Climate Tech Investor: Seed-stage Sustainability Tech — Paul Straub, Co-founder of Wireframe Ventures

Led by Co-founder and Managing Partner Paul Straub, Wireframe Ventures is a pre-seed and seed-stage investor focused on technology benefiting people and planet, including impact ventures focused on climate change, synthetic biology, AI, automation, and zero-emission transportation.

Below are two excerpts from the podcast.

"For many years, my area of focus was around renewables, built environment, and things that were very traditional for cleantech. What's been great about Wireframe is that when we think about decarbonization, we are agnostic in terms of whether you're working in agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, or carbon removal and sequestration. There's an entirely open playing field from our point of view, and we're agnostic from a technology standpoint, too. We will invest in synthetic biology, computational biology, hardware, software, or business model innovations. We view those as great tools and what we care about is who is wielding those tools. We want to know what is the product capability and expertise of a founding team to actually put those tools to work towards the mission around climate. We think about the health of the planet or climate as being the primary objective."

"The most prominent climate tech companies right now are the ones that combine climate and SAAS. We see these kinds of uncapped valuations for SAAS businesses in general, but then add climate and all of the sudden it's just explosive in terms of the valuations. We've got a lot of software businesses that we’re backing. But there's also a lot of interest in carbon removal technologies, which is terrific because it is certainly needed, but it does feel like there are some echoes of the first cleantech boom. I'm trying to remain very open to what's going to work this time because things are very different. There's just an enormous amount of capital flowing into technologies that still have a lot of technical risks and still require project capital to scale. We certainly need some great solutions to remove carbon from the air, but it’s still a very early market."

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