Climate change investor Climate VC has launched to exert a gigaton scale impact on climate change across the next decade and set a precedent as to how the venture capital sector approaches climate investing.
Focusing on the UK market, Climate VC is focused on finding and backing climate change startups that might have been overlooked by traditional VCs. Their aim is to disrupt the traditional VC approach to climate innovation by placing an equal emphasis on climate impact and commercial return.
Climate VC is led by a team of AI and advanced technology specialists, operators and founders with over two decades of experience in building successful startups. The team, made up of Peet Denny, Simrun Basuita, and Andrea Emanuelli, is supported by serial founder and angel investor Doug Scott, alongside an Impact Advisory Board that includes a Greenpeace board director, a senior Google executive, and environmental and climate change advisors to the Ministry of Defence.
The specialist VC has big ambitions, with an aim to back 100-200 early-stage UK-based climate startups over three years. Of these, they hope ten will become full-scale successes, each removing 10 megatons of C02e a year for a decade, cumulatively creating a gigaton impact on the climate change mission by the mid-2030s.
All of this will require courage and a smart investment strategy; in year one, Climate VC intends to deploy £10M of investments, rising to £35M by 2025. Initial investments include UK-based Global OTEC’s renewable energy solution for tropical island nations and sustainable agroforestry startup Tierra Foods.
Peet Denny, founding partner of Climate VC, has said Climate VC’s “investment strategy is multi-layered but laser focused in its ambition.” Expanding on their strategy, Denny says that they will be “backing climate change innovators that might have been overlooked by other investors but whose cutting-edge ventures can be deployed effectively in markets with the greatest potential for impacting emissions.”
The team intends to complete seven to ten investments per quarter. The fund has a pipeline of planned investments, with the next announcement coming in April.