CLIMAX 500

500 global climate tech startups, at one place


Introduction & context

CLIMAX 500 is an online showcase of 500 climate tech startups from around the world, representing the top 10 innovative startups in 50 key decarbonization avenues.

While climate tech startups have been there for over decades, their importance and contribution to a safer world has been fully realized only recently. As a result, there has been an exceptional growth in climate tech startups worldwide, and a parallel interest among some of the brightest minds in the world to be a part of this innovation ecosystem.

Climate change mitigation - specifically, decarbonization - is a complex domain that requires coordinated action from diverse fields involving the worlds of science, engineering, technology, digital, ecology, agriculture, economics, policies and more. The team at Clixoo spent over a year researching the various decarbonization avenues and identified about 50 of them that have the potential to make a significant impact to global decarbonization efforts. The complete list of decarbonization avenues is available here


Our research team spent a further few months in reviewing over 3500 startups in these decarbonization avenues, and have chosen the top 500 among them, ten each for each of the 50 decarbonization avenues.

CLIMAX 500 thus represents a combination of high impact decarbonization avenues and innovative teams and startups - a potent mixture that really has the power to change the world.

How did we rank and select the startups?

Ranking the startups and arriving at the top ten list was not an easy task. After a considerable amount of brainstorming and discussions, we used four criteria to rank the startups


Impact - This criterion was about the likely impact of the startup’s solution for decarbonization - in order words, the solution should be able to make a real difference

Scalability - Related to the first criterio, though different from it, is the potential of the solution to scale in order to impact a large enough portion of the use or application segment fairly quickly.


Team - The team that was behind the startup was very important to us. Climate tech needs people with solid experiences and background in specialized fields. While we can never not rule out a powerful, disruptive, scalable idea from a complete greenhorn, the probability of that happening in climate tech is fairly low. So, while we did not penalize lack of experience or background, we certainly did appreciate teams with rich backgrounds with a few extra brownie points.


Innovation - We did assign reasonable weightage to innovation, but it did not carry the highest number of marks. And for a reason. Most of the solutions that will have a high impact on decarbonization will be built upon a number of existing engineering and scientific solutions rather than being completely new.

Readiness - while we were a bit flexible on this, we gave higher marks in general to those solutions that were already in the market or were almost there, as against solutions that were still in the lab stage or early pilots.


While our team did its best to come up with the best 10 based on the above criteria, we are sure that there are great companies and teams we have missed out. We will be glad to hear from them so we consider them for the CLIMAX 500 2023 edition.

We welcome your feedback and suggestions

An exercise to identify the top 500 startups in a complex field such as decarbonization is never easy. Our team has a lot more to learn, and a lot of those learning can come from you.

Any feedback you have on CLIMAX 500, and any suggestions you have for improvement, you can send us a note over email - that would be to our co-founder Narasimhan ( narsi@clixoo.com). You can also use the Tell Us page to get more contact coordinates.

Team Clixoo hopes that CLIMAX 500 was of some help to your efforts and endeavours.

All the best!