September 4, 2026

We’re excited to announce a new initiative, enabled by support from the Schmidt Family Foundation, to make climate-related intellectual property easier to find, understand, and evaluate.

LabStart was founded to tackle a persistent problem: There’s so much promising climate technology going unused or forgotten, whether it’s sitting on the shelves of universities and labs or lost in bankruptcy and legal disputes as climate companies shut down.

To address this, LabStart has partnered with TEA Commons to build a publicly available tool that will enable climate founders to identify and evaluate IP more quickly and effectively.

‍The IP Problem LabStart Is Tackling: Good IP, Buried Deep
‍There are tens of thousands of climate patents owned by and available to license from U.S. academic institutions that are not realizing their full impact on climate change. There are even more patents that aren’t being used in today’s world if you look at the intellectual property that was developed by now-defunct companies from cleantech 1.0 and 2.0. 

Just because IP is stuck on a shelf or in legal limbo doesn’t mean it can never work. Many of these technologies didn’t have the right market conditions or simply lacked an entrepreneur to take the IP from lab to market. 
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There are tens of thousands of climate patents owned by and available to license from U.S. academic institutions that are not realizing their full impact on climate change.

But identifying this IP isn’t enough.

Even when an entrepreneur finds something promising, the listing is often written in technical and legal jargon that takes expertise to decode. And after decoding, another question still remains: Can this technology work as a business? 

Right now, a LabStart fellow can spend weeks or months digging into a single piece of IP only to discover that the underlying economics don't hold up.

‍What We're Building
‍With the Schmidt Family Foundation’s support and in partnership with TEA Commons, LabStart is building a tool to make climate IP dramatically easier to find, understand, and evaluate. It will:

• Increase the amount of IP evaluated. Finding relevant intellectual property can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Our tool will work with users to facilitate higher-quality IP matches.
• Reduce the time needed to find and vet IP. It can take an entrepreneur days to weeks to find and analyze potential IP. This will provide the data and insights needed to weed out options in minutes.
• Translate the jargon. Our tool will turn dense technical and legal patent language into plain, usable descriptions of what a technology can do.

This will be open to the public, so any entrepreneur, investor, or researcher can use it to find and evaluate climate IP faster.

To make a world-class vetting function, we've partnered with TEA Commons, which specializes in techno-economic analysis—the discipline of rigorously answering the questions "Can you actually make money building this?" and “Will the market adopt this over the status quo?”

They’re questions that too often get answered too late in climate entrepreneurship. ​​By baking this analysis into the tool from the start, we're aiming to surface answers much earlier, before time, capital, and momentum are sunk into a path that won't work.

‍The Launchpad: Cement and Concrete Technology
‍Every new tool needs a place to prove itself, and we're starting with cement and concrete technology. This is one of the toughest, highest-emitting sectors to decarbonize. It's a great proving ground, as the IP landscape is deep, the technical barriers to entry are real, and the potential climate impact of getting good technology to market faster is significant.

What’s Next?
‍If you’re a philanthropist who wants to support the next phases of this work, or an institution with IP to share, contact LabStart CEO Deepa Lounsbury: deepa@labstart.co.

Want to be one of the entrepreneurs that uses the tool? Apply for the next LabStart cohort by October 9: labstart.co/apply