“Never tell me the odds.”
– Han Solo, The Empire Strikes Back

 

Twelve years ago this month, we sent our first newsletter. Put another way, it’s been 625 weeks (hence WK625 in the subject). When we started, most folks were curious and supportive and then told us they knew people who lost a lot of money in cleantech 1.0. But we’ve always believed people and tech could deliver miracles and so it seems appropriate that we get to co-author our impact report with tech that already feels like an alien intelligence.

Read the full report: 2025 Third Sphere Portfolio Impact Report

 

45M Tonnes CO2e Avoided. 300M+ Lives Protected.

Impact went out of fashion in 2025. In 2023, 40% of S&P 100 companies used “ESG” in their annual sustainability report titles. Last year, that dropped to just 6%. We know it’s the moment to go deeper. We started by asking one question of roughly 25% of our largest portfolio companies: If we measure your impact today, what does it add up to?

Some sample responses:

• Cove’s AI-native architecture platform, avoided 45M tonnes of CO2e, about equivalent to the annual emissions of Norway.
• Future Motion’s Onewheel’s have traveled 218M+ miles across 139 countries, replacing car trips with the most fun way to get around.
• HAAS Alert protects 175-200M people through the world’s largest vehicle-to-everything alerting network serving 5,000+ agencies, and already 5M+ connected vehicles, all 50 US states, 7 countries.
• Near Space Labs deploys stratospheric imaging robots that reach disaster zones within hours, today serving 100-150M people.

And this only captures companies where impact is measurable today. Many in our portfolio’s future upside is too early to quantify or too small to matter now, but scaling toward it.

 

How AI Helped Us Measure All of This

This entire report was built using Claude as a research and analysis partner, we’re leaving the “—” to prove it. You’ll have to guess if typos are human generated or prompted. We organized data from 24 company profiles representing the largest/oldest from each fund. Now that we have a repeatable process, we’ll add more soon.

AI didn’t replace judgment. Founders corrected our numbers, challenged our assumptions, and added context no model could generate. But AI made it possible for our small team to produce something that would have previously required a few dedicated analysts working on it for months, and a larger fund AUM, which we believe would misalign interests with founders. More on that another day.

And the carbon cost of all that AI work? Approximately 4-6 kg CO2e total, covering AI inference, cloud storage, emails to founders for data collection, file generation, and workflow development. That’s equivalent to driving about 12 miles in a gasoline car, or roughly 1/25th of a single LA to SF flight. Economy class.

 

What’s Next: A Gigaton and a Billion Lives

Under growth scenarios, our portfolio has a visible path to 1 gigaton of cumulative CO2e avoided in the 2030s and to protecting more than 10% of the global population from climate risk. We publish this not as a victory lap but as a benchmark — every profile is public, every methodology is explained.

 

Speedstrapping: How You Get There

The biggest threat to climate impact isn’t technology — it’s company failure. And the biggest cause of company death is over-reliance on rapidly shifting interests of VCs and their LPs. That’s why we developed Speedstrapping, an approach to company building focused on revenue-first, diversified capital sources, AI as force multiplier,  and financial discipline as religion. Every company in this report survived a period when climate tech funding contracted sharply. They thrived because they weren’t waiting for permission from the next term sheet.

Read the Speedstrap Playbook: Part 1 and Part 2 on Substack

Read the full report: 2025 Third Sphere Portfolio Impact Report

 

Opportunities to work with companies featured in this report

Hiring: Several companies featured in this report are growing their teams. Revivn is hiring an Engineering Manager, a Shipping and Receiving Supervisor, a Recruiter, and an Account Executive in Brooklyn. Mark43 needs an Engineering Manager and a Program Manager, Federal Services (both remote). Shellworks is looking for an Operations Associate and a Senior Polymer Engineer in London. Circuit is hiring Autonomous Vehicle Operators in Boca Raton and Driver Ambassadors across Florida, Washington, and D.C. And Robot.com is looking for a Maintenance Analyst in Colombia. See all 246 open roles across the portfolio at jobs.thirdsphere.com.

 

Twelve years ago, a pre-seed climate fund would have been told the odds of success were very bad. Luckily, we didn’t really ask. And nor did the founders featured in our impact report. 625 weeks later, 45.7 million tonnes avoided and 300 million lives protected. And we’re just getting to the good part.

 

Thanks for reading,

The Third Sphere Team: Shaun, Stonly, Yana, Miela & Roscel

 

P.S. made it this far? Reward yourself with Third Sphere socks!

P.P.S. Know founders we should meet? The companies thriving today were not working in popular areas when we invested. Our criteria are pretty simple – great team, bad logo, working demo, no customers and the potential to have a huge impact in some area of climate (probably the one that isn’t getting much media coverage right now).

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You can find our previous updates here.