Companies in the adaptation space are starting to get the kind of growth-stage cash that was once relegated to mitigation.
That’s according to the latest climate tech investment trend report from Currence, formerly known as Sightline. The report flags two Series F funding rounds for radar satellite companies — $521 million for Finnish ICEYE and $175 million for U.S.-based Tomorrow.io — as propping up a “record” investment year so far for adaptation and earth observation.
However, these numbers are complicated by the fact that these satellite technologies that are so valuable for climate and energy resilience are also valuable to some of the world’s most deep-pocketed customers: the military.
ICEYE, for example, provides satellite data to NATO and has contracts with militaries across Europe, including in Germany, Finland, and Ukraine. And Tomorrow.io, which focuses more on weather data than ICEYE, has the U.S. Air Force as a customer. According to Katie MacDonald, director of innovations at RWDI and co-founder of Tailwind, an investment firm focused on adaptation solutions, said that the military applications of their technologies are “difficult to extricate from the use cases that are resilience and adaptation,” MacDonald said.
