Here's our list of smart green VCs that back startups in climate tech, energy, mobility, cities, advanced materials, food and circular economy to generate impact as well as environmental, financial and strategic returns for their fund investors. To showcase the investment strategy, we also include portfolio companies that we like. In the VC food chain, early stage investors prefer to invest, at lower valuations and higher risk, in the Seed and Series A financing rounds of young startups working on product market fit and traction (customers, revenues). Afterwards, late stage VCs join startup cap tables from Series B onwards, expecting more than €5M revenues, experienced management teams, positive unit economics and fast growth. Facing climate change, technology revolution and global competition, the majority of corporates are active in corporate venturing and open innovation to invest and cooperate with startups. As a result, VCs follow different investment strategies to build their portfolios that startups should know before pitching.
We love this startup since we got to know it in April 2021. Applying the power of robotics to make the wind industry more efficient is a great idea. Our ecoportfolio company Aerones raises $30M Series A led by Lightrock and Haniel with participation of new investor Blume Equity. Aerones is based in Riga (Latvia), develops and manufactures a family of smart robots and provides their robot-enabled services for the maintenance of wind turbines with a team of 200 employees to more than 100 customers in 20 countries including Vestas, GE, Siemens Gamesa, NextEra and Enel. The goal is to minimise downtime when wind turbines are inspected, cleaned, coated or repaired. In fact, Aerones' services are 6 times faster, 40% more efficient and a lot safer for humans that don't need to climb up wind turbines because the robots do. This enables huge cost savings in the $30B wind turbine maintenance market that is forecasted to grow to $50B by 2028.
Ecosummit GmbH
Neuenburger Str. 19
10969 Berlin, Germany
Jan Michael Hess
jan@ecosummit.net
+49 176 21208417