10 Start-Ups to Watch 2024

At the beginning of the last century, many scientists worried that agricultural production wasn’t keeping pace with the world’s rapidly growing population, and they feared widespread famine. But innovation warded off the disaster.

Fritz Haber invented a way to convert inert nitrogen in the atmosphere into fertilizer. The BASF engineer Carl Bosch industrialized the process. Crop yields soared.

Now the greenhouse gas–belching fertilizer plants using this technology are contributing to one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century: climate change. The 10 start-ups we’ve chosen this year say that innovation can provide solutions to society’s biggest challenges once again.

But climate change is arguably an even tougher problem than the one Haber and Bosch faced. While a single technology supercharged agricultural production, keeping the world at a hospitable temperature will require scores of new approaches: carbon capture systems, biobased plastics, chemicals made from carbon dioxide. That’s on top of chemical technologies needed to address problems like disease, pollution, and malnutrition.

In the coming years, scientists will have to repeat Haber and Bosch’s feat many times over. The problem is that commercializing a chemical technology can take years or decades, too long to effectively put the brakes on global warming.

Some entrepreneurs are determined to shorten this timeline. It took Thomas McDonald, cofounder of Mosaic Materials, more than a decade to bring a carbon capture material from the lab to the market. He says that’s not nearly fast enough. Now as a leader at Orbital Materials, he plans to speed up the discovery of new materials for cleantech by using artificial intelligence.

Other founders say persistence is the key to getting influential technologies across the finish line. Guoqiang Chen worked almost 40 years on techniques to produce biodegradable plastic with genetically modified bacteria before he cofounded PhaBuilder in 2021 to commercialize the technology.

Developing the technologies needed to address climate change and other massive challenges will call for both speed and persistence. In many cases, a slow slog of incremental steps precedes a final sprint to produce a meaningful technology.

These are the firms we’re watching in the race to solve the biggest challenges of the 21st century. To create this list, we read hundreds of reader submissions, combed through databases of venture-backed firms, and revisited C&EN’s own coverage of start-ups. If they’re successful, these start-ups will be only a small part of the solution to the problems they’re facing. There’s a long way to go, but we’re rooting for them.

Nominations for 2025’s 10 Start-Ups to Watch are open now. You can find the nomination form online.