Climate Investor: $2 Billion for Deep Tech Climate Ventures — Dr. Eric Toone, CTO of Breakthrough Energy Ventures

Co-led by Dr. Eric Toone, Breakthrough Energy Ventures is a long-term VC investor — anchored by Bill Gates, Ray Dalio, and mission-aligned peers — that aims to build the new, cutting-edge companies that will lead the world to net-zero emissions.

Below are two excerpts from the podcast.

"The first decade of this century saw cleantech v1.0, which was pretty much a failure, so we wanted to do something different. The fund is a 20-year fund instead of a 10-year fund to more closely approximate the timeline for the development of technologies and businesses in this space. We have a very technical organization with around 20 people on the team who have doctoral degrees in chemistry, math, physics, and related fields. The idea was to bring a very technical group of people together to do diligence on these technologies. The first fund is fully deployed. We raised the second fund and started investing out of that at the beginning of this year. We have about 80 companies we’ve invested in across the globe."

"There's been an extraordinary amount of money that has entered this space over the last couple of years, and valuations that have gone through the roof. Eight of our companies over the past six months raised between $250-800 million, and we have a company that will likely raise over a billion dollars in its next round. Even at that level, it is still a drop in the bucket. Money in the whole sustainability space still accounts for single-digit percentages of all venture capital, and capital directed towards energy is less than 1%. It's gratifying to see the new capital in this space, but the investment is still way less than what's required."

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