Climate tech: from innovation to impact in strategic sectors

Venture capital into climate tech peaked at $78B in 2022, fell to $41B in both 2024 and 2025, and has reached $43B in 2026 with a quarter of the year left. Split by segment, Electric Mobility has taken $170B of the $491B raised since 2010, Clean Energy $112B and Energy Storage $89B. The five companies profiled below, in the lighter tiles, have raised $2.3B in 2026 to bring new processes to steel and cement production, industrial heating, geothermal power and jet fuel.

Companies closing the gap through innovation

The IEA’s gap sits in steel, cement, chemicals, industrial heat and the fuels that move aircraft and ships. Five companies show what closing it takes; each is moving its technology beyond the prototype stage and into the market.

The selection is editorial, not a ranking: VC-backed companies whose core process is not yet running at commercial scale, in the sectors the IEA names, with a recorded valuation and a venture round in 2026. Together they have raised $5.4B of venture capital and are valued at $8.2B combined. Three are based in the US, Stegra in Stockholm and Terra CO2 in Vancouver.

Low-carbon steel and cement

Stegra is building a plant at Boden in northern Sweden that reduces iron ore with green hydrogen instead of coking coal, and has signed carmakers and manufacturers as customers and investors, among them Mercedes-Benz, Scania and Schaeffler. It has raised $3.9B of venture capital since 2021 and $8.5B of project debt from a bank syndicate that includes Societe Generale, BNP Paribas and the European Investment Bank. Terra CO2 takes the other route in cement: instead of a new kiln process it makes a cement substitute from quarry rock, feedstock that already sits next to every aggregate mine. It has 40 employees, 10 patents and $275M of venture capital, and its 2025 Series B brought in the cement makers CEMEX and Eagle Materials as investors alongside Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

Cleaner industrial energy, geothermal power and biofuel

Antora Energy stores cheap wind and solar power as heat in blocks of carbon and delivers it back to factories at up to 1,500°C, or as electricity through thermophotovoltaic cells. Its $550M Series C in July 2026 valued it at $2.5B; Rondo Energy does a similar job with brick heat storage and has raised $82M. Quaise drills with millimetre waves instead of a drill bit, a technique taken from fusion research, to reach rock hotter than 400°C as deep as 20km, for geothermal heat and power where coal and gas plants already stand. It was spun out of MIT in 2018 and raised $169M in July 2026 from Prelude Ventures, the drilling contractor Nabors and the Japanese energy groups JERA and Idemitsu; at its first geothermal power project, on federal land near the Newberry volcano in central Oregon, it began drilling its first well in September 2026, towards a first phase of 50MW by 2030. LanzaJet converts ethanol into jet fuel; it was spun out of LanzaTech in 2020 and its shareholders include Shell, British Airways, All Nippon Airways, Southwest Airlines and International Airlines Group, the buyers of the fuel.

A recovery year for climate tech, a record year for these companies

All five raised venture capital in 2026: Stegra $1.5B, Antora Energy $550M, Quaise $169M, LanzaJet $47M and Terra CO2 $22M. Stegra has raised $3.9B in total, largely through two rounds of $1.7B in 2023 and $1.5B in 2026, to build its steel plant. The other four have raised $1.5B between them: Antora and Quaise put theirs into a battery factory in California and a geothermal project in Oregon, while Terra CO2 and LanzaJet have raised less than $300M each and lean on grants and investors from the industries they sell into.

The investors come from the industries being decarbonised as much as from venture funds. Breakthrough Energy Ventures backs three of the five; Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Shell, Just Climate and Siemens each hold two. The customers are often investors too: the cement makers CEMEX and Eagle Materials in Terra CO2, the airlines British Airways, Southwest and International Airlines Group in LanzaJet, the carmakers Mercedes-Benz and Scania in Stegra, and the drilling contractor Nabors and the utility JERA in Quaise.

What this means

About a third of the emissions cuts the IEA’s net zero pathway needs in 2050 still depend on technology that has to be proven and then built at scale. The five are building it: steel without coking coal, cement without clinker, batteries that store wind and solar power as heating, geothermal power from superhot rock, jet fuel from ethanol. These are true alternatives to how we create power, how we build and how we travel.