WK595: Silver linings - Third Sphere

WK595: Silver linings

“Don’t change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller

Please save the date for our New York Climate Week event. We’ll be launching our Speedstrap Playbook ( open for pre-read & comments), hosting lots of portfolio demos, and connecting the dots across our community of founders, investors, customers and partners.

Some Silver Linings

• We’re starting to see more detailed frameworks for resilience and adaptation.
• Clean power continues to hit new records as AI demand comes into focus.
• Solar + storage is now unstoppable because of cost and collocation options.
• EV trucking is the best thing to happen to logistics in a long time. Ask Volvo.
• $250M climate funds are still being launched.

Andrew Ng shares lessons learned from building 1 startup per month in Building Faster with AI.

LLMs are good for a bunch of things and you should be using them for those things, but there are failure modes which mean they should be avoided in some cases. Some things work super well because they really do benefit from pattern matching and there are loads of things that yield to this from pitch decks to SQL scripts. Sure there will be errors, but not complete failures. The productivity gains for some categories of work  are real. But here’s a breakdown of recent Apple research on where LLMs fall down.

We were early to this and felt crazy for a while, but really happy to see more VCs looking at the full cap stack.

Opportunities

Meta has launched an annual RFP for value chain interventions for emissions reductions, and this year are focusing our RFP on the following sectors:

• Semiconductor manufacturing • Chemicals manufacturing • Truck transportation • Copper mining and manufacturing • Steel and iron mining and manufacturing • Cement and concrete manufacturing • Space heating of commercial buildings • Addressing fugitive emissions of fluorinated greenhouse gases in commercial settings • Air transportation • Aluminum production and processing • Maritime transportation

The deadline to execute a key prerequisite, Meta’s mutual NDA, is July 18, 2025 at 12:00pm Pacific Time.

PG&E is offering $25m available by year end to go towards efforts in resilience, adaptation and electrification. Deadline on July 25th.

Sifted, Sistafund and Station F are launching what should be a good opportunity for recognition and visibility for women in tech in the EU.

Focal is building a robotic, targeted heating system that delivers personalized, energy-efficient warmth and is hiring a Senior Full Stack SWE

There are 193 opportunities available across Third Sphere portfolio companies. Please forward and share.

Portfolio News

Congratulations to Rema at Near Space Labs and Brendand at Thalo Labs for their MistyWest Hardtech Awards recognition.

A message from Wasted via Triple Pundit: “Even on your worst days, just remember that you pee liquid gold”.

Circuit shared a reflection on their impact from sustainable mobility to economic development through the lens of one rider turned driver.

SonicFire shows off their acoustic fire suppression in a first home test video.

Congratulations to the Partsimony team for joining the latest AI American Infrastructure Academy Cohort by Google.

“We sat in the covered outdoor patio, which has a very nice heating system. It is easy to use and adjust as needed. It’s called Focal Heat”. Have to love it when your first products are getting reviewed ahead of the food in the wild. Congrats Focal!

See you in Malmo?

If you’re planning to attend The Drop 2025, we’re hosting a Ripple on climate adaptation and resilience. If you’d like to join or know experts/thought leaders who should be part of the conversation (especially ones already attending), let us know! We’d love more insights.

Best,

Stonly and the Third Sphere Team