- 6
- September
2023
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 4-5 June 2024.
Read more- 25
- October
2016
ParkBee raises €1.8M from InnovationQuarter and angels
Wouter de Bruijne pitched ParkBee at Ecosummit Amsterdam on 7 July 2016 and explained why sharing commercial parking assets is a smart green business idea. Today, Wouter and the Co-founders Jian Jiang and Tom Buchmann celebrate having raised €1.8M from InnovationQuarter, the regional development agency for West Holland, and 4 undisclosed angel investors. The Dutch startup makes unused private parking garages, mainly office building car parks, available to the public. This makes sense as cars are parking most of the time and everybody knows how difficult it is to find parking in crowded city centres, especially when you are in a hurry to your next business meeting or running multiple private errands on a busy day. ParkBee is integrated in the Dutch parking apps Parkmobile, which is majority owned by BMW since 2015, and Park-line rather than trying to build their own consumer brand.
Read more- 30
- June
2016
Ecosummit rocks Amsterdam on 7 July 2016 at Rockstart
This year we bring Ecosummit for the first time to Amsterdam because we like the city and believe it is a good business idea. During the last few months we worked very hard to make it happen and digged deep into the Dutch smart green innovation community. We got a lot of positive response from old and new Ecosummit friends and also sent a few one-way emails into the local internet whose inbox owners don’t value our European startup platform as much as we do – not yet. This is going to change next week when Ecosummit rocks Amsterdam on 7 July at Rockstart, the famous Dutch startup accelerator founded in 2011 by the serial entrepreneur and Yoga enthusiast Oscar Kneppers and a few of his business buddies. Since 2014, Rockstart is an Ecosummit partner that showcases their smart energy portfolio every year on stage and Ecosummit TV. In March 2016, the lottery-funded impact VC DOEN Foundation invested in Rockstart because both organisations share the same vision that entrepreneurs are able to solve the big problems of our planet, society and economy.
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