GlassPoint, a New York-based energy startup that produces solar-generated steam, announced Monday it closed on an $8 million Series A round. The investment was led by 300PM, with participation from former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, former Alcoa COO Tomas Sigurdsson and several other industrial leaders. GlassPoint will use the money to expand its business and help industrial companies decarbonize their operations.
Founded in 2009, GlassPoint builds, owns and operates large-scale solar steam facilities for heavy industries like mining and metals. It uses large curved mirrors that direct sunlight onto boiler tubes that contain water, which then produces high-pressure steam. This process is the only proven solution to effectively decarbonize industrial process heat at scale, according to the company. To date, GlassPoint claims to have deployed more than half of all the solar steam for industry in the world, and developed the world’s largest solar process heat plant in Saudi Arabia in 2022.
This Series A is coming at a time when decarbonization is top of mind for many companies. New regulations from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will soon require that publicly listed companies disclose climate-related risks, as well as information about their direct and indirect carbon emissions — prompting widespread action in carbon-reducing strategies.
“Every major industrial company is reassessing their supply chain, and GlassPoint provides the most cost-effective option to reduce carbon emissions immediately by delivering renewable heat at the scale they need,” GlassPoint CEO and founder Rod MacGregor said in a statement. “We look forward to putting this investment to work to help industrial leaders across the Middle East and North America decarbonize materials essential to the energy transition and combat climate change.”
