List of the 300 largest Cleantech Venture Capital Investors [2023]

List of 3 cleantech venture capital investors

Clean technology, or in short cleantech, describes processes, products, and services that aim to counteract climate change and reduce the negative environmental impacts by making energy efficient improvements, using sustainable resources, or implementing other modern solutions. This article highlights three interesting cleantech venture capital investors from our curated cleantech VC list.

1. Capricorn Partners (Belgium)

Capricorn Partners is a venture capital fund that focuses on innovative companies using technology as a competitive advantage. They concentrate on digital, health, and clean technologies that have a positive impact on the world. The company consist of 25 experts in 4 different sectors and they have €610M across 10 funds under management. One of the portfolio companies is Nabaltec, who make environmentally friendly chemicals.

2. SFJ Ventures (USA)

SFJ Ventures is interested in high-growth companies who want to improve the future by focusing on developing healthier, smarter, and cleaner options. The company has over two decades of experience and 81 portfolio companies. Through their investment in these start-ups SFJ Ventures has managed to mitigate over 3 million metric tons of CO2. One of the cleantech companies they invested in is Ambient Fuels, a company that builds facilities to deliver sufficient and cost-competitive clean fuel.

3. Soulmates Ventures (Czech Republic)

Soulmates Ventures focuses on working towards a sustainable future. They are looking for 20 companies in 2023 and are willing to invest up to €1M in each project to improve people’s lives and the planet. They currently have 5 portfolio companies. One of them is Perfect-Air, a digital network that creates real-time data for air pollution.

Reasons why cleantech will be the next big thing

Most venture capital funds are still focused on topics related to software and the Internet. This is due in particular to the history of the VC world and the fact that the last two decades have been characterized by very great advances in the digitization environment. Now, however, the topic of sustainability is dominating more and more debates and occupying a particularly important position for both companies and governments around the world. Efficiency gains are needed to make renewable energy and other means of combating climate change even more viable on a mass scale. For this reason, many observers believe that even more startups will emerge in this field. Cleantech is becoming the next big thing, and more and more early-stage investors share this point of view.

Picture Source: Noah Buscher

Included information in our Cleantech investor list

Our keyword analysis-based list include the following general columns:

• Name of the VC fund
• Country of origin
• URL
• E-mail (general)
• Investment focus (if data available)
• Corporate VC (yes/no)

The following columns are based on the keyword crawler, which is a Python-based, in-house developed tool that crawls every page for at least 45 seconds to find the respective keywords.

• total_frequency (e.g.: 263) – total counted occurrences of keywords on the VC website
• average_keyword_rate (e.g. 0.02) – average rate of keyword occurrences per subpage in relation with total number of words
• most_common_keyword (e.g. „cleantech“) – keyword that was counted the most often on respective VC website
• most_common_keyword_frequency (e.g. 406) – number of times the most common keyword was counted
• sub_url_highest_rate (e.g. https://capricorn.be/en/channels/quest-cleantech/portfolio) – sub url with the highest number of found keywords
• highest_rate (e.g. 0.13) – highest keyword rate per subpage
• frequency_per_keyword: {‘cleantech’: 406, ‘greentech’: 0, ‘climatetech’: 0} – dictionary of number of keyword occurrences per keyword

Picture Source: Anders J

Results of our keyword analysis

In the next paragraph, we are focusing on insights derived from our keyword research, which was based on our list of the 2,500 largest VC investors worldwide.

Percentage of VC funds that invest in Cleantech

Our keyword crawler analyzed more than 2,500 venture capital funds regarding insurtech investment keywords. We found out that 13.0 % of the global VC funds mention cleantech.

Focus on Cleantech

This bar chart shows the most important keywords from our keyword search, however most companies use the keyword cleantech to describe their vc company. Additionally, greentech and climatetech are used.