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