Announcing the oversubscribed final close of 2150’s first fund and five initial investments with the potential to mitigate 1.6 gigatonnes of CO2.
It feels like it was just yesterday that we unveiled 2150 and announced our first close of €130 million. Over the subsequent six months, we were fortunate to receive an unprecedented level of interest from mission-aligned investors -from global financial institutions and mobility groups to leaders in real estate and infrastructure. Their belief in our team and ambition has allowed us to surpass our initial target and raise an oversubscribed fund of €270m (€268.2m to be exact, ± $310m USD today) which we closed at the end of summer 2021.
Our investor base now includes some of the world’s largest sovereign funds including the Norwegian sovereign climate investment company, Nysnø. Leading financial institutions and their clients including Credit Suisse’s Climate Innovation Fund and a client advised by AIMS Imprint of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The pension groups, investment arms and foundations of global corporations including Woven Capital L.P., the investment arm of Toyota’s Woven Planet Group and both the BMW Foundation and BMW Group. They join our initial anchors, Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, Denmark’s Green Future Fund and Novo Holdings.
Alongside the rest of the NREP family, we have also brought together forward thinking players in the broad urban ecosystem who build, develop or manage over 430 million square feet of real estate (a 3x increase from our first close).
Our investors are our Partners, and they entrust us with their money to deliver on our mission to back impactful technologies that can make our urban environment more efficient, sustainable and resilient. They have tasked us with delivering market-leading financial returns alongside measurable and material impact on our planet and its citizens. Their investment allows us to actively seek brilliant entrepreneurs working on technologies that can have the scale of impact we need to achieve.
Our growing portfolio is already allowing us to deliver on that task. Initial investments span from North America to Asia, and at scale, the technologies from these five initial companies has the potential to mitigate 1.6 gigatonnes of CO2, more than the annual emissions from Germany, UK, France combined.
These initial investments include:
CarbonCure (Canada) whose technology helps to lower the embodied carbon in concrete, the leading industrial polluter on our planet, representing 8% of global CO2 emissions. Carbon Cure is now deployed across 400 concrete sites worldwide and won the X Prize earlier this year.
Nodes & Links (UK) which deploys advanced algorithms to help the managers of complex infrastructure projects, from train lines to nuclear reactors to roads and data centers, to be delivered on budget and on time, saving waste and resources and accelerating the deployment of critically needed sustainable infrastructure.
Aeroseal (USA) has developed technology that seals the building envelope, reducing leaks and lowering energy requirements. With a network of 1,000 dealer partners across 27 countries, its sealing technology has already been applied to over 100m square feet of commercial space and more than 175,000 homes.
Ampd Energy (Hong Kong) whose Enertainer product replaces the noisy, dirty, polluting diesel generators that power many of the world’s construction sites with a battery-enabled energy system reducing CO2 emissions and dangerous air pollutants. Close to 70 Enertainers are already deployed in Asia with ambitious market expansion plans in the years to come.
Normative (Sweden) which is the leading carbon accounting engine, helping companies to measure and act upon their own and their supply chain’s carbon emissions and has partnered with the UK Government for the COP26 business climate hub and received a Fellowship award from Google.org.
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We are thankful to the founders of these companies for their trust and partnership and for allowing us to be part of their entrepreneurial voyage and sustainability mission.
On our deep dives and facilitation, we continue to work with our industry partners, Advisory Board members and academic network on identifying the greatest challenges of the built world and scouring technologies that can scale to address them. We are currently looking at technologies as varied as new materials, more efficient cooling, modular construction and management of waste. If you are an entrepreneur working on any of these areas, please do reach out! We also continue to regularly facilitate introductions of technologies (some of which we back, others which we don’t) to those owners and managers of 430m sq feet who are actively seeking to deploy impactful solutions.
And finally, while we do want to celebrate this important milestone for 2150, we feel it is even more important to use today as a way to recognise how technology entrepreneurs, venture capital and institutional investors are beginning to act with the speed and urgency needed to achieve the impact required. We are enthused by the outreach from generalist VC peers seeking to learn more or do more, about new and existing ClimateTech funds emerging or growing in scale, and by the vast number of repeat entrepreneurs not sitting on their laurels but instead deciding to apply their experience towards action. Let’s go!
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About 2150
2150 is a venture capital firm investing in technology companies that seek to sustainably reimagine and reshape the urban environment and enable a sustainable and scalable future of mass urbanisation. 2150’s investment thesis focuses on major unsolved problems across what it calls the ‘Urban Stack’, which comprises every element of the built environment, from the way our cities are designed, constructed and powered, to the way people live, work, move, and are cared for. Find out more at www.2150.vc and follow us on twitter.
