Luke Iseman, CEO of Make Sunsets, joins Cheddar News to discuss how the startup is sending balloons filled with particles into the atmosphere to fight climate change.

This Startup Sends Balloons to the Atmosphere to Fight Climate Change

make sunsets is a startup that launches particles or clouds as they call it, into the atmosphere to fight global warming so cool joining me now is luke Iseman ceo of make sunsets luke wow, you took the words out of my mouth. Cool, this is very cool. How does it work? Yeah, so it's biomimetic. We're basically copying what volcanoes have done for thousands of years with 100% less lava basically we're putting really reflective particles very high into the sky. This is something that's been well studied for a very long time. Scientists know it works and really this is the only thing we can do if we want to avoid catastrophic levels of global warming during our lives. So what is the science behind it? I mean it is very cool but how do people wrap their heads around this to know that it is legitimate. Yeah, the easiest way to think about it and this is oversimplifying a lot but it's kind of like how if the sun is really bright and then a cloud gets between you and the sun, the sun is less bright, it's like that. But these are particles far higher ups, they actually stay up for between one and two years and reflect sunlight before it even gets into the lower levels of the atmosphere. We're actually up in the stratosphere. Well we've seen a lot of VC firms certainly billionaires out there. Bill Gates, Jeff, Bezos celebrities to try to get behind some of these climate focused companies out there. Talk to me about your funding rounds whether or not you're looking to raise money and if so how much you've raised so far? Yeah. So we've raised about $750,000 so far. And where that will get us to is several rounds of flights with our balloons. We actually, um, even though we're a very young two person startup before we could even do any launches in uh in Mexico, where where I'm based. the mexican government actually asked us not to, they put out a press release saying that without consultation we should not launch here. So first priority with that money is to find ideally an island nation threatened by climate change or somewhere else to do our upcoming launches. Okay, wow, look, so your company is very young. Just two people working on it. What's the balloon component that you reference there? Yeah. So to deliver these particles, there's a bunch of different ways we can do it. The one that I could do, you know, funded off of my credit card is buying something called weather balloons. They're basically like the balloons you'd see at a kid's party but about six ft in diameter, they're made out of latex. So they biodegrade after they come down and we fill those up with um, of helium and our special particle then it goes up expands until it bursts and then ideally we have a parachute on it that comes back down with a GoPro and some other tracking information, but that'll be, that'll be on later flights when we, when we find a country that is happy to be our launch partner. So what are the next steps? Ah, look, it sounds like obviously you've been funding this on, on some VC investment, $750,000 your credit card that you referenced as well. What are the logistical steps to take this to the next level? Yeah. So the biggest thing that we need is one, a country that's happy to have us launch from, from that location and to paying customers. Unlike a lot of speculative tech, we're really focused on from our first flights, making sure that we're profitable on a per flight basis. This is if we can find a customer who embraces this as their way to meet net zero, that'll be quite easy to do. Our cost is two orders of magnitude lower than other carbon credits. We're not doing anything to be clear about atmospheric carbon. We're just directly addressing warming. So that things like direct capture long term can actually solve the problem. So how will you build out staff to reach these goals? Yeah, I'm pretty scrappy. I used to work for y Combinator helping hardware companies figure out how to make a big amount of progress over the, you know, three month course of the program. So basically we're just going to expand in response to demand until we, you know, we'll stay two or three people until we have paying customers ready to go. And then because we're so profitable per launch, if we can find customers to buy our cooling credits, we'll just expand in response to that. I think it's a lot cooler than sitting at a desk writing software, in my opinion. So I don't think we'll have too much trouble recruiting. What does your shirt say? Cool Earth? Is that what it says? It is? Yeah, that's, uh, that's the goal. Okay, luke. Iseman Ceo makes sunsets luke. Thank you.