Billionaire-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures has made another long-term bet in a Boston deep tech startup that aligns with the fund's broader mission of fighting climate change.
The $1 billion fund backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos led the $20 million round raised on Thursday by Boston Metal, a Woburn, Mass.-based developer of a process to reduce carbon emissions in steel making.
Spun-out of MIT in 2012, Boston Metal - which replaces pollution-heavy techniques to transform metals with electricity - is not the first MIT-born company that Breakthrough Energy Ventures added to its portfolio.
Last year, the fund invested in Form Energy, which is developing a new type of battery that can store renewable energy for months at a fraction of the current cost, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is building a compact power plant with the final goal of accelerating commercial fusion power.
The $1 billion capital of Breakthrough Energy Ventures comes from an investor group that includes Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Richard Branson and other top business leaders. Its strict criteria for investing is that the company must be developing technologies with the potential to reduce "about 1 percent of projected 2050 global emissions." Locally, they also contributed to the recent $26 million round of Malta Inc., which works on storing renewable energy in molten salts.
Other investors in Boston Metal's round included Prelude Ventures and MIT's The Engine.
"Steel is and will remain one of the staples of modern society, but the production of steel today produces over two gigatons of CO2," said Tadeu Carneiro, CEO of Boston Metal, in a statement. "The same fundamental method for producing steel has been used for millennia, but Boston Metal is breaking that paradigm by replacing coal with electrons.”
