Epicentre of climate-change tech will move into India: Prashanth Prakash

ACT started off as a product of Covid-19. We had brought together start-ups, investors and others to reduce the impact of Covid. Later we realised that we could go beyond just Covid-related issues and made it into a multi-cause platform, as we realised that solutions that start-ups create could be used to solve larger societal problems.

Start-ups are nimble, have a sense of urgency, are disruptive, use a different lens to view things, are pragmatic, and work towards achieving an end goal. Since start-ups will drive our economy forward – we are looking to become a $5-6 trillion economy soon – it’s important they get into climate-specific action that offers plenty of opportunities to solve for the world. Besides being planet friendly, it’s also an area that’s bound to attract huge capital.

We’ll be looking at three large verticals – education, environment, and gender, apart from health.

Which are the specific areas that the pledge will focus on with regard to the environment?

The three large areas that we will focus on will be mobility, SaaS platforms and deep tech. In the mobility space, the focus will largely be on electric vehicles in areas like battery tech. In the software as a service (SaaS) space, we will help companies in the compliance/reporting area. We will engage with India’s IT trade body Nasscom and SaaS Bhoomi (a community of founders shaping the SaaS ecosystem) to ensure adoption. In deep tech we will look to encourage climate-friendly manufacturing and look to replace the use of plastics.

In all these three areas and more, the pledge will provide start-ups with a toolkit, framework, and resources to accelerate their sustainability journey. The organisation is developed for taking the right action to catalyse social change through collaborations across the board. It mainly focuses on and is designed for VCs, start-up founders, donors, NGOs, expert advisors, government stakeholders as well as the public at large.

The Green Start-up Pledge aligns with ‘Net Zero by 2050’ goals and supports start-ups in scaling sustainable practices and providing resources so that India can deliver on its climate promises.

India’s growth in other tech areas has been noteworthy, but in areas of climate tech and sustainability, we have lagged behind.

India has demonstrated its ability to leapfrog others in mobile adoption and digital payments. It’s time we get more ambitious with our sustainability goals. That’s why we need to start by helping our start-ups design themselves better.

The epicenter of climate change tech will move into India. There’s a large opportunity in this space to build from India for the world and then deploy the same for the world.

The green start-up pledge is the world's first climate pledge designed mainly for start-ups and is backed by India's top venture capital funds. The pledge is promoted by entrepreneurs including Zerodha's Nithin Kamath, Zomato's Deepinder Goyal, and Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal. It was featured at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Egypt on November 12 and will also be launched here at the Bengaluru Tech Summit on November 19.

India is facing a huge environmental crisis in cities like Bengaluru (waste management) and Gurgaon (air pollution). How do you think we can tackle some of these issues via this pledge?

Of the 10-12 start-ups that we have signed on, 2-3 of them are solving for this space.

In our portfolio, we have start-ups like Farmers 4 Forests which has developed a community-led forestry model that optimises for bio-diversity and taps into carbon credits for long-term sustainability and scale. Then there is APChemi which uses its proprietary technologies to transform hard-to-recycle waste via pyrolysis and produces a climate-friendly oil/petrol replacement.

We have Ambee, a start-up that is an environmental intelligence platform that leverages climate and environmental data to enable better business, policy, and urban planning. Then we have Brisil which uses proprietary tech to extract green silica from rice husk ash, replacing conventional sand-extracted silica thus reducing air pollution.