Venture capital firm Matterwave has launched a $79 million fund aimed at European sustainability projects.
The fund, announced in a Tuesday (March 7) news release, comes as Europe’s industrial base is facing critical challenges, including energy dependency, raw material dependency, and supply chain issues, all against the backdrop of unchecked climate change, said Christian Reitberger, one of Matterwave Ventures’ partners.
“At the same time, however, Europe has most of the building blocks for solving these problems in its own hands: world-class research facilities, a large domestic market, regulatory tailwinds, and a growing number of entrepreneurs committed to solving these technological challenges,” Reitberger added. “This presents interesting investment opportunities for Matterwave in technologies made in Europe.”
Matterwave said in the release it will invest in 20 to 25 companies working in the areas of sustainability, resource efficiency, and climate tech.
The company said it began building out its sustainability approach in 2022, a year in which a number of European sustainability startups took in a great deal of funding, while also enjoying millions of dollars in investments from EU governments.
For example, Valar Ventures led a $23 million Series A round in December by London-based Treecard to back its vision for a debit card that helps plant trees.
In another Series A from around that time, Gorilla, a spin-off from Belgian tech agency November Five, raised $6.3 million to help energy companies reach their net zero emissions targets via its cloud-based data processing platform.
Meanwhile, environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues have become central to fund managers’ investment strategies.
Deloitte projected in 2022 that ESG-mandated assets would represent half of all professionally managed assets globally by 2024 as European Union countries adopt new disclosure regulations.
The need for investors and asset managers to comply with ESG rules has led to the development of new accounting frameworks and data tools.
“Building a detailed picture of the carbon emissions and fossil fuel exposure of complex financial instruments requires data that extends across both the financial data that RegTechs and rating agencies have always mobilized, as well as alternative datasets that have not traditionally been exploited,” PYMNTS wrote last year, adding that these include “industrial information, ESG reports, corporate relations data and various third-party datasets.”
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