The Breeze - Issue #2
Investment theses and SINAI Technologies
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Climate tech investment theses
It’s been a surreal week. The coronavirus is a global pandemic. The stock market fell dramatically. It feels strange to be talking about investing when people’s lives are being upended. I invite you to join me in the new practice of social distancing and WFH if possible.
For startups, it’s a black swan event. For climate tech startups, I expect the fundraising environment to be especially rough since it’s an emerging space and VCs are still learning.
But as Paul Graham said in 2008, “a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup.”
To help climate tech founders identify potential capital sources, I’m sharing a list of climate-focused investors and their focus areas or investment theses. This may also be helpful to investors who are still working on their own theses, like yours truly.
Ranked generally by initial check size, low to high:
Climate angels: Stefano Bernardi (ex-Aragon), Jason Jacobs (MCJ), April Underwood (ex-Slack), Erika Reinhardt (ex-Stripe), Peter Light (ex-Google X), Michael Perry (Shopify), and Nan Ransohoff (Nuro), Alisyn Malek (ex-May Mobility).
Elemental Excelerator: Melissa, Sherrie and Matt are taking applications for the next batch of startups addressing challenges in energy, mobility, agriculture, water and circular economy.
Techstars Sustainability: In partnership with The Nature Conservancy, Hannah works with startups protecting land and water, designing sustainable food, addressing climate, and creating greener cities. Applications are open. They also host a free online workshop called A Taste of Techstars.
Y Combinator: Gustaf leads YC’s Carbon Removal effort investing in frontier tech and software. Apply now.
Climate Capital: Sundeep backs emission reduction and adaptation startups.
Powerhouse: Emily and Rohit invest early in energy and mobility startups.
Lowercarbon Capital: Clay and Chris focus on reducing CO2 emissions, removing carbon and actively cooling the planet, especially deep/frontier tech.
Better Ventures: Jessica and Lyndsey invest in pre-seed and seed capital efficient startups in sustainable economy, including food and ag, synthetic biology, closed loop production & consumption, and clean energy & electric mobility.
Lionheart Ventures: Sierra invests in mitigation and resilience-focused startups across climate tech, mental health and financial access.
RNN Ventures: Ramez Naam invests in clean energy and mobility. He particularly likes clean energy software and deep tech ventures that are ahead of the price/performance trends of current technology.
Trailmix: Soraya and Molly invest in sustainability as pillar in their focus on the future of living well.
Wireframe Ventures: Paul is a cleantech 1.0 vet now investing early across the climate tech spectrum.
Urban Us: Stonly and Shaun invest in startups that upgrade cities to meet climate action goals, including GHG reduction, resilience and urban densification.
Congruent: Abe has been investing in climate tech for 16 years across carbon reduction, energy, transportation, food/ag. Read the company characteristics he looks for.
Version One Ventures: one of Max’s themes is solving climate change with renewables, storage, EVs and moonshots in addition to sustainable food production, manufacturing and recycling.
Prime Impact Fund: Matt looks for startups making massive emissions reductions that traditional VCs won’t touch.
Amasia: Ramanan, Danny and team invest in companies that catalyze behavior change for positive climate impact.
Intelis: Kevin & co invest across energy, sustainability and climate.
Fifty Years: Seth, Ela and Shuo invest in deep tech and software climate solutions that pass the Mr. Burns test.
Union Square Ventures: as we covered last week, USV published their research deck Energy & Climate Market Map.
Spero Ventures: Jonathan and Stephen are investing in climate, sustainability and food. Check out this piece on food by Marc, cofounder of Tesla.
Obvious Ventures: Nan and team invest in sustainable system (e.g. materials, cities), healthcare, and people empowerment. Obvious is especially rad because they’re a B Corp.
Energy Impact Partners: Shayle focuses on the energy transition and writes about the $1T opportunity in grid decarbonization.
Energize Ventures: Juan invests in energy companies on the commercialization path.
G2VP: Valerie and her team of climate experts make venture and growth equity investments in startups digitizing old-school industries in sustainable ways, with checks in the $10M-$25M range.
Breakthrough Energy Ventures: Matt is a seasoned energy operator investing in startups that have a massive impact on GHG mitigation.
I’ve also spoken with generalist VCs who are investing in climate but haven’t published anything yet: Mike and Shawn at Floodgate, Semil at Haystack, Caroline and Bryan at Sequoia, Jyri at Yes, Ian at Cantos, Gaurav at Afore, Jake and Howie at AlphaBridge, Satya at Homebrew, Rick at Equal, Raanan at Resolute, and Josh at Freestyle… to name a few!
If you’re looking for connections to these folks, depending on the context, I might be able to help out.
Interview with Maria Fujihara of SINAI Technologies
On Thursday I interviewed Maria Fujihara, CEO/cofounder of SINAI Technologies. The company is currently in YC and will present virtually at Demo Day on Monday. (Disclosure: I’m an investor.)
You might have seen companies like Microsoft, Starbucks, Intuit, and Shopify make public carbon pledges. Hundreds of companies have made these pledges or must meet local carbon regulations, but there’s no easy way to manage that.
SINAI helps corporations understand their carbon emissions and determine the most cost-effective ways to reduce emissions. Maria shared these tips for corporations:
Corporations first need to understand their emissions across sites, which SINAI helps with.
Next, they must determine ways to reduce the emissions from the production of their goods or services (aka Scope 1 emissions). This requires understanding each potential action’s impact then making decisions.
After exhausting step 2, they can consider buying carbon offsets. However buying offsets isn’t ideal because it’s effectively paying for bad carbon behavior.
One more thing: Evolve Energy, which was featured last week, won Startup Grind’s “Grind Startup of the Year” in a field of 300 startups! Read the Startup Grind interview with CEO Michael Lee.
Thanks for reading! You can reach me at tommy@jetstream.io.
Stay breezy,
Tommy
This is awesome Tommy, thank you! We would love to talk with you sometime.
Thank you so much for this Tommy. We're in the middle of a seed raise. Thankfully we started early enough this year and have built enough traction that I expect we'll successfully close soon, but it's great that the community has this resource. Going to reach out to a few of the names on this list!