15 climate tech startups to watch in 2026

The climate tech sector is hitting a stride that few expected this soon. After two consecutive years of decline, global venture and growth investment bounced back in 2025, reaching $40.5 billion — an 8% increase according to Sightline Climate data. And that number came alongside another jaw-dropping stat: 179 climate funds collectively raised $92 billion in new capital, setting a record. This kind of momentum doesn’t happen by accident, and understanding what’s driving this surge is essential for anyone tracking the innovation ecosystem up close.

This movement unfolded against a specific political backdrop in the United States, where the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act clarified which paths the federal government intended to support — and that unlocked capital that had been sitting on the sidelines, waiting for some kind of signal. When the regulatory environment shows signs of stability, even partial ones, the market responds. And that’s exactly what happened: funds that had been in wait-and-see mode started moving their portfolios toward companies with climate-focused theses.

And at the heart of it all is artificial intelligence. Nearly 28 cents of every dollar invested in climate equity went straight to AI-embedded solutions, with data centers alone attracting close to $2 billion. It’s no exaggeration to say that AI has stopped being just a tool and is becoming the very infrastructure of climate — from how we consume energy to how we prepare for natural disasters. 🌍

Beyond AI, two other themes dominated the landscape. The first is the race for critical materials and domestic minerals, with projections pointing to 30 to 40% deficits in copper and lithium by 2035 — an issue that has already become a matter of national security, not just environmental concern. The second is climate adaptation, which crossed the niche boundary and entered asset-class territory, with funding jumping 64% as investors and companies realized that a hotter planet represents serious and immediate operational risk.

With this landscape in mind, the Trellis team evaluated 105 startups and selected the 15 most promising to watch in 2026, organized across three major themes:

• Data centers — and the urgent challenge of reducing energy and water consumption
• Materials innovation — tackling the projected scarcity of essential minerals
• Climate adaptation — the category that exploded in relevance and investment

A team of Trellis analysts assessed each candidate based on four criteria: solution innovation capability, commercial traction, impact potential, and founding team strength. Five finalists were chosen in each category.

Data Centers: the new sustainability battleground

Few people were making this connection five years ago, but today it’s more than obvious: data centers are a climate problem. The explosive growth of artificial intelligence models demands computational infrastructure that consumes energy on a staggering scale. Data centers are estimated to already account for roughly 1 to 2% of global electricity consumption — and that number is on track to double by the end of the decade if nothing changes in how these facilities are designed and operated. This is the space where some of the most compelling startups on the list are operating, with approaches ranging from modular wind energy systems to floating ocean data centers.

Five companies were selected in this category, and each one attacks the problem from a different angle:

• WAVR Technologies — generates water from the atmosphere using waste heat from AI data centers. An ingenious solution that turns a byproduct that would otherwise be wasted into a water resource, simultaneously tackling the water consumption problem at these facilities.
• Airloom Energy — develops modular wind systems designed for data centers, utilities, and defense. Instead of relying on traditional massive turbines, the company works with a lighter and more adaptable architecture.
• etalytics — uses AI software to cut energy waste in data center cooling and reduce manual operations. It’s the kind of optimization that seems invisible but generates massive savings at scale.
• Aikido Technologies — builds floating offshore data centers. The idea might sound radical, but leveraging ocean temperatures for natural cooling makes solid sense from an energy standpoint.
• Magnefy — combines AI and magnetic sensing to detect electrical faults in transformers and inverters. Invisible electrical problems in critical infrastructure can cause enormous losses, and catching them before they happen is a real differentiator.

What stands out about this group of companies is that they’re not just optimizing what already exists — they’re rethinking the entire logic of operations. Some are working with repurposing the heat generated by servers to produce water or energy, turning a byproduct that was being discarded into a real source of value. Others are developing AI-powered management software that adjusts energy consumption in real time based on demand, dynamically reducing waste.

There’s also a water sustainability dimension that frequently gets overlooked in the data center debate. Traditional cooling systems consume massive volumes of water — in some parts of the world, a single large-scale data center can use more water per day than an entire mid-sized city. Startups like WAVR Technologies are developing technologies that not only reduce this dependency but literally reverse the process, extracting water from the atmosphere as part of their operation. It’s a clear example of how technological innovation and environmental responsibility can move forward together without one having to sacrifice the other.

Materials Innovation: racing against the clock

The energy transition has a problem that still hasn’t gotten the mainstream attention it deserves: it depends on materials that are becoming scarce. Copper and lithium are two prime examples — and projections point to 30 to 40% deficits by 2035 if demand keeps growing at its current pace without new sources or substitutes being developed. Solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, power transmission cables — all of it depends on these materials. And when supply can’t keep up with demand in strategic sectors, prices skyrocket and climate tech projects become more expensive and harder to scale.

The five startups selected in this category bring varied and creative approaches:

• Aepnus Technology — converts industrial waste into useful chemicals for mining, batteries, textiles, and paper. It’s circular economy applied with serious technical rigor.
• Elementium Materials — develops drop-in electrolytes that improve battery performance. In other words, you don’t need to redesign the entire battery — just swap out one component for significant gains.
• Smart Plastic Technologies — creates plastic additives that maintain material performance during use and enable bioassimilation at end of life. An elegant answer to the plastic problem that doesn’t involve simply banning the material.
• REEgen — uses engineered microbes to recover critical minerals from industrial waste. Biotechnology in service of urban mining, essentially.
• EnKoat — extends the lifespan of commercial roofs and reduces building energy demand through advanced thermal barrier coatings. It sounds simple, but the cumulative impact at scale is enormous.

This field is perhaps the most technical of all three themes, but it’s also the one with the greatest potential to create lasting competitive advantages — because whoever solves the materials problem will be sitting on top of a massive strategic asset. The critical materials question has already become a matter of national security in the United States and other countries, which means it’s not just the private sector willing to invest: governments are also pouring heavy resources into securing domestic supply chains.

Artificial intelligence plays a decisive role here too, but in a way that still surprises a lot of people. AI models are being used to accelerate the discovery of new materials, digitally simulating how different compounds behave under specific conditions before any physical test is even conducted. This process, which used to take years and require expensive labs, can now be compressed into weeks. Some of the startups on this list use exactly this approach — combining machine learning with data from previous experiments to identify promising candidates at a speed that would be impossible otherwise. It’s innovation accelerating innovation, and the climate is better for it. 🌱

Climate Adaptation: the category that became an asset class

If there’s one area that surprised the most in 2025, it was climate adaptation. With 64% growth in funding, it went from being treated as a social impact niche to becoming a category that serious investors are watching with the same attention they give any other technology vertical. The logic is simple and straightforward: climate change is already happening, and regardless of any mitigation effort, the world is going to need infrastructure, data, and systems to deal with the effects that are already inevitable — more intense droughts, more frequent floods, longer heat waves.

The five finalists in this category cover an impressive spectrum:

• Beehive — an AI platform that helps companies prepare for and respond to natural disasters, while also automating climate risk reports. In a landscape where regulators increasingly require this kind of disclosure, demand for this service is only going to grow.
• Helix Earth — removes moisture before the cooling process, cutting air conditioning energy consumption and improving air quality. An upstream approach that tackles the root of the problem rather than the symptom.
• California Cultured — produces coffee and chocolate at industrial scale through plant cell biomanufacturing. With climate change threatening traditional growing regions, securing production of these items independently of weather conditions is both a business opportunity and a necessity.
• Nucleic Sensing Systems — operates autonomous biosensors that monitor water and harmful biological signals. Continuous water quality monitoring is critical in a world where extreme events can contaminate supply sources unpredictably.
• Sensegrass — provides soil intelligence sensors and AI-powered agronomy tools to help farmers optimize productivity and build climate resilience. Agriculture is one of the sectors most vulnerable to climate change, and granular, real-time data makes all the difference in decision-making.

What ties all these approaches together is the reliance on large-scale data and sophisticated predictive models — and that’s where artificial intelligence takes center stage again. Climate adaptation is, in practice, an information problem: knowing what’s going to happen, where, when, and how intensely. The more precise that knowledge, the more efficient the response. The startups that manage to build the best predictive models for climate events — powered by quality data and adequate computational capacity — will hold a competitive advantage that’s very hard to replicate. And that’s why investors are willing to bet on this category with growing conviction. 💡

What these 15 startups have in common

Looking at the full set of companies selected by Trellis, a few characteristics show up consistently. The first is deep integration with artificial intelligence — not as a marketing talking point, but as a functional part of the product. Whether it’s optimizing energy consumption in real time, accelerating materials discovery, or generating more accurate climate predictions, AI is embedded in the core value proposition of these companies, and that sets them apart from an earlier generation of climate startups that relied much more heavily on hardware or behavior change.

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The second characteristic is the ability to generate revenue through scalable business models. A recurring criticism of the climate tech ecosystem is that many companies depend on government subsidies or institutional buyers with very long sales cycles to survive. The startups on this list, for the most part, have models that can grow in more dynamic commercial environments — whether through software as a service, data platforms, or solutions that quickly pay for themselves through operational efficiency. This not only makes it easier to attract private investment but also accelerates market adoption.

The third is timing. With the macroeconomic context favoring the sector in 2025 and the growth trend holding into 2026, these companies are in a privileged position to capture a window of opportunity that doesn’t always stay open for long. Capital is available, demand for sustainability is real across both the corporate and government sectors, and technology has finally reached a level of maturity that allows building solutions that actually work at scale. This alignment of factors is rare — and the startups that know how to seize it now will come out significantly ahead.

The global landscape and Brazil’s role

Although the Trellis list focuses on startups with a presence in the North American market, the global climate tech movement has a direct impact on the Brazilian ecosystem. Brazil holds some of the world’s largest reserves of critical minerals, including lithium and rare earths, which places the country at the center of the conversation about secure supply chains. Technologies like those developed by REEgen or Aepnus Technology, for example, could have direct applications in Brazil’s mining industry, helping to add value to industrial waste that is currently discarded without any recovery.

In the climate adaptation space, Brazil faces enormous and urgent challenges. Extreme events like floods, prolonged droughts, and heat waves are already part of daily reality across multiple regions, and demand for monitoring, prediction, and response systems is only going to increase. Startups like Beehive and Sensegrass offer models that could be adapted for the Brazilian context, where agriculture represents a significant share of GDP and exposure to climate risk is a constant concern for both producers and investors.

What becomes clear looking at this list of 15 startups is that climate tech in 2026 is no longer about good intentions — it’s about solving real problems with cutting-edge technology, generating financial returns, and building resilience for a future that’s already knocking on the door. And artificial intelligence is the common thread connecting virtually all of these solutions, proving once again that AI’s most transformative impact may not be in the chatbots we use every day, but in how we protect and rebuild the planet. 🚀