climate tech

Korean VC Sopoong closes $8M fund for startups focused on environmental impact • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Asia, Climate, climate tech, social impact, Sopoong Ventures, south korea, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Two years ago, South Korea unveiled a plan to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Getting there will be another story. Although Korean manufacturers say they are trying to change their ways, the country’s GDP is linked to some uniquely pollutive industries, including petrochemical producers, automakers and shipbuilders. Though some businesses may never be truly sustainable, a venture firm in Seoul argues that emerging climate-tech startups will help big manufacturers do better overall. Sopoong, a social impact-focused VC, intends to support environmentally minded tech founders in South Korea and Southeast Asia, while building a bridge between Korean conglomerates and startups in the sector. Sopoong has closed on around $8 million (10.3 billion won) for its latest, sixth fund, bringing the firm’s total assets under management to approximately $22 million (28 billion won). I spoke with Sopoong chief executive Max Sang-Yeop Han, a serial entrepreneur who joined Sopoong in 2016 and acquired the firm in 2019, to learn about the VC’s plans. “It is a significant signal for large South Korean corporates participating as limited partners of environmental and climate tech-focused venture capitals like us,” Han said. “Participating LPs [Korean conglomerates] are passionate about climate technology and want to take part to address the climate and environment issue as they agree that the climate crisis is one of the urgent problems.” Korean petroleum refining company GS Holdings and chemical company Isu participated in Sopoong’s climate-focused fund as limited partners as of April, Han said, adding that they will be more like strategic partners to Sopoong. Non-profit organizations such as Asan Nanum Foundation, established by Hyundai Group, and D.Camp, as well as startup founders and executives, including the co-founder and former CEO of Krafton, Gang-Seok Kim, also joined Sopoong’s climate fund, Han continued. The early-stage VC had already set up five social impact funds and backed 81 startups since 2020, after Han acquired the firm in December 2019. Sopoong was launched in 2008 by Jaewoong Lee, who co-founded South Korea’s largest internet portal operator Daum Communication, which merged with Kakao in 2014. Now, the VC firm wants to zero in on the climate crisis and other environmental issues through its sixth fund, but other tech sectors like SaaS and IT will still be on its radar, according to Han. “Two-thirds of the fund will be invested in the environment and climate tech, including renewable energy, agri-tech, and food tech, and the rest will go to the information technology industry investment,” Han said. Its sweet spot is early-stage ventures from seed to series A stages across South Korea and Southeast Asia. Its average check size is $150,000, but the firm can go up to $600,000, Han told ZebethMedia. The sixth fund has already invested in 16 startups, including MetaTexture, a plant-based food startup; Selex, a Vietnam-based electric scooter and battery-swapping technology startup; Myorange, a platform for managing charitable donations; and Function 12, an automation tool that helps users complete coding and design files. Nine of the 16 portfolio companies are participating in Sopoong’s first accelerator program, which launched in June and runs for six months. Sopoong invests up to $350,000 into each startup via the accelerator program and offers mentorship, co-working space, administrative support and networking opportunities with experts. On top of the accelerator, the firm also launched a six-month fellowship program to foster climate tech entrepreneurship. So far, Sopoong says it has selected 13 individuals with master’s or doctoral degrees in environment-related majors, offering them $1,700 in grants per month and other support, including the accelerator program. If participating fellows succeed in founding a startup, Sopoong could make a seed investment, Han said.

Laid off? Climate tech is looking for talent and founders • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 5, 2022Posted in Climate, climate tech, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, Layoffs, tech layoffsNo Comments

As rumors rumbled that the U.S. Federal Reserve would hike rates once more — and when it followed through earlier this week — another round of layoffs hit the tech sector. Stripe, Opendoor, Chime, Zillow, Cerebral, Brex, and of course Twitter, among others, have already cut or are about to eliminate thousands of jobs. That’s bad news for employees today, but it might be good news for the climate in the near future. Before we get too far, let me say up front that getting laid off is terrible and not something I wish to happen to anyone. Not knowing where your paychecks will come from or what benefits you’ll receive is difficult in the best of times, and it’s far worse when economic signs are mixed or major life changes are looming. I am not at all trying to minimize what people go through when they’ve been laid off. It’s happened to me, and it sucks. But layoffs also offer a chance at a new beginning. Even before the recent waves of layoffs started washing over the tech industry, people were leaving their old jobs for new opportunities in climate tech. While this is a ZebethMedia+ story, we made sure the paywall is below the key links in case you are job-hunting. Hugs — The TC+ team “One thing we’re seeing is really, really strong talent leaving larger companies,” Erin Price-Wright, a partner at Index Ventures, said at ZebethMedia Disrupt, “because some of the financial upside for public tech companies or maybe even late-stage tech companies has sort of vaporized in the last few months. And people are like, ‘Well, I had these golden handcuffs, and that was preventing me from working on what I really care about. And I don’t have that anymore. So I’m going to take a risk and I’m going to do something.’” Climate tech has been booming relative to the rest of the market, with startups in the sector raising $5.6 billion in the first half of this year, short of 2021’s crazy hauls but still well ahead of 2020, the next previous record, according to PitchBook. Five years from now, PitchBook expects the climate tech market to be worth $1.4 trillion, a compound annual growth rate of 8.8%. All those companies are in desperate need of talent. Nearly every early-stage founder in the climate tech space I’ve spoken with in recent months went out of their way to mention that they’re hiring. Job board Climatebase has hundreds of jobs listed right now, and that’s just a portion of the climate tech companies with active listings. Shaun Abrahamson, co-founder of climate-focused Third Sphere, pointed out that his firm’s portfolio companies are currently hiring for over 400 positions. Breakthrough Energy Ventures’ portfolio companies are hiring for nearly 1,200 positions. Elsewhere, around 100 companies are using the climate career platform Terra.do to directly connect with applicants, chief business officer Nishant Mani told ZebethMedia. The startup frequently runs virtual job fairs to match employees with employers, and business is booming. The platform’s user base is growing 50% month on month, and Mani is aiming to get 1,000 companies actively using the platform in the next six months.

How to land investors who fund game-changing companies • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 4, 2022Posted in Climate, climate tech, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, EC Hardware, EC TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, Sila, startup fundraising, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VentureNo Comments

A lot of problems worth solving aren’t ones that you can solve in a year or two or even 10. For founders and investors alike, such long timelines can seem daunting. But for Gene Berdichevsky, co-founder and CEO of battery tech startup Sila, hard tech problems are also some of the most tantalizing. “It’s always a good time to be a hard tech startup,” Berdichevsky said at ZebethMedia Disrupt. “One of the reasons is that the world doesn’t change just because it should. It changes because someone goes after something insanely hard and actually succeeds at it.” Such hard.tech startups run the gamut from advanced batteries like those made by Sila to nuclear fusion, quantum computing, automation and robotics. Any tech that has the potential for such broad impact also has a massive potential market, and that means a certain class of investors are willing to be in it for the long haul. “Hire people to do the technical stuff. Keep an eye on it, but then go learn the other pieces.” Gene Berdichevsky, co-founder and CEO, Sila “We look for real step-change, game-changing technologies that are going to benefit everyone and we think that will drive a huge [total addressable market],” said Milo Werner, a general partner at The Engine. When Berdichevsky founded Sila, he believed his company’s technology, a silicon-based anode that promises to improve lithium-ion battery energy density by 20%–40%, would be a significant enough advance that it would have no problem finding a market. What he didn’t expect was how long it would take. When Sila’s first product debuted inside the Whoop 4.0 wearable last year, the path to market had been twice as long as Berdichevsky had expected.

GenZero’s Frederick Teo on “limitless” opportunities in climate tech • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Climate, climate tech, GenZero, Singapore, sosv, Southeast Asia, temasek, VentureNo Comments

2050 is an important year for climate tech, with the Paris Agreement calling for emissions to reach net zero by then. In a conversation with GenZero’s Frederick Teo for SOSV’s Climate Tech Summit, we talked about realistic paths to hitting that goal and how startups can tackle what Teo called one of the most existentialist challenges of our generation. GenZero is a $3.6 billion investment company that is backed by Temasek, already known for its climate investing. Teo talked about how it gauges companies before investing, supporting nascent technologies and solutions in the space and what startups can tackle in the next two decades. This Q&A was edited for length, and you can watch the full conversation here or at the bottom of the article. TC: GenZero’s initial commit is from Temasek, which was already a leader in global investing when it announced GenZero in June. It’s a wholly-owned company of Temasek, so why did Temasek decide to start GenZero and what is GenZero doing that Temasek isn’t already? FT: Temasek, as you know, has already taken a lot of steps in the past few years into making investments into sustainability, as well as clean energy and climate-related spaces. It is important for us to think about how to deploy capital in this space because obviously all of us are aware of the climate emergency, the fact that this is actually likely to be one of the most existentialist challenges of our generation. It is important for us to be able to find solutions that can actually address many of these things like global warming, sea level rises, the challenges of food production in a sustainable way. So we wanted to be able to have a dedicated capability to access some of these decarbonization opportunities, and Temasek decided to park aside a sizable amount of capital to be able to develop a team that would be able to focus on issues like carbon markets, decarbonization technologies as well as nature solutions. So that is the reason why we established GenZero as a separate investment platform company. In our work we have been looking at technology solutions such as low carbon materials and carbon capture capabilities, nature solutions that seek to protect and restore natural ecosystems, often with a view to generate carbon credits on top of that, as well as to invest into ecosystem enablers in the carbon market space. The reason for that is because we think that in the near term, energy transition would require some form of participation from carbon markets to allow people to gradually execute this transition. But we do need carbon markets to be credible, effective, transparent, high quality, and therefore there is still investments needed in order to be able to improve capabilities and technologies and solutions in that space. TC: For companies that are curious about trying to pitch themselves to you, what are some examples of your current portfolio companies? FT: In the technology space, we have invested into both funds as well as companies, so a major fund investment is Decarbonization Partners, and that is basically a climate-focused fund that is a joint venture between Temasek and BlackRock. We are an LP invested in that, and they are very focused on late-venture, early growth opportunities across different areas in the decarbonization space. We have also invested into a technology company called Newlight, which seeks to be able to produce bio plastics from captured methane. On the nature side, we have been investing into a few forestry projects that generate carbon credits, and then on the carbon market side, we count among our portfolio companies things like South Pole, which is a global leader in providing project advisory, technical advisory solutions and project development for companies seeking to embark on a net zero decarbonization journey, as well as a carbon exchange called Climate Impact X, which is headquartered here in Singapore. TC: For companies that are curious about potentially getting investment from you, what investment stage does GenZero typically look at? FT: We are kind of flexible. For very early-stage companies, say around the Series A or just before, we will work with different partners to be able to evaluate and deploy capital to support early-stage companies, but I think it’s important to understand why we need to do this. If we think about the broader net zero decarbonization challenge, everybody talks about this 2050 timeline to get to net zero. But the reality is that if we want to create significant climate impact by 2050, we are looking at new solutions that must already somewhat exist today or are starting to come into being today, because we will need another 10 to 15 years for the technologies and solutions to mature and get to a stage where they could be commercializes, and then probably another 10 to 15 years for it to actually be able to be deployed and create some kind of impact. That basically means that this current cohort of young companies are going to make a difference to the 2050 agenda. That is the reason why we are very excited to participate in this space right now, because the action must take place now in order to have any meaningful difference by 2050. TC: Considering that, with technology not coming to fruition by them until then, or making actionable results by then, in light of that, what kind of metrics or milestones do you like to see companies bring to the table before you consider them for your portfolio? FT: I think it goes back to the way we evaluate our performance at GenZero. We have a double bottom line, so our shareholder expects us to be able to obviously achieve some level of financial returns. That’s a given. But we also take the idea around measuring climate impact rather seriously. We try and understand, for example, the kind of climate impact that a solution would be able to achieve if successful deployed. We also look

Top climate tech deals net nearly $4B in Q3, outpacing other industries • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 16, 2022Posted in cb insights, Climate, climate tech, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, fundraisingNo Comments

Climate tech wrapped a strong Q3, landing three of the top four equity deals, including the whopping $1 billion Series A raised by fleet charging startup TeraWatt. While the broader market might be cooling, climate tech continues to be a hot ticket, with investment figures for top deals in Q3 outpacing the two previous quarters this year. In total, five climate tech startups made CB Insights’ top 10 equity deals list in Q3, pulling in a combined $3.7 billion. That far exceeds last quarter’s $2.5 billion across eight top startups and Q1’s $1.4 billion across five top startups. Top climate tech investments continued to diversify, too, showing just how deeply it’s becoming embedded into the economy.

Investing platform raises $10M to offer climate investing from a different angle to ESG ratings • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Climate, climate techNo Comments

Net Purpose, a platform for sustainable investors, has raised £10 million in a Series A round led by ETF Partners, funding which will be used to expand its product and team, says the company. The company is benefitting from a shit to investing in sustainable products. According to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment, $120 trillion is committed to invest sustainably, with allocations growing at 22% year on year. New investors M-Tech Capital and Exceptional Ventures joined the round, and existing investors Jim O’Neill, former Chair of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Kevin Gould, Co-Founder IHS Markit, the Louis Family, Illuminate Financial, and Revent increased their commitments. Currently, investors rely on reported and estimated data and ESG ratings., These tend to measure financial risk, not social and environmental return. Net Purpose claims its platform looks more at social and environmental performance based on factual reporting. Indeed, there are claims that MSCI, the largest ESG rating company, doesn’t even try to measure the impact of a corporation. Sam Duncan, Net Purpose Founder and CEO said: “Net Purpose’ core differentiator is that we provide investment-grade facts on the social and environmental performance of companies and investment portfolios and no black box ratings or scores. Facts measure social and environmental performance, not financial risk. Net Purpose also has more and higher quality data than any other provider.” Net Purpose competitors are ESG Ratings providers like MSCI and Sustainalytics.

Fears of climate tech underinvestment are probably overblown • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Climate, climate tech, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, investment, VentureNo Comments

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over whether the world will get its act together enough to prevent catastrophic warming. There’s certainly a case to be made there — we’ve spent the last several decades kicking the can down the road at every opportunity. Well, here we are again, with the can again before us and the end of the road fast approaching. Lucky for me, I tend to be an optimist. I still think we’re in for a world of pain, and we’ll probably have to rely on some exotic technologies like fusion power and direct air capture to pull ourselves back from the brink. But in my opinion, when the chips are down, humanity tends to pull through. If we use computing and software as a guide, we should expect to see a nearly fivefold increase in the capital committed in the next 30 years. That is why I think many of the gloom-and-doom scenarios regarding climate tech investments tend to be overly bearish. Take the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) forecasts, which for years habitually underestimated the growth of solar power. The agency has since added better models to its toolkit, but it and others still make predictions that go on to be proven overly pessimistic. In reality, renewable energy and other climate tech is likely to follow an adoption curve that’s similar to other industries. It might even follow an accelerated version given how broad and deep the impacts and benefits of climate tech are likely to be — and the very real prospect of Armageddon if we do nothing. To see how climate tech stands to outperform today’s forecasts, you only have to look as far back as 1970, when the computing revolution was beginning. Exponential trends The overarching trend of investment in the computing and telecommunications space over 50 years has been exponential. But that simplistic analysis papers over the significant growth that happened in the early years. It also fails to pick up on key technological advances that sparked wider adoption.