Climate VC has just announced it plans to invest £10 million into more than a hundred UK ClimateTech companies, with a specific goal of ensuring each of these investments lead to the removal of 10 megatons of CO2e per year for the next ten years.
It’s absolutely fantastic to see VC’s aligning their investment strategy with specific, bold climate impact targets. That, alone, makes it super clear for startups what their focus should be if they want to be supported by the likes of Climate VC.
However, one point that comes up frequently in my discussions and is specifically called out in this article, is that while supporting impact focused startups is a noble and important cause, investors still demand returns.
Given that this point is (vaguely) commented on twice in the article both by the founder and their Google advisor, I imagine it is a crucial point the firm is grappling with.
I’ve reached out to Climate VC for further comment on this point as I feel understanding this would benefit not just other investors and startups, but larger organisations too.
While this article calls out their carbon target as a unique differentiator, I am also impressed to see their advisors range from the Ministry of Defence, to Google and Greenpeace.
The firm plans to grow their fund two-fold every quarter, reach a total of £35 million in 2025.
Good luck to you with this, and if you’re a ClimateTech startup with a clear carbon removal strategy, get in touch with them via climate.vc
Update:
I spoke with Climate VC’s Founding Partner, Peet Denny about how they reconcile the need to deliver a return on investment vs their focus on impact.
We strongly believe that returns follow impact.
So we go for impact, and we set a very high bar.
To achieve 10MtCO2e/year, we look for startups that are on a path to revolutionise industries, supply chains or create entirely new markets – at global scale. You can’t do this without being a very successful company and one of the very best at what you do.
So we look for proof points that a venture has a credible path to get above the impact threshold we set, and the commercial due diligence that follows is then usually pretty straightforward.
We also believe that in changing the world, you create new opportunities, dynamics and paradigms. Which in turn create huge value. Value that those world-changing companies, and their investors, will benefit significantly from.
A great deal of that value will be financial, but money does not accurately reflect all of the things we truly value. Investments in impact ventures create multi-dimensional value. Yes, as Chamath Palihapitiya, Larry Fink et al have said, climate tech investments will make us all incredibly rich, but for us that’s only part of the story.
Peet Denny, Founding Partner Climate VC
#climatetech #CleanTech #ClimateAction
Read the original article here
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