Help Needed: Partnerships and Funding in the Cold Chain Industry

Hannah Sieber is the CEO and Co-founder of Artyc, a refrigerant-free battery powered cooling company. In this episode, we cover the cold chain. In short, the cold chain is how goods are transported if they need to be kept in certain guaranteed temperature ranges, with different logistics mechanisms that can maintain goods such as food or medicines, anywhere from room temperature to deep freeze. 

There are a few reasons why the cold chain is important for climate change. First, you can imagine that all of the refrigerated trucks, warehouses, and storage lockers use a lot of energy. Second, the refrigerants that are used to power the air conditioning or freezers that the cold chain uses are very potent greenhouse gasses with global warming potential that can be many times greater than CO2. Dry ice itself, which is often used to keep things cool, is basically pure CO2.

Third, the cold chain today is pretty broken. A significant amount of food is wasted due to spoilage during transport, which itself can generate methane emissions if it's not properly disposed of. Not to mention the embedded emissions in our agricultural processes required to grow it in the first place. 

Hannah is going to tell us about all of this and how her product at Artyc aims to address these challenges while improving the traceability and accountability of goods in the cold chain. MCJ is proud to be a multiple time investor in Artyc via our venture capital funds.

In this episode, we cover: 

• [02:23]: Hannah's background living and working in China
• [07:44]: Founding EcoFlow with team from DJI to improve drone battery life
• [10:36]: Hannah's return to school for an earth science degree
• [12:10]: Her thesis on California power shutoffs and intersection with cold chain
• [16:06]: Overview of the cold chain, how it works, and where it breaks down
• [19:29]: Four different cold chains: ambient, refrigerated, frozen, and deep freeze cryo 
• [22:29]: High global warming potential of refrigerants and tradeoff with ozone depleting refrigerants
• [29:33]: Artyc's mission of building refrigerant-free battery-powered cooling devices
• [31:26]: Their focus on durability, precise temperature control and stability
• [33:43]: Imagining an "infrastructureless" cold chain
• [41:38]: Use cases in healthcare and beyond
• [43:51]: Artyc's funding journey from grants to recent Series A
• [45:13]: Hiring and partnerships in developing new products
• Resource mentioned: After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort  by Eric Dean Wilson

Get connected: 

• Hannah Sieber LinkedIn
• Cody Simms X / LinkedIn
• MCJ Podcast / Collective / Instagram

*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.

Episode recorded on Sep 28, 2023  (Published on Nov 9, 2023)

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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant