From AgFunderNews, September 2:
Investors looking to tackle the climate crisis through clean technology over the past year were most interested in startups dealing with food and water, according to industry newsletter Climate Tech VC‘s mid-year review of venture capital funding.
The authors, who are investors themselves, tracked deals made across seven sectors — carbon, industrial, consumer, climate, energy, food and water, and mobility — between Q2 2020 and Q2 2021 and found food and water attracted the largest number of unique investors by far.
The ubiquity of food and water in everyday life and the global Covid-19 crisis are two likely factors that prompted this heightened interest, says Sophie Purdom, co-founder of Climate Tech VC and an active investor in early-stage climate technology businesses.
Food and water “are the most visceral and the most tangible of all of those climate investing categories,” she told AFN.
“Keep in mind this time period we’re tracking is also squarely during pandemic times, when maybe for the first time in a while everyone’s at home and thinking about what food they put in their body, what they’re stocking in their fridge, and engaging with the world around them and their lifestyle in a way that they hadn’t before.”
“Investors are people too, and we’re all biased in our decision making by our lifestyles, and so I have to think in some ways that the pandemic influenced investors wanting to participate at that obvious intersection of climate and food,” Purdom added.
These categories also attract investors who are “dipping their toes into ESG for the first time,” she said, referring to the environmental, social, and governance issues that investors are increasingly paying attention to.
Image credit: Climate Tech VC
Climate tech investment as a whole is heating up, with startups raising about $16 billion across some 250 deals in the first half of 2021 – equivalent to total deals funded in the whole of 2020.
Energy, the more traditional sector for cleantech investors, is still attracting a large number of deals. But they pale in comparison to food and water — as well as mobility — in terms of actual dollar amount invested....
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