What is Climate Tech VC & how did it get started

Climate Tech VC, the newsletter, emerged at the start of 2020. Kim explains that it was intended to be a way to track and share what’s happening in the climate tech ecosystem before it was officially called “climate tech.” Now, fast forward to two and a half, three years later, CTVC is at 40,000 subscribers, spanning investors, corporates, and operators, who are all reading this resource on a day-to-day basis. 

As for Kim’s journey as a founder, she expresses that she has always been focused on wanting to address the climate crisis. In 2019, Kim decided she wanted to figure out a way to work on the issue full-time and ended up going down the business and finance rabbit hole. She took a class on sustainable finance and investing early on in college, and realized finance and capital is an extremely relevant and critical lever when it comes to tackling climate change. Kim found herself on the typical investment banking path, working at JPMorgan as part of their Tech M&A team. While working in San Francisco, she noticed that the city was being bombarded with everything that is Silicon Valley and technology – cue all of the billboards of all the different apps to download. Kim realized that innovation and technology are critical to disrupting markets like the internet and e-commerce, so why not also the climate crisis? Towards the end of 2019, she says it started to feel like there was this reemergence of cleantech and the new shape of climate tech began to take form.

Scale & growth in climate tech venture investing

Kim explains that on a week-by-week basis, on a day-by-day basis, CTVC is tracking all of the deals and funding in climate tech. Every half a year, they aggregate that data into a mid-year or annual report. From their insights, 2021 revealed a peak of $40 billion in venture funding into climate tech, which is pretty staggering relative to the market before 2020 and the somewhat start of climate tech. Since then, even though there’s been a general market slowdown that has particularly hit venture and other general sectors hard, the number of deals in climate tech actually increased in the first half of 2022. CTVC reports a 15% increase in deals and then a decrease in the amount of funding going into the space relative to the back half of 2021. But overall, they’re still seeing a ton of interest in early-stage companies. Deals in the Seed and Series A stages have seen a large pickup in funding interest to verticals like climate management, risk, and intelligence, so solutions that are built for helping to monitor where emissions lie in corporate supply chains, helping them manage it, corporate offsetting, and there’s been a significant eight times pick up in funding into the carbon vertical. Kim believes the world is waking up to the fact that mitigation is core to climate tech, but now we’re also starting to think about more solutions on the carbon removal and management side to further advance decarbonization efforts.

Resources Mentioned

• Climate Tech VC
• Greentown Labs
• Kula Bio
• Energy Impact Partners
• Syzygy Plasmonics
• Cemvita Factory
• Day One Ventures
• Decarbonization Partners
• TPG’s Climate Rise Fund
• Brookfield Global Transition Fund
• Saudi Aramco Sustainability Fund

Connect with Kim Zou

• Connect with Kim on LinkedIn

Connect With Jason Rissman

• InvestedInClimate.com 
• On LinkedIn
• On Twitter

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