Another ClimateTech Podcast
Another ClimateTech Podcast is a weekly interview series that explores the fight against climate change through the lens of entrepreneurship, investment, academia, activism, and art. Join Ryan Grant Little, a seasoned climatetech founder, advisor, and investor, as he interviews the climate warriors trying to save us from ourselves.
#Climate #Climatetech #Cleantech #Sustainability #Environment
Another ClimateTech Podcast
Fixing the chemical industry's emissions problem with Marissa Beatty of Turnover Labs
Marissa Beatty is the co-founder and CEO of Turnover Labs, a startup developing technology to convert CO2 into valuable chemicals. With a background in chemical engineering and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, Marissa is tackling the challenge of carbon utilization in the petrochemical industry.
In this episode we talked about:
🧪 Turnover Labs' approach to converting CO2 into useful chemical building blocks
💼 The challenges and opportunities for female founders in the climate tech space
💰 How Marissa secured backing from notable climate tech investors for her pre-seed round
🔬 The importance of corporate partnerships in developing and scaling carbon utilization technologies
🎯 Turnover Labs' strategy for narrowing their focus and identifying potential customers
🤝 Why I’m missing out by not going to Climate Week NYC
#CarbonUtilization #CleanChemistry #ClimateTech #netzero
The CO2 is being emitted actually in a really opportunistic place, because usually it's emitted at like a petrochemical refinery or a monomer or like polymers production facility. So those facilities are already in a position to take basic building blocks that are coming from petroleum and build them into valuable molecules. And they have CO2 present and it's like the basic building block of most molecules. So we're just trying to turn it into the smallest unit that they can use in their operations so they don't necessarily have to move it off site and go through the complexity of scoping out a capture, transport and storage thing. They can use it and just sort of increase their production, as they were probably already going to, but do it in a more sustainable way. They were probably already going to, but do it in a more sustainable way.
Ryan Grant Little:Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. Before you listen to this episode, take a quick second and rate and subscribe to it, as it's pretty much the only way that people find out about it. It would really mean a lot to me. Marissa Beatty is founder and CEO of Turnover Labs, a company that turns CO2 into the building blocks of chemicals. She's been working on this through her whole academic career and spun out her PhD research into this brilliant company, which valorizes a major waste stream for chemical companies while helping them reach their sustainability goals. I reached Marissa in New York City. I'm Ryan Grant Little Happy to have you here, marissa. Welcome to the podcast.
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, thanks for having me.
Ryan Grant Little:You are the founder and CEO of Turnover Labs, which makes carbon neutral alternatives to petroleum-based chemical precursors, which are the building blocks of chemicals, and you describe this as well-behaved electrochemistry if I got that right from somewhere on your webpage, which I think would be a really cool but maybe very niche bumper sticker, and I wonder if you could just kind of catch us up and tell us a bit about what Turnover Labs does and how you came to launch it.
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, thank you. So turnover labs is based on technology that can take CO2 from sort of mixed streams so like CO2 that's coming out, with other things present, like dirty impurities, like what would be coming out of a chemical facility or what would be coming out of a power plant eventually, and it takes CO2 out of that and it transforms it into a basic building block for chemicals production. So our company is based off of this technology, but it's also based off of the idea that we can build singular units that can go to where the CO2 is and turn them into something useful as a way to sort of accelerate decarbonization beyond just waiting for capture and sequestration to get online, so as a way to use leftover CO2 that maybe isn't a good candidate for capture and also giving it a new life and displacing the need for petroleum to come into the chemical manufacturing industry.
Ryan Grant Little:Okay, so it's kind of like smaller scale. So some of the CO2 direct capture needs really pure streams and you're usually talking about massive, massive outputs and you're kind of you can deal with more polluted streams more locally. So what kind of customers would you be selling this to? Who's the ideal candidate?
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, so we're primarily targeting chemical producers. The idea that we kind of have is you know, co2 is already present at these facilities. Maybe it's not, you know, going to be transported somewhere and put underground, but the CO2 is already present at these facilities. Maybe it's not, you know, going to be transported somewhere and put underground, but the CO2 is being emitted actually in a really opportunistic place, because usually it's emitted at like a petrochemical refinery or a monomer or like polymers production facility. So those facilities are already in a position to take basic building blocks that are coming from petroleum and build them into valuable molecules, and they have CO2 present and it's like the basic building block of most molecules. So we're just trying to turn it into the smallest unit that they can use in their operations so they don't necessarily have to move it off site and go through the complexity of scoping out a capture, transport and storage thing. They can use it and just sort of increase their production, as they were probably already going to, but do it in a more sustainable way.
Ryan Grant Little:So the emitters are also the customers. It's got this kind of circularity to it. It's like this concept of insetting instead of offsetting, basically, which is, I think, more and more becoming a topic. How big is this problem that you're solving? So, if we're thinking about precursors and what kind of environmental damage we'd be thinking about that, the traditional chemical way of precursor production, like what does that look like in numbers each year?
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, so the entire chemical production industry emits two gigatons of CO2 like annually, and that's a combination of steel and cement and all of the major players that I think your viewers are aware of or listeners are aware of. On the petrochemical side of things it's quite substantial. I think it's just south of a full gigaton, which is an unfortunate number because everybody loves saying the gigaton number. But 950 million tons per year is still pretty beneficial or still substantial, and about 40 percent 30 to 40 percent of petrochemicals are actually made out of the most basic building blocks that our technology is producing. So there's a really big opportunity there and they all emit a lot of CO2.
Ryan Grant Little:And are you working with these companies already? Do you have pilot plants or full-scale commercial projects in place already?
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, so we're at an early stage right now. We do have partners that we're working with, but we keep things within our lab and what we're doing is we're getting data, we're getting information from those partners about what's coming out of you know, different processes, and then we're simulating that with our own test stand in our lab to essentially break our system and see where there are failure points so that we can build it back stronger, so that once we go and we're at that stage where we have the prototype to deploy in field- we know that it work in partnership with a host of academic and scientific partners, including your alma mater, Columbia University in New York, through to the US Department of Energy.
Ryan Grant Little:So pretty good, pretty good logos to have on the deck or on the website and to be, working with. What kind of partnerships are these, and how do you decide who to work with as a partner?
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, so there's a couple of different partnerships that we have with various state agencies as well, as you know, like Activate and other entrepreneurial and fellowship societies that help scientists essentially make the jump or transition into entrepreneurship.
Marissa Beatty:On the side of potential customers we say partners because we haven't yet converted them to full paying customers who are buying our units yet, but we're on that pathway for it. So these are people who have processes or chemical facilities that essentially have CO2 that's compatible with our process at the current stage and have a need for what we're making. So they aren't, you know, they're looking carbon forward at things. They're trying to map things out for the next 10 years about what their carbon or decarbonization strategy looks like, and they also, simultaneously, are getting hit with different pressures in the world to decarbonize. Things like methane availability, which is what the basic building block that we make is usually made out of, is made out of natural gas. So in regions where the supply chain for that is a little bit more uncertain, or if there's just a general want to trend towards decarbonization in their facilities and make sustainable materials, those are the companies that we're looking at.
Ryan Grant Little:I can imagine, for companies that have, like these, 2030, 2040 net zero plans, that you could be a substantial part of that.
Marissa Beatty:Right right. And we do say in some senses that we are trying to Trojan horse in decarbonization, because right now the chemicals industry it's a commodity-based industry. Their margins aren't necessarily the most fun to play around with. But there's real concern to decarbonize in the next 20 years and there are lots of other benefits to our technology beyond just the decarbonization asset for it.
Ryan Grant Little:I mean, I can imagine that it makes sense in so many different ways, both from a practical perspective, probably from a cost efficiency perspective, from an environmental perspective and a storytelling perspective. Right With the circularity, do you get any pushback? Is there, are there any downsides? Or what's the number one negative? You hear from these, like chemical companies, for example.
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, I mean we hear lots because founders are never wanting for more criticism, so we get lots of criticism on it. I think a majority of criticism about our technology and around climate technology in general is around cost and riskiness for these larger, more well-established industries. So unless you're really beating something or demolishing it on price point or solving a major problem which is the avenue that we're going for but unless you're really demolishing it from a price point, people basically have the sentiment that like why would anybody take a risk on it unless they're saving substantial, kind of see the writing on the wall that things are not going to keep going how they're going.
Marissa Beatty:There's going to be a lot more volatility in the future and a lot of people are hedging their bets before and are starting to work with new technology now, as it's being developed, to make sure that they have access to it down the line.
Ryan Grant Little:Okay, yeah, inertia is a powerful force. You have to come up with a very good explanation for why people should do something or make changes, because the cost of doing something new and it not working out is much higher than not doing anything at all and continuing with the status quo.
Marissa Beatty:Right, and we're working in an industry where a lot of the technical advancement can be rather marginal and slow, and this is something that people are trying to address with climate and with decarbonization, which has to be a very fast rollout in order to hit certain targets. So it's kind of this, you know, discontinuity between these two ideas of how do we do something very, very fast but also work with people who are not typically, you know, accustomed to that sort of profile sort of profile.
Ryan Grant Little:I mentioned that Columbia University is your alma mater and Turnover Labs is the commercial continuation, if you will, of the work you were doing there both in your master's and your PhD. And I know lots of our listeners are in the research phase, you know, at universities around the world and looking at doing things like spinning out their topic, as you've done done into a startup and I wonder what kind of advice would you have for them to make that process as successful as possible?
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, I think the thing that I advocate for a lot of founders, more so than anything that they can do with their education or with their research, is to start developing a network of other founders and a support network early.
Marissa Beatty:I think the jump into becoming an entrepreneur would have been a lot harder if I didn't have examples within my own friend network, within my own professional network of people who had done that before that I could go and ask questions and learn from and kind of use them as role models and inspiration to make that really difficult jump. Because it's quite scary. Once you get to the other side of things, you really take your life and your career into your own hands. There's a lot of doubt and concern that swims around in your head and sometimes in your family and your friend groups heads. So if you're already in a community that establishes that as a viable path and you can use those examples to sort of ground you in your founder journey, I think that's really beneficial and that's been one of the better things about the communities that I situated myself in.
Ryan Grant Little:That's really good advice. I note that you are also an Activate fellow. Do you want to talk a little bit about what that is and how that gave you a boost? Do you want to talk a little?
Marissa Beatty:bit about what that is and how that gave you a boost, yeah, yeah. So Activate was pretty transformative in my journey specifically. I had waffled around about what to do. I envisioned this engineer scientist career for myself, sort of moving forward. But I also really was caring about climate. I was caring about the events that were happening just every single day on the news and I wanted to really position myself in electrochemistry because I thought electrochemistry was the path forward. So it was this conflict of here's the thing that I want to work on. Here's the thing that I think really needs to get rolled out, and it seems like now's the time to do it. And I say like Activate found me. I found Activate. We found each other because they were going through Columbia and they were looking at Columbia being a partner for their program, because they were establishing the first inaugural climate cohort for Activate, and I was like this is like Such good timing for this.
Marissa Beatty:Activate is a fellowship that supports scientists, making that jump, as I've said before, from scientist to entrepreneur. I call it a little bit sometimes academic deprogramming. They spend a lot of time addressing your values and how you think about technology, innovation and commercialization and saying what have you learned what do you think is necessary for now and what do you think is necessary for the future in order to get this technology into the hands of people. So I really admired that strategy. They give you two years of support. I'll say handholding, because at the beginning I didn't really know what my company necessarily was. I knew where it wanted to go, but I didn't know in what form it would exist. And they really sit down with you and they help make sure that you're building something of value with your technology and not just trying to build a random technology and try to sell it to whoever.
Ryan Grant Little:And is this something that people in academia who are looking to spin out and create a startup can apply for as a global, or can you talk a little bit more about the organization itself?
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, so I'm not necessarily sure if it's a global organization. I know for certain that we have a couple of fellows that are in Canada, so I know it transcends outside of the United States. I believe is just for anybody who's doing hard technology. So we have a couple of professors who have come out and they're doing their own startup in hard technology. We have a couple that have come from consulting who were building things in their garage and they applied for it. So it's not necessarily just academics, but you do have to have a hard technology and it does have to be a transformative technology. So that's usually where academics situate themselves.
Ryan Grant Little:Interesting, and so you're still in New York City and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what the community is like there. I mean, you've got New York Climate Week coming up about what the community is like there. I mean, you've got New York Climate Week coming up. There's the hack first North American hack summit coming up in November. What's it like to be a climate tech entrepreneur in the Big Apple? It's probably not the cheapest city to build a company, but I'm sure it has plenty of advantages. What are some of those?
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, well, I'm super stoked for Climate Week. I've been sort of planning my calendar a couple. I'd say like a month and a half ago I started. You are talking to the right person. If you want somebody to advocate for New York. I try to get everybody to come out here.
Marissa Beatty:I think the climate community is so incredible. Here You're never going to run out of happy hours. I feel like there's a happy hour like two or three every single week if that's your thing, but it's just sort of a place to meet other people who really care about climate. It is expensive, but as far as American cities go, the rents are comparable to San Francisco, in some cases even better than lab space that we can get in Boston. It's a little bit tight, of course. You got to have that classic New York apartment hunting, scrappiness to find a good lab space, but I also really admire the founders out here.
Marissa Beatty:I think it's a different attitude than what you might get in a Bay or what you might get in Boston. Every city has its own feel for how they approach things. New York in particular. I think we've got this really big attitude of calling people on what they're doing very, very hard, which is great Like getting that sort of feedback early on when you're sort of laying your path make sure that you're walking on the right path. So people here are super energetic about climate.
Marissa Beatty:New Yorkers have very, very low carbon footprints. I think we have the lowest in the US but you might want to double check me on that one and I take the subway. There's no shortage of different sustainable options in the city. It's a really great person, or it's a really great city to live in to be a person who cares about climate. It's a really fantastic area to be a founder.
Marissa Beatty:New York City is really catalyzing startup culture for climate. We have a couple I think we have Roosevelt Island and we have Governor's Island which are both owned by various municipalities I think state versus local just specifically to do climate projects on or climate pilots. So we have these green zone areas where we can go and take technology. Some of my friends have active pilots running on Governor's Island removing carbon from the Hudson River, where the Hudson River meets the East River. So I think it's a really great city. They really try to jumpstart people here. They really want to make it the epicenter of climate and again, we have Climate Week every year where the world falls upon New York and we accept them with open hands and we take them around and we all talk about emissions and it's a fantastic time.
Ryan Grant Little:I feel like persona non grata. In the past couple of weeks, everybody keeps asking me if I'm going to be there for Climate Week, and when I say no, they look at me like I've lost my mind. You should come, I would host you. Okay, we're just one more on the list. Okay, give me that look. Getting back to Turnover Labs, so your team is entirely female. Founded and venture-backed startups still skew horrendously male led. I probably don't need to tell you that, and I thought about this just as I was preparing this episode that you know, I recently had the winners of the Shape the Future competition from Moonshot Pirates on the podcast, and that's a team of four female founders from four different countries, the youngest of whom is 16. And I thought I would ask you what advice you have for them, pretending that they're listening to the podcast, but actually I know they will be. So what advice would you have for younger female founders who are doing amazing things in climate?
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, I think my advice kind of echoes what I was saying earlier, which is you should find a community of people who support you in any way. That can be a little bit scarier, coming, you know, being woman, identifying and coming out into a field where you don't see anybody who sort of looks like you, so that's very daunting. There's also a lot of data that supports that. Female founders get asked a lot more defensive questions. We receive more criticism than our male counterparts. So all of the doubt that swirls around in your mind as a founder, I think it is more accelerated and more present there in female founders just because we're so much, we're getting so much more feedback, we're getting so much more criticism than maybe we would in a different situation. The thing that I would say is we're like the female founders in the community all get that and you can find people that you can sit down with, just be very real with and speak about the issues that you're having. That is very transformative. That takes it from being feeling in an isolated position, feeling like I must be doing something wrong, I must not be right for this. It's being like oh okay, the system's a little bit still stacked against me, but this is what we got to do to move forward.
Marissa Beatty:The other thing that I also encourage people to think about is, rather than thinking about the downsides of being, you know, sort of unique or the minority in the field, is sort of viewing that as an asset. I think if you're, I say to female scientists and female engineers, like you've spent your whole career kind of being the one woman in the room and you've had to speak with people who have very different backgrounds than you and you have to identify with them and sort of meet them on their terms, and that's something that you're going to do as a founder, where you're going to be the only founder in a room group of VCs and you're going to have to explain your ideas, so you already have those muscles kind of built. So I would say like, rather than viewing it as a detriment, view it as an asset that you can sort of leverage and really play on it and, like the experiences you've had, to make a really unique story and I think people will pay attention to you for it.
Ryan Grant Little:That's great advice. You've managed to get the backing of some pretty serious names in climate. So if I look at this GigaScale Capital, impact Science Ventures, collaborative Fund, pace Ventures and the corporate venture capital Global Chemical Ventures Can you talk a little bit about that round, how it came together? What you know, was it that a pre-seed, a seed or later, and what is your next round looking like? Have you already thought about that? Yeah, it that a pre-seed, a seed or later, and what is your next round looking like? Have you already thought about that?
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, it was a pre-seed round and it kind of came. You know, I'm sure you paid attention to the last year or so in the VC world how things were up, and then they were down and all around sideways.
Marissa Beatty:So we had introductions to the VC's ISV Collab Fund and GigaScale or Impact Science Ventures through the Activate community. So Activate helps facilitate introductions with early founders to early check writers in those various funds and those checks are anticipated to be like hello, how are you doing checks? Just to sort of get started and get a jumpstart on funding companies at the earliest stage. So that sort of came. First we were in a position to raise. We wanted to start like we wanted to start specific development with our prototype. We wanted to get into the lab, we wanted to build out our team and we found a corporate. We knew that we needed to go with a corporate. We're working with chemical companies. We need to have somebody on the inside that's helping us out, that's giving us that perspective.
Marissa Beatty:And through various intentional looking we found one that was willing to take sort of a risk on an early, pre-seed company. That's not something that a lot of corporates do. But they saw the value in what we were building and they jumped in and they said, hey, we want to co-lead this round, let's go for it. And Pace came on board. They brought in the perspective of people who were very focused and believed in carbon utilization. They're also over there in Europe and they've got fantastic connections with people who are already sort of laying down this groundwork for carbon utilization, capture and sequestration in chemicals production.
Marissa Beatty:So it was this initial sort of introduction to early starters and then building the cap table out to include folks who can add a lot of specific knowledge about building specifically within the chemical space, and that was the pre-seed round. So next year and the next year or so we're, like I said, we're breaking our unit over and over and over again. We're bringing the data to people that we're working with. We're sort of seeing ways that we can amend our process to be more economic, more beneficial and then, once we start developing the idea for like an in-field trial or a laboratory scale pilot on our side, we would kick off our seed sort of just to support that grow out and that building of A team and be technology so that we can go and start to bring our technology into the field.
Ryan Grant Little:That's amazing. That's a great starting point. And especially having corporates interested that early on because a lot of times they can follow you through the journey, basically all the way through as well.
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, exactly.
Ryan Grant Little:And what does the next year look like? So, in addition to the financing side, what about on the sort of commercial milestones and goals?
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, so we've been really hammering down on our go to market strategy for getting new customers in the pipeline and new partners in the pipeline. We obviously have a pretty wide sweeping application space. Like I said, like 40% of petrochemicals use the thing that we're making. So we're trying to narrow focus down a little bit more for specific industries that we think we can thrive the most in. And we're also speaking with customers and identifying sort of like hanging chad CO2 that maybe they were thinking about for capture and maybe it's just not well positioned to a sequestration site, Maybe the cleanup isn't there, Maybe the infrastructure is delayed. So what we're trying to do is A yes, work on the technology and make sure that technology works, but B find a narrow focus for areas that we can deploy into and really have a beneficial impact, not just in a carbon perspective but also for our customers, adding value to that.
Ryan Grant Little:And what's the best way for people who are listening to this and are really interested in the mission, what's the best way for them to help you deliver on it and what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, so we have a catch-all email if you want to reach out, which is hello at turnoverlabscom. If you have any way that you can think of to help us, we need all the help that we can get. So absolutely, reach out. I look at those emails. Gina looks at those emails. We make sure that we see them. Obviously, the things that founders ask for is always money and pro bono work. I will take whatever help people will get. On the other side of things, what we're looking for is data and information about emissions and different opportunities. So we've been asking people who work in the chemicals industry if they have a particular process that they think might have been a good candidate for capture. But maybe it has this thing in it or that thing in it or random things in it. Definitely reach out and bring that to our attention. We are trying to collect as much data that we can about this again to see areas where A we can work, but B just sort of identifying holes in this decarbonization story for the chemicals industry.
Ryan Grant Little:Okay, so chemical companies that might've been told that their streams are of CO2 are too impure before might be a good candidate now with you.
Marissa Beatty:Right, or people who work in the field of chemicals, production, chemical engineering, consulting in that field, anybody who has sort of an eye on the things that they're looking for in decarbonization and has insights that they want to share. We're happy to hear them.
Ryan Grant Little:Brilliant Marissa. Thank you so much and, as always, I'll put the links in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining.
Marissa Beatty:Yeah, thank you for having me again. This is great, and you should come to Climate Week. Let's see about that week.
Ryan Grant Little:Let's see about that. Thanks again. Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climate tech podcom. Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.
