Climate CEOs: Scaling Startups Climate Fintech: $125M Raised from 450 Investors in 2 Years with Carbon Equity
Learn how Jacqueline van den Ende built Carbon Equity into a $125M platform mobilizing retail capital for climate tech VC & PE funds—unlocking the power of “mass affluent” investors for the planet.
⭐ My guest today is Jacqueline van den Ende, Co-founder & CEO at Carbon Equity, a fintech platform that seeks to power the world's most impactful climate technology solutions with retail capital.
In under two years, they’ve mobilized $120M across 450+ high net worth and mass affluent individuals to invest in professionally managed VC and private equity climate funds.
As for background, she spent approximately half her career investing in companies, as a partner with Peak Capital and as an investor at HAL Investments, and the other half building and leading companies.
---
🎙️ In this episode, we talked about:
- The relative risk of investing in fund of funds vs. individual angel investments
- What “mass affluent” means and how a larger portion of their $177T in assets can be mobilized for climate
- How to motivate new hires by focusing on what you can offer them (e.g., flexibility) instead of what you can’t (e.g., high salaries)
- A new interpretation of The Golden Rule
- How to learn by doing, through experiments, instead of relying on Excel and Powerpoint
- What she means by saying “money as a means”
- Their goal of moving $1B into climate within five years
- How to interpret the quote “This Too Shall Pass” during great and hard times as a founder
- Why she wakes up at 5 am
- And lots more
---
🙏 Hope you enjoy it!
📣 And give Jacqueline and Carbon Equity a shout-out on LinkedIn, Slack, or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people.
---
👍 Please leave a review or rating on your favorite podcast player. This is the #1 way that more listeners can discover the amazing climate CEOs and investors I get to interview here.
---
🌎 Entrepreneurs for Impact is on a mission to help climate innovators grow faster with new investment capital, share best practices among peers, expand their networks, and reach their full potential.
Here's our weekly newsletter — A 3-minute summary of climate tech startups, better habits, and deep work trends: https://entrepreneursforimpact.substack.com
Our main program is a Climate CEO Mastermind peer group community: https://entrepreneursforimpact.com
Our invite-only cohorts of 12 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls. Today’s highly curated Mastermind members represent over $8B in market cap or assets under management.
Programs are led by Dr. Chris Wedding — 4x founder, $1B of investment experience, and Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill professor, with 70,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.