If you’re looking for comparisons, Norrsken VC is a $130 million impact VC that covers climate, while Demeter Partners last raised a €250 million fund focused on climate.
World Fund is also backed by pension funds including the UK Environment Agency Pension Fund, Wiltshire Pension Fund, and Croatia’s Erste Plavi.
World Fund has completed its raise during a war in Europe, interest rate rises, and jittery LPs.
In 2023 there was over $20 billion raised by European climate tech startups, almost matching the previous year, and bucking declining trends in other sectors, according to Dealroom.
The U.K., Sweden and Germany led for total climate tech VC in 2023 but Iceland, Lithuania and Bulgaria showed notable growth.
Crafting the perfect venture capital pitch is so simple that there’s an industry of consultants to help founders get their decks in order.
TechCrunch has a long-running series of Pitch Deck Teardowns to help founders, and you can find an infinite number of Twitter threads on the subject.
Enter Wing Venture Capital’s Sara Choi, who will give a talk at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 this April and take audience questions on how to pitch.
After all, when venture capital is harder to raise than it has been in years, nailing the pitch is critical for today’s early-stage founders.
Early Stage 2024 is just around the corner, so book your pass here before March 29 and save $200.
The big cloud vendors have all already lined up with other chatbot partners: Microsoft with OpenAI, Google and Amazon with Anthropic; Cohere picking up assorted others like Oracle and Salesforce.
If and when Inflection ever perfected Pi on its enormous AI infrastructure, the race looked to be already lost.
Despite close ties with OpenAI, Microsoft also has many reasons to be needing a backup for it’s all-important AI gambit.
There are so many red flags with OpenAI that Microsoft is wise to wean its dependence.
Then again, just like Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, we wonder if regulators will also have something to say about this deal.
Giant Ventures in January closed two new funds totaling $250 million that it will invest in startups on both sides of the Atlantic, and today, TechCrunch has learned exclusively that Frontline Ventures has also raised $200 million across two funds, named Frontline Growth and Frontline Seed.
Frontline has historically invested in both Europe and North America, and its new funds will continue to follow that strategy, betting on B2B software companies.
The new seed fund will favor European ventures, while the growth fund will focus on U.S. startups.
Expansion roadmapO’Donnell told TechCrunch that when it helps portfolio companies navigate expansion to another market, Frontline focuses on four aspects: timing, go-to-market strategy, talent, and organizational design and location.
That’s by order of importance, and a company’s location should be a derivative of the previous three aspects, O’Donnell said.
Silence wants to shake things up when it comes to climate tech investment.
This new angel-style VC firm has already raised $35 million and plans to make dozens of small investments in climate startups to help them apply the tech startup playbook.
He also founded Merlin, an hourly jobs marketplace in the U.S.With Silence, Borja wants to apply his experience to climate investment.
A silent partnerSince the first close of the fund in June 2022, Silence has already invested in 22 different companies.
So we told them ‘we’ll be your lead,’” Borja said.
Electric boat maker Candela is approaching cruising speed with $25 million in new funding and the first commercial deployment of its new P-12 ferry, in New Zealand.
The P-12, a ferry design that can handle up to 30 passengers, made its debut late last year.
Like any other industry, you have to know when to buy and when to build, and big boating companies are happy to buy — or invest.
Candela’s boats use hydrofoils with electric engines mounted on the bottom to effectively fly above the surface of the water once they get past a certain speed, vastly reducing energy consumption — historically and understandably a sticking point for electric boating.
Theh $25 million round was led, as mentioned, by Beneteau, with participation from EQT Ventures, Ocean Zero LLC, and Kan DelaAB.
Astera Labs started its life as a public company trading at $52.56 per share, up 46% when the bell rang.
Astera Labs makes connectivity hardware for cloud computing data centers.
Astera Labs’ IPO price valued it at around $5.5 billion, a figure that swells to around $8.9 billion at its current trading price.
The strong performance of Astera in its first hours as a public company could also ameliorate some investor activity that is holding back, or even preventing some public offerings altogether.
If VCs know that the startup could pop on the public market like Astera Labs, maybe they will think about the timeline differently.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Wednesday show, focused on startup and venture capital news that matters.
Today we have a grip of startup stories, and a venture capital item that isn’t as bad of news as it seems at first blush.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Here’s the rundown:
Meet the first roundtable roster at TC Early Stage 2024You won’t have to search very hard or go very far to engage in compelling conversations next month at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024.
One of the most popular attractions at Early Stage are roundtables.
These expert-led, small-group conversations focus on a specific topic designed to inform, inspire and help you build a better business.
Starting roundtable roster at Early Stage 2024Adapt & Thrive: Mastering the Chameleon MindsetWith Christopher Dube (CIO, Prepare 4 VC) and Jason Kraus (CEO, Prepare 4 VC).
Book your early-bird pass to TC Early Stage 2024 right now before prices go up on March 31.
India-based audio platform Pocket FM has secured $103 million in Series D funding led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from Stepstone Group.
Pocket FM offers audio series with several short episodes and aim to become the “Netflix for audio” globally.
That means you can’t use the coins you bought on Pocket FM to unlock content Pocket Novel products and vice versa.
Pocket FM also has a limited audiobook vertical where it competes with the likes of Audible with a similar pay-to-unlock strategy.
Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund ADIA has held talks with Pocket FM for a potential mega funding round, TechCrunch reported last week.
