Top 5 promising climate tech start-ups in emerging economies revealed
UNICEF announces ventures from the Climate Innovation Challenge 2025
- English
- Español
Across emerging markets, frontier-tech entrepreneurs are reshaping how communities prepare for floods, heatwaves, pollution, and other climate pressures that directly affect children’s lives. Earlier this year, UNICEF’s Office of Innovation launched the Climate Innovation Challenge with the India Health Fund (IHF) and the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) to identify the most promising of these ideas and understand where climate innovation is gaining real traction.
The response was exciting, with more than 1,200 startups applying from across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Among them, over 85 per cent were early-stage, 88 per cent were youth-led, and 79 per cent were female-founded. Their submissions offered something invaluable to UNICEF: a live snapshot of where climate innovation is thriving, where ecosystems remain nascent, and which solutions are closest to protecting children at scale.
From this global pipeline of ideas, a standout group of seed and growth-stage ventures has now been selected for tailored mentorship and investment-readiness support through the UNICEF Venture Fund. These ventures reflect not only technological ingenuity, but also the lived realities of the communities they are built for.
Meet the Winners:
CLIMATRIXAI (Nigeria). Combining satellite imagery, IoT sensors, and AI models, ClimatrixAI delivers hyperlocal predictions of floods, heatwaves, and other environmental hazards — turning fragmented climate data into early warnings and risk intelligence for governments, insurers, and city planners.
NAXA (Nepal). NAXA blends community insights with climate and hazard data to generate localized risk profiles and multilingual preparedness messages, strengthening anticipatory action in hard-to-reach regions across Nepal.
RIFFAI (Thailand) — integrates GIS layers, weather forecasts, geological indicators, and classification models into an AI system that predicts environmental changes and their severity, bridging the gap between raw geospatial data and real-time disaster preparedness decisions.
RESPIRER (India). Respirer uses AI to process high-frequency environmental and air-quality data collected from school-zone and in-vehicle monitors, revealing pollution patterns where it matters most for children and offering cities actionable insights to design safer, healthier environments.
TRYOLABS (Uruguay) — female-founded / female-led. TryoLabs leverages generative AI, AI agents, and GeoAI to transform fragmented climate datasets into clear, actionable insights for children and the systems that support them. Their work shows how advanced AI can be grounded in public-good use cases, enabling governments and NGOs to respond faster and plan more effectively for climate change.
As part of the challenge, the selected startups will receive up to 10 hours of technical support on open-source development, business, and diversity strategies, and guidance to refine and validate their business models and technical approach with UNICEF and ecosystem collaborators. This support aims to help early-stage teams strengthen their solutions and prepare for future investment opportunities.
As UNICEF continues to deepen its climate innovation portfolio, these ventures point to where momentum is building and where the right partnerships can unlock impact at scale. We invite value-aligned collaborators to stay engaged as this work evolves, and to help build the shared infrastructure needed for a climate-resilient future for every child.