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Investors at MCJ Collective, Breakthrough Energy Ventures and SOSV’s HAX to speak at SOSV Climate Summit
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Richard Ellis
Richard Ellis
August 30, 2022

Much of the VC industry is in retreat this year, but early-stage climate tech investors are charging ahead. In fact, seed deals in climate tech doubled year over year in the first half of 2022. Picking winners at this early stage is notoriously difficult and risky, however. So how do early-stage VCs identify, vet, and de-risk these capital-intensive ventures? What common challenges do founders face at this stage, and how can they be overcome?

The SOSV Climate Tech Summit from October 25-26 gathered a panel of early-stage climate tech VCs to tackle these questions. Check out their discussion below.

SOSV’s very own Duncan Turner, General Partner and Managing Director of HAX, drew from his experience working with over 200 “hard tech” startups. They include VoltStorage, a pioneer in stationary flow batteries for renewable energy,  Neptune Robotics, which makes robots that clean giant ship hulls, and XFuel, which makes carbon neutral fuels out of biomass.

Cody Simms, Partner at MCJ Collective and co-host of its famed podcast, My Climate Journey, shared how his team uses AngelList’s rolling-fund structure to invest in climate tech with a community of 2,400+ MJC members. Their portfolio includes Arcadia, a unicorn data platform that optimizes clean energy use, and Twelve, which transforms CO2 into chemicals, materials and fuels for everyday goods.    

Fifty Years founding partner Ela Madej made the case for clean innovations that the greediest capitalist would buy (aka, the Mr. Burns Test). Inspired by Winston Churchill’s 1931 essay, “Fifty Years Hence,” the firm has backed unicorns including  Upside Foods, a lab-based meat startup and alumni of SOSV’s IndieBio program, and Solugen, which decarbonizes chemical production using synthetic biology. 

The moderator of this panel discussion was David Rowan, angel investor, founding UK editor-in-chief of Wired, and founder of the Voyagers.io climate tech and health tech community. 

Are early-stage VCs actually finding the startups that can prevent a climate change catastrophe? What can we all do to build this early-stage ecosystem and entice founders into the formidable climate-tech journey?

Learn more about the Summit.

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