and plans to support the company to scale across Asia and the Pacific. The company aims to mitigate 36,600 tons of CO2e in the region by 2025.
Euler Motors is an Indian manufacturer of light electric 3-wheeled vehicles for last-mile commercial logistics.
Euler Motors is an Indian manufacturer of light electric 3-wheeled vehicles for last-mile commercial logistics.
The company developed a full-stack electric mobility solution including proprietary battery cooling and management technology, and has also set up a network of more than 100 charging stations in the Delhi-National Capital Region to support its vehicle fleet
Founded in 2018, Euler Motors’ client roster includes e-commerce and FMCG companies Flipkart, Big Basket, and Udaan.
Euler Motors Founder and CEO Saurav Kumar was a guest on the Climatic electric mobility talk show. He spoke about Euler’s work to decarbonize India’s light electric commercial vehicle segment by replacing traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles – and his plans to scale Euler’s electric mobility solution into Southeast Asia, South America, and Europe.
ADB Ventures made an equity investment in Euler Motors in March 2021.
Skycatch Inc., is a leading provider of enterprise-grade technology for capturing, processing, and analyzing high-accuracy 3D drone data for use in the construction industry.
Skycatch Inc., is a leading provider of enterprise-grade technology for capturing, processing, and analyzing high-accuracy 3D drone data for use in the construction industry. Clients around the world and across several developing Asia Pacific markets use Skycatch’s affordable technology to create accurate digital 3D models of physical sites and monitor for discrepancies. It can enable significant cost and time savings, reduced CO2 emissions, and improved safety on infrastructure projects.
Christian Sanz, Skycatch founder and CEO, appeared on ADB Ventures’ Climatic web series to discuss how his company uses drones and AI to make construction smarter. The episode also discussed how Skycatch’s technology was used during Asian Development Bank-funded construction on the Port of Nauru.
Skycatch, founded in 2013, now counts Komatsu, Goldwind, Teck Resources, and Anglo American among its clients. The company’s mission is to use its tech to make construction more climate friendly on more than 2,000 projects in emerging Asia by 2025, with a goal of eliminating more than 2 million tons of CO2 equivalent.
ADB Ventures made an equity investment in Skycatch in March 2021.
Satellite Data Unlocks Access to Finance for India’s Climate-Vulnerable Farmers.
Satellite Data Unlocks Access to Finance for India’s Climate-Vulnerable Farmers
Agriculture accounts for 49 percent of India’s employment and feeds 1.3 billion people. Yet farmers in more than 75 percent of India’s districts face risks from extreme climate events1.
Improved access to finance would increase farmers’ resilience to climate-related crop damage and lost income. Yet India’s financial institutions struggle to work with the 78 percent of farmer households that are smallholders2 due to the difficulty and expense of assessing risk.
Bengaluru-based SatSure has developed a data analytics platform that unlocks finance for smallholder farms. SatSure aggregates real-time and historical data from satellites and operations. Proprietary AI-powered modelling gauges a farm’s income generation potential, allowing financial institutions to assess risk more accurately. The solution empowers financial institutions to issue credit and insurance policies faster, in higher volume, and more cost-effectively.
Since its inception in 2017, SatSure has partnered with India’s leading financial institutions and insurance companies including ICICI Bank, Reliance General Insurance, and Samunnati Finance. It has reduced agricultural loan appraisals from 15 days to just one.
ADB Ventures invested in SatSure in early 2022 to grow the company’s product portfolio and aid regional expansion. Satsure expects to support 2.5 million loans to smallholder farmers in the region by 2025, contributing to their climate resilience.
ADB Ventures has launched a new video series called Climatic about the innovators who are reducing Asia’s carbon footprint, the entrepreneurs who are making the region more resilient to climate change and the corporate leaders who are partnering with startups for impact.
MANILA, PHILIPPINES (September 1st, 2021) — ADB Ventures has launched a new video series called Climatic about the innovators who are reducing Asia’s carbon footprint, the entrepreneurs who are making the region more resilient to climate change and the corporate leaders who are partnering with startups for impact. The series will be broadcast on YouTube.
Climatic is made possible by a grant from Climate Investment Funds’ Clean Technology Fund Program. Linh Thai, a seasoned venture capital investor and judge on Shark Tank Vietnam, hosts the series.
Each of the four Climatic series will feature two episodes dedicated to a theme, beginning with smart construction. In one episode, viewers will be able to watch as entrepreneurs pitch their businesses to environmentally conscious investors. The series will also feature a talk show episode where investors and industry experts will discuss how green technologies can scale across Asia’s emerging markets. By modelling successful business models and highlighting opportunities for technologies to scale commercially, Climatic aims to inspire more innovation, entrepreneurship, and investment for climate mitigation and adaptation across the Asia-Pacific region.
The first Smart Construction series will feature entrepreneurs who are aiming to reduce the construction sector’s greenhouse gas emissions and improve the resilience of buildings and infrastructure to extreme heat, flooding, and other impacts of a changing climate. According to the 2020 Global Status Report For Buildings and Construction, despite stable energy demand, energy-related CO2 emissions from building operations and construction reached their highest level ever recorded in 2019. Together with manufacturing, transportation, and the use of construction materials, they account for 38 percent of global CO2 emissions. As the impact of COVID-19 lessens, it is predicted that the Southeast Asian construction sector will recover by 7.5 percent growth by the end of this year.
According to the Center for Strategic & International Studies, climate change represents a threat to long-term regional stability in Southeast Asia. By 2050, it is expected daily high tides will flood the areas where over 48 million people in Southeast Asia now live, while predicted average flood levels could inundate the homes of over 79 million.
“Is it possible to scale climate-impact technologies in developing Asian markets for venture capital-caliber returns? It is. With Climatic, we are marking a trail for innovators and investors to follow. In fact, ADB Ventures has a goal of crowding in $1 billion risk capital investment toward the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. This series is one pillar of our strategy alongside our own investment operations and co-investment partnerships across the Asia-Pacific region,” said Dominic Mellor, Principal Investment Specialist for ADB Ventures.
ADB Ventures is the venture arm of the Asian Development Bank, providing seed, early, and early-growth stage capital for technology companies generating climate and gender impact in Asia and the Pacific.
Reducing the Carbon Footprint of Infrastructure Construction.
Reducing the Carbon Footprint of Infrastructure Construction
Construction accounts for 11 per cent of global CO2 emissions and is a major contributor to air and water pollution. 90 per cent of major construction projects also face cost overruns and schedule delays. Supervision of construction and infrastructure projects depends on human observations, which are costly and prone to error.
Skycatch uses drone-based aerial surveying to provide affordable and accurate digital 3D models of construction sites, enabling frequent and accurate project tracking, eliminating wastage, reducing delays and mistakes, and improving workflows. Operating across multiple ADB DMCs, Skycatch is targeting the global construction, renewable energy, and extractive industries, and is working with key clients including Komatsu, Goldwind, Teck Resources, and Anglo American.
ADB Ventures invested in Skycatch in March 2021. Through this investment, ADB Ventures aims to catalyze the adoption of enabling technology in infrastructure projects, which would result in reduced carbon footprints, improved safety, and operational efficiency.
Skycatch is targeting to deploy their technology in more than 2,000 projects in developing Asia by 2025, which will avert 1.1 million tonnes of CO2.
