- 6
- September
2019
Smart green VCs you should know
There are many smart green VCs in Europe and the US that back startups in energy, mobility, buildings, cities, materials, food and circular economy to create impact as well as environmental, financial and strategic returns for their fund investors (LPs). In the VC food chain, early stage investors prefer to invest, at lower valuations and higher risk, in the Seed, Series A and Series B financing rounds of young startups working on product market fit and traction (users, customers, revenues). On the other hand, late stage VCs like shorter holding periods and time-to-exit and, consequently, advanced startups with more than €5M revenues, experienced management teams and fast growth. The existence of KPIs, ideally going up over time, makes the life of every investor easier. Facing climate change, technology revolution and global competition, the majority of corporates have adopted corporate venturing and open innovation strategies in order to invest in and do business with startups. The result are different investment strategies and sometimes competing portfolios that startups should know before pitching. Let’s co-invest and meet at Ecosummit Berlin.
Read more- 30
- April
2015
Johan Reynaert presents the European Investment Fund and shares their LP lessons learned
Ecosummit TV: Johan Reynaert presents the European Investment Fund (EIF) and shares their LP lessons learned at ECO14 London. EIF is the biggest fund investor in Europe and a major LP in 16 sustainability VC funds such as Munich Venture Partners, Environmental Technologies Fund, Demeter, Capricorn, VNT Management, Aster Capital, Emertec, WHEB and Icos Capital. According to Johan, sustainability as an asset subclass within venture capital is maturing. GPs and LPs have learned from the past and nowadays focus on capital efficiency, value creation and cooperation with corporates in their startup portfolio. A new trend – that we just discussed with Johan’s colleague Patric Gresko at the Cleantech Forum in Florence – is the interaction of impact investors and smart green VCs. The deep integration of impact investing into the investment strategy and portfolio management enables VCs and startups to tap into a lot of new capital from family offices and other impact investors.
Read more- 23
- June
2013
Smart green corporate venture capital panel with Eon, Aster, Electranova and Entelios
Ecosummit TV: Tim Lafferty of Global Corporate Venturing moderates the smart green corporate venture capital panel featuring Susana Quintana-Plaza (E.ON), Alexander Schlaepfer (Aster), Philippe Ringenbach (Electranova) and Tom Schulz (Entelios). Being an important pillar of the open innovation strategy of multinationals, corporate venture capital is a big trend as 500 new CVC units were created in the last 3 years. At least 10% of the CVCs are active in one or several of the cleantech sectors. Next to money, CVCs offer strategic value through market access and technological expertise.
Read more- 8
- October
2012
Smart green dealflow: SolarFuel, Govecs, Tiramizoo, Sortech and Evodos
5 smart green startups that are connected to Ecosummit in various ways successfully raised new venture capital during the last months: Power to Gas pioneer SolarFuel (€7.5M, Germany), electric scooter maker Govecs (€10M, Germany), bike messenger platform Tiramizoo (undisclosed, Germany), sustainable cooling provider Sortech (undisclosed, Germany) and algae harvester Evodos (undisclosed, Netherlands). Let’s take a closer look at the products and business models of the startups and their new investors.
Read more- 21
- May
2011
Peter Stein pitches Thermoelectric Generator Startup GreenTEG at ECO11
Ecosummit TV brings to you Peter Stein, Co-Founder and Head of Sales and Finance of GreenTEG, pitching the Zurich-based thermoelectric generator startup to investors at ECO11 in Berlin. The amount of lost waste energy, especially as heat, mankind loses during power generation and industrial production is huge. GreenTEG has developed cost-efficient technology that turns waste heat into energy using thermoelectric generators.
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