Hi . 

“The truth doesn’t care about our needs or wants. It doesn’t care about our   governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time.”

  - Valery Legasov, head of the Chernobyl disaster commission.

The new miniseries from HBO and Sky, dramatizes the story of the 1986 nuclear accident, one of the worst human-made catastrophes in history.

Climate change is not unlike Chernobyl. Nations and countries that benefit from fossil fuels have replaced a soviet system of disinformation. But there is a key difference. Collectively we can all help to avoid a disaster.

We know cities are central to reducing GHG emissions and adapting to new realities from fires and floods to supply chain disruptions. We’ve been helping founders and now we’d like to help investors generate public benefits and above market financial returns.

To start, we’re sharing our first version of our urbantech investor playbook. We’d really appreciate your comments and insights as we look to add new chapters over the summer.

Startup Intros

We’re excited to introduce our newest startup investments. All these teams will be working with us at URBAN-X over the summer.

Food For All partners with restaurants to take potential food waste and convert it to meals that cost as little as $4 (available in New York and Boston).

OurHub is an outdoor exercise and play network offering activities like ping pong, pole tennis and basketball in Copenhagen, Paris and soon in NYC.

Pi Variables makes traffic control devices that provide real time programmable lights and data to mapping/GPS services.

3AM Innovations makes a tracking service for first responders specifically designed for emergency response situations.

Cove Tool automates performance modeling for architects and building product manufacturers, even at the very earliest design stages.

Evolve Energy reduces energy costs and emissions for homes using a combination of real-time pricing, connected home devices and renewable energy, starting in Texas.

Varuna is a water quality monitoring service that leverages system-wide and distributed data to increase operational efficiencies.

Jobs

Cove Tool is looking for an expert in daylight simulation to help them further improve early stage building performance models. Maybe you know a prospect for the lead EE role at Wright Electric to help build electric aircraft. Bowery Farming has a bunch of open roles related to farm construction and farm operations. Seamless Docs is seeking a demand generation lead to join the marketing team. Avvir is looking for senior computer vision engineers to move from reality capture to deep insights during construction. Perl Street is seeking a full stack software developer to help build the financial modeling platform for urbantech startups.

And there are another 62 more open opportunities from Urban Us portfolio companies.

Opportunities

Greater Sacramento has an RFQ to revitalize 12 commercial corridors through innovative interventions. City of Milton Keynes offers $900k in contracts to develop, deploy innovative electric vehicle tech. There dozens more open calls from cities curated by Citymart covering everything from renewable energy and mobility planning to economic development and better hiring processes. Take a look.

LACI wants to help clean energy and zero emissions mobility startups. Or perhaps you are focused on affordable housing? Check out https://www.housinglab.co/. Also, founders solving for urban heat island impacts wanted by NY.

The Aspen Institute is collecting feedback from a broad range of folks about urban tech and equitable contracting. You can see the results so far and share your own perspective at https://aspen.insights.us/.

Climate change is a reality with a baffling impact worldwide. How can technology help? Join NECEC's Navigate webinar with GM, Equinor Ventures and Boston Properties to find out. 

Cities

We’re enjoying Technopolis, the new podcast from CityLab. Catch the first 8 episodes about cities + tech (H/T Arnaud Sahuguet).  

We’re skeptical that kick scooters are the transport form factor of the future. First, CDC finds that electric scooter use results in 20 injuries per 100,000 trips, about 10x worse than bikes - via The Verge. Bird recently announced something that looks a lot like a real scooter. If you’re in Berlin, Beijing or Brooklyn, you may already be using something similar, if not as cool looking. Somewhat related - Fred Wilson’s take on the challenges facing shared scooter land.

We’ll talk about this more in our next call for startups, but as we build algorithms, we risk automating already poor decision-making in the form of bias. Benedict Evans’ Note on AI Bias offers some great context. (H/T Dean DiPietro)

Location, location, location looks like a dated idea now that the retail crisis is increasingly a landlord crisis via Sidewalk Talk.

Startups

The fundraising environment has changed a lot in the last few years. Tomasz Tunguz on The Fundraising Environment in 2019 - Three Major Shifts. The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup's metrics - 80 slide deck included from Andrew Chen

You can’t fundraise past seed without product-market fit. Here's how Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit - First Round Review.

When you do raise, you’ll need to figure out how to find talent to join your team. Stripe's remote engineering hub shows how distributed workforces can thrive - VentureBeat. 

Urban Us

We tend to see a lot of news about startups in conflict with policymakers. But that’s not been our experience. Crain’s New York features Blocpower and Radiator Labs, who helped show what is possible for building energy retrofits - “Laws capping building emissions could be gold for proptech”

Change continues in all aspects of transportation and logistics. Business insider explores whether Circuit is the answer and alternative to congestion causing mobility like Lyft and Uber. Park & Diamond featured in CBS’ Innovation Nation (first story in the series). Coord release of a curb management tool was announced on Smart Cities Dive. Forbes contributor, Dorin Levin covers Lunewave’s potential to give self-driving vehicle technology a big boost. SF Chronicle profiles Kiwi Campus and the love Kiwibots garner from the Berkeley community they serve.

The built environment is not going to be outdone. Axios on how utilities are turning to AI to predict coming disasters with the help of Urbint. Irving Fain of Bowery Farming on his journey as an entrepreneur on The Proof. Arch Paper explains why Toggle is using robots for rebar assembly. Jon Dishotsky discusses fundraising with 20VC and Starcity’s most ambitious project yet, the largest co-living project ever, with Citylab.

Finally, we opened with cohort 6 companies, so we’ll wrap with cohort 5. Here’s Jason and the LAUNCH team interviewing a few founders from URBAN-X Cohort 5 on a recent podcast episode.

Best,

Liz, Mark, Anthony, Stonly & Shaun