CDL Carbon Removal: Accelerating Startups Tackling Climate Change
Climate change poses an existential threat to our current way of life. Facing this colossal challenge, the imperative is clear: reducing carbon as fast as we can. This urgent mission necessitates unprecedented innovation and collaboration to develop and scale CDR solutions. It’s in this critical context that the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) decided to create a dedicated acceleration program: the CDL Carbon Removal. This year, CDL-Paris organized a dedicated CDL session at Station F, supporting deep tech startups developing carbon sequestration and removal solutions.
The Creative Destruction Lab is a global non-profit program that brings together experts, investors, scientists, and leaders in their fields to help high-potential startups grow. As the program has a keen focus on projects that can scale quickly and "make a big difference in a short period of time", the CDL Carbon Removal stream specifically selects the top 100 companies emerging from the XPRIZE initiative, integrating them into an intensive 9-month journey within CDL. The goal is to support these innovators and startups who need concrete support to continue their commercial journey, as Andrew Tauhert, Chief Advancement Officer at XPRIZE explains in the video.
CDL Sessions: The Engine of Acceleration
CDL sessions are at the very heart of the program, acting as the primary mechanism for accelerating these ventures. On session days, the CDL mentors and CDL ventures, alongside MBA and engineering students, and the CDL team, convene at one of CDL's global sites (Berlin, Toronto, Paris…). The core purpose of these gatherings is to set objectives and define the three most important priorities for the ventures' upcoming eight-week sprint.
Beyond goal-setting, the CDL team and mentors actively assess various aspects of the ventures, asking critical questions such as: "Have they registered their ideas yet? Have they got the right funding? Have they been introduced to potential partners?". The approach is comprehensive, looking at each venture "from every possible angle" to identify where introductions can be made or changes facilitated. The goal is to adopt a holistic viewpoint of the business, ensuring all critical aspects are addressed.
The Indispensable Value of CDL Mentors
A cornerstone of the program's success is the CDL mentor network. These are experts, investors, scientists, just leaders in their field who dedicate their time to help startups grow and identify their objectives. This unique blend of expertise and experience is what truly sets the program apart.
Discover the mentors from CDL-Paris Carbon Removal
Mentors play several key roles:
- Challenging objectives: Leveraging their extensive experience, mentors critically evaluate the ventures' proposed goals and offer invaluable insights. They challenge the companies' objectives and share their rich experience.
- Streamlining growth: Mentors work closely with ventures to streamline those objectives and help them achieve their commercial scale targets. CDL is renowned for having the exact right mixture of people who can help take a venture from where it is today to accelerate the next step.
- Invaluable advice: Founders receive support in registering their intellectual property (IP), securing appropriate financing, and establishing crucial partnerships. Many of these ventures already own fantastic ideas and valuable IP, and CDL helps them capitalize on these assets.
- Access to a global ecosystem: Business experts, academics, founders, scientists, and leaders from across the globe... Having the ecosystem from North America and Europe converge to support carbon removal entrepreneurs provides an amazing opportunity to build something massive. A collaborative environment enabling to foster the large-scale solutions needed to address climate change.
About CDL-Paris
Since 2020, HEC Paris has established a strategic alliance with the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), a global nonprofit startup program dedicated to seed-stage, science-based companies addressing solutions for tomorrow's global challenges, impacting business, society, and the environment.