Welcome to The Overview

Hi there!

We’re Overview Capital and we invest in the mitigation of methane and other super pollutants at the earliest stages.

Welcome to our bi-weekly newsletter: The Overview. 

We’re excited to keep you up to speed as we invest in and support companies mitigating methane and other super pollutants.

Nice to (re)meet you. Here’s who we are:

We – Kelsey Rudin, Lauren Singer, and Julia Arnhold – are the Managing Partners at Overview Capital. For a bit of backstory:

• Julia and Kelsey are long-time friends who attended The University of Pennsylvania together and have invested actively in climate for years

• Kelsey invested in Lauren’s first business, Package Free, years ago which led to a deep friendship

• All three have been focused on climate investing from different angles including materials, ingredients, conservation, agriculture, built environment, and waste

• We joined together to invest in companies mitigating methane and other super pollutants, the greatest opportunity we have to cut warming in our lifetime, and Overview Capital was born.

Why we focus on methane & super pollutants

Super pollutants, like methane and nitrous oxide, are powerful climate forcers. They have a short atmospheric life compared to carbon dioxide but a disproportionate warming impact. More than half the global warming the world will experience between now and 2050 is driven by super pollutants. Even though other greenhouse gasses like methane have driven ~30% of observable global warming, methane has historically attracted less than 2% of climate funding. That’s quite the mismatch and other super pollutants are even more overlooked!

The TAM for solutions is enormous. An estimated $90T needs to be spent on global warming and climate change mitigation by 2030. If more than half that warming is driven by super pollutants, you’re looking at a $45T+ funding opportunity over the next 5 years. 

We’re early to a massive market opportunity here. Plus, as you’ll see highlighted in this and future emails, this narrative is starting to take off. It pays to be early to a novel ‘arena’. We launched Overview to be the investors that founders, funds, policymakers, and more think of when they think of methane and super pollutants.

Our progress

We launched Fund I in January 2023 and have since invested in 16 companies that directly mitigate methane and other super pollutants across sectors including oil and gas, animal agriculture, and rice farming. We’ve invested alongside exceptional funds like Breakthrough, Lightspeed, Lerer Hippeau, Collab Fund, S2G, Fifth Wall, and Equal Ventures, seeing fantastic progress from our first companies.

• Alga Biosciences - Eliminating methane emissions at-scale

• Anthropogenic - Providing real-time monitoring and reporting of assets such as bonds, carbon credits, and more to power a new class of socially and environmentally responsible investment

• ArkeaBio - Developing a vaccine to reduce livestock methane emissions

• Bluedot Technologies - A single payment platform for EV drivers and fleets

• Elio - AI co-pilot for designing sustainable drug manufacturing 

• Emvolon - Converting wasted resources into valuable liquid chemicals

• Goodmylk - Making mylk the new milk

• Highwood Emissions - Emissions software for the oil and gas industry

• Miraterra - Making soil intelligence more accurate and less expensive

• Mitti Labs - Accelerating the decarbonization of agriculture for smallholder farmers

• Mojave Energy Systems - Changing the physics of air conditioning 

• Oka - De-risking Climate Investments with Carbon Credit Insurance

• ReynKo - Solving turbulence

• Steward - Regenerative farming credit financing

• Texture - Distributed energy in one place

• Xplorobot - Detecting and verifying methane emissions with laser OGI

Events

On April 2nd, in partnership with J.P. Morgan, we hosted what one guest called the “Super Bowl” of methane and super pollutants. 50+ stakeholders from across industries, including oil and gas, agriculture and dairy, venture capital, and more, gathered for a roundtable discussion on the “Methane Opportunity,” namely, why methane is a fantastic place to focus both for climate impact and for economic benefit. Lauren led a panel with Fred Krupp, the President of the Environmental Defense Fund, Jessica Matthews, the Global Head of Sustainable Investing at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, and Matt Kolesar, the Chief Environmental Scientist at Exxon.

Topics discussed ranged from:

• Monitoring and measurement: New technologies like the EDF’s MethaneSAT satellite, which launched last month, will enable novel measurement and monitoring of methane across sectors, driving great accountability and action across the entire value chain. 

• Regulatory environment: Stakeholders like Exxon are also responding to new regulations like the EPA’s methane fees (more on that above) and are voluntarily setting more ambitious targets to cut methane emissions from operations by 75% by 2030.

• Financing and new markets: Alongside all of the above, companies like J.P. Morgan and Exxon recognize the economic opportunity inherent to keeping more methane on Earth and out of the atmosphere. Still, new markets and financing mechanisms are needed to scale early-stage methane mitigation solutions. What do these look like? Can carbon market models work for methane, too? This one in particular sparked a lot of audience discussion.

Whether or not you were at the event, we’d love to hear from you. What other questions or ideas would you pose to the panelists?  We’re all ears and will see many of you around San Francisco this week for Climate Week.

News and policy

• The EPA released its new proposed rule that will impose fees on oil and gas companies if methane emissions from their operations exceed specified thresholds. The fees will start at $900 per metric tonne per year in 2024 and then ratchet up to $1,500 by 2026. The oil and gas sector is the second largest source of anthropogenic methane emissions both in the U.S. and globally (after agriculture).

• Several recently released studies show methane emissions from oil and gas are higher than previously thought (or certainly than reported). For instance, oilfields in the U.S. are estimated to release up to three times as much methane as previously thought. Globally, methane emissions from oil and gas were close to record highs in 2023 despite pledges to reduce them. Further, methane emissions from U.S. landfills are up to 40% higher than previously thought, too.

• The EDF's methane-tracking satellite, MethaneSAT, successfully launched into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The satellite will accelerate efforts to monitor and measure methane emissions globally. All of the satellite’s data will be open-sourced as early as next year.

• BNP Paribas and Kayrros, which has designed methane emissions tracking services based on satellite imagery, announced a partnership to accelerate methane mitigation in oil and gas.

• The EPA and the DOE announced a Notice of Intent to fund methane measurement and reduction technologies from the oil and gas sectors.

• The world wastes the equivalent of 1 billion meals daily, the predominance of which actually comes from households. Much of that turns into methane in landfills.

• More reading: The IEA’s Global Methane Tracker for 2024, which offers estimates of methane emissions and emissions abatement opportunities globally, is out.

Notable raises 

There isn’t just a massive environmental opportunity inherent to keeping methane out of the atmosphere. Keeping it on Earth also represents a significant economic opportunity. Unlike carbon dioxide, methane is a versatile, valuable commodity inherent to countless processes — ranging from energy generation to food production — that power society. As evidenced by the recent fundraising announcements highlighted below, this idea is catching on, though it’s still early.

• LongPath Technologies, based out of Boulder, CO, raised up to $189M in a conditional loan guarantee from the DOE to build and install a “real-time methane emissions monitoring network” in the Permian Basin, and other oil basins across Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Texas.

• Insight M, based out of Sunnyvale, CA, raised $52M in an initial close of Series D funding to expand its high-frequency aerial methane leak detection technologies and services globally. Kairos uses aircraft equipped with gas-detecting spectrometers to monitor oil and

  gas-producing regions. BlackRock led.

• Windfall Bio, based out of Menlo Park, CA, raised $28M in Series A funding for its methane mitigation technologies that use methanotrophs to transform methane into valuable products. Prelude Ventures led.

Odds and ends

Yesterday was Earth Day, and we encourage you to do one thing in favor of the planet. Might we suggest starting to compost, not eating meat (even just for the day), or setting up a Google alert for “methane”? 

Thanks for reading the first edition of The Overview. If you are a methane or super pollutant focused company or want to connect on methane or our investment work, please reach out at [email protected].

– The Overview Team