Founders looking to address climate change soon will have a new opportunity for investment and mentors in Atlanta.
Cox Enterprises and Gener8tor, a Wisconsin-based venture fund that also operates accelerators, are launching the Cox Cleantech Accelerator, a 12-week program that comes with a $100,000 investment from Cox for each company selected to participate.
The accelerator will run for at least three years, with five companies chosen each spring and fall. In total, plans are for 30 companies to go through the accelerator in its initial phase.
The initial investment by Cox in the startups amounts to $3 million. Cox is one of the nation’s largest privately owned companies. Its holdings include broadband giant Cox Communications, Cox Automotive and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
This is not the first time Cox has supported the Atlanta startup scene. In 2015, the company did a comprehensive study of what the tech ecosystem in the city needed in order to become a top tech hub in the U.S. Cox then took its findings and started trying to fill the gaps, Morgan Phillips, Atlanta ventures lead for Cox Enterprises, told the AJC.
The company helped bring Techstars, a major startup accelerator, to Atlanta. It also is a founding member of Engage Ventures and has invested in local seed funds.
The clean tech accelerator came about after the people behind the Georgia Cleantech Innovation Hub, a not-for-profit focused on spurring economic development through clean tech, had an idea that the state needed an accelerator specifically for companies looking to help the country decarbonize, said Andy Marshall, executive director of the hub. After joining forces with Gener8tor, they then went out to raise funding for the initiative and found an ideal partner in Cox, Marshall said.
Cox had seen similar cities be successful in establishing themselves as a hub for specific industries like health care or blockchain, Phillips said.
“When we looked around at other emerging ecosystems that have had a lot of success and a lot of rapid growth, we found that a lot of them had success in particular industries,” she said.
The company was looking at different industries in which to focus support and funding to help “grow Atlanta’s venture ecosystem and grow a reputation as well,” Phillips said.
Looking at what Atlanta and Georgia have to offer, clean tech quickly rose to the top.
The country has seen a clean energy boom in recent years, in huge part because of the Inflation Reduction Act and the billions of federal dollars that have come along with it.
Georgia has seen $22 billion in announced private sector investments in clean technology and infrastructure in the two years since the bill became law, says a report by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research and the research firm Rhodium Group.
Cox Enterprises has invested more than $2 billion since 2007 in clean technologies and initiatives, Phillips said. In November, Cox invested $250 million in a solar company. It also owns about 3% of electric automaker Rivian. In 2021, Rivian announced plans to build a $5 billion factory about an hour east of Atlanta. Rivian put the plant on pause earlier this year, but has said it will build the facility and meet its jobs and investment commitments.
Companies do not have to be from Georgia to participate in the new clean tech accelerator, but the programming will be in Atlanta and the startups will have access to Cox’s office space in Ponce City Market.
Ideal companies already will have some traction and a novel sustainability technology that is venture-backable, Phillips said. The $100,000 investment will go into whatever round of funding the startup is raising and the terms of the deal are flexible, she explained.
Since the cohorts will be small, the programming will be hands-on and tailored to each company, said Ryan Jeffery, senior managing director of sustainability for Gener8tor. The startups will be introduced to hundreds of mentors, Gener8tor’s investor network and Atlanta corporations, Jeffery said.
Cox also is covering the operations for the accelerator, but Marshall declined to say how much the company is investing.
Marshall said the goal with the accelerator is to help triple the number of clean tech startups in Georgia in the next five years. He estimates there currently are about 50 such companies and wants the number to grow to 150.
Applications will close Nov. 17, and the first cohort will start in February 2025.
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