This week Alex is away so Nick is let loose on the podcast! Nick chats to Christiaan Jordaan, CEO and founder of Sicona.  Sound familiar? We interviewed Christiaan in back November 2021 in one of our all-time listener favourite episodes: "Australia's Role in the Battery Revolution". Since then Sicona has come a long way! Fresh off their recent $22m funding round for their battery technology we thought we'd cover the big issues since our previous chat: How the US Inflation Reduction Act has changed the game for climate startups (2:05) How Australia should respond (9:11) How the rise of Artificial Intelligence has affected climate startups like Sicona (12:29) Christiaan's HOTTEST TAKES on venture capital and funding climate solutions (15:38); and The inside scoop on Christiaan's recent funding round (21:28) In case you missed our last episode with Christiaan, here's a quick recap on Christiaan and his business (or you can have a a listen here) Sicona aims to revolutionise the battery world by improving battery efficiency with their unique anode materials, a technology that can be used with existing lithium ion batteries. Christiaan is also the co-founder of Novalith, a company that uses carbon dioxide as a reagent in extracting lithium. We have an episode featuring Novalith where we spoke to his Co-founder Steven Vassiloudis. We are proudly supported by Bank Australia (www.bankaust.com.au). *** As always if you don’t want to miss any eps, hit that follow button! We’d also love it if you gave us a review / rating on Apple or Spotify! It helps other listeners find us. You can sign up to our mailing list, say [email protected] or follow us at www.instagram.com/apositiveclimatepodcast and https://au.linkedin.com/company/a-positive-climate.  ** About the podcast A Positive Climate is an uplifting podcast about tackling climate change. An entertaining look at the products, people and technologies making a real difference.  Hosted by Australian climate technology experts Alex McIntosh and Nick Zeltzer, two friends on a mission to find the solutions to keep our existential crises at bay. Previous guests have included innovators from JET Charge, 5B, Amazon, Zoomo, V2Food, All G Foods, Vow, Sea Forest, Great Wrap, Infravision, Zero Co, Hysata, Sicona, OneSmallStep, Tenacious Ventures, CarsGuide, AMSL Aero, Nori, EnergyLab, MicroTau and many more. Music by the late, great Nick Weaver Production by our hero Mark Spencer from Here.Media Social Media, Comms and PR by Alistair Perkins See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.