List of the 450 largest Renewable Energy Technology Investors [Update 2024]

List of 5 large renewable energy technology venture capital investors

The development of renewable energy has become a current and important point of research over the past years for a more sustainable world. This article describes three VC funds that support renewable energy startups with capital.

1. Shell Ventures (UK)

Shell Ventures is part of the Shell group, an energy and petrochemical company. The company is aiming to invest in energy and mobility transformations to ensure lower emissions, an electrified energy system and innovative solutions. An interesting company in their portfolio is enie, a leading supplier of solar panels that aims to make sustainable energy more accessible.

Update 2024: In December 2023, Shell Offshore Inc., a subsidiary of Shell plc, announced the Final Investment Decision for Sparta, a deep-water development in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. This project represents their competitive approach to simplifying and replicating projects.

2. Vireo Ventures (Germany)

Vireo Ventures is a venture capital fund interested in early-stage startups with high scalability. They mainly invest in B2B businesses that aim to electrify and decarbonize the world. They have, for example, invested in e-mobilio, a digital support system for electric car sales, and ampere.cloud, an operating system for renewable energy.

3. Almi Invest (Sweden)

Almi Invest actively invests in companies across various industries, including renewable energy. An interesting portfolio company is Climeon, a company specializing in converting low-temperature waste heat into clean electricity. Another example is Blixt who develop intelligent grid sensors and software that optimize the management and monitoring of power distribution networks.

4. High-Tech Gründerfonds (Germany)

High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) is an early-stage venture capital firm locates in Bonn, Germany. Companies included in their portfolio are for example Sonnen, who developed smart energy storage solutions that enable homeowners to store excess solar power and use it during peak demand periods and tado°, a company specializing in smart climate control solutions by offering heating and cooling systems that optimize energy usage based on occupancy and weather conditions.

5. Giant Leap (Australia)

Giant Leap is a VC firm with a strong focus on sustainability and positive impact. Within its portfolio, Giant Leap has invested in three notable companies: Sunrun is a leading provider of residential solar energy systems and, therefore, offers homeowners the opportunity to harness clean, renewable energy through rooftop solar installations, reducing their dependence on fossil fuels and lowering their carbon footprint. Limejump uses technology and real-time data analytics and machine learning algorithms to help businesses optimize their energy consumption. Carbon Clean Solutions implements carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies that focus on solutions to capture CO2 emissions from industrial processes, helping companies reduce their carbon footprint.

Picture Source: Dan Meyers

Included information in our renewable energy investor list

Our keyword analysis-based list includes 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.: 1051) – total counted occurrences of keywords on the VC website
• average_keyword_rate (e.g. 0.01) – average rate of keyword occurrences per subpage in relation with total number of words
• most_common_keyword (e.g. „renewable energy“) – keyword that was counted the most often on respective VC website
• most_common_keyword_frequency (e.g. 351) – number of times the most common keyword was counted
• sub_url_highest_rate (e.g. https://toyota.ventures/portfolio.html#jasper) – sub url with the highest number of found keywords
• highest_rate (e.g. 0.03) – highest keyword rate per subpage
• frequency_per_keyword: {‘renewable energy’: 349, ‘green energy’: 349, ‘renewables’: 351, ‘wind energy’: 0, ‘solar energy’: 0, ‘solar power’: 0, ‘photovoltaics’: 2} – dictionary of number of keyword occurrences per keyword

Picture Source: Nicholas Doherty

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 the renewable energy sector

Our keyword crawler analyzed more than 2,500 venture capital funds regarding green energy investment keywords. We found out that 17.8 % of the global VC funds mention renewable energy solutions.

Focus on renewable energy

This bar chart shows the most important keywords from our keyword search, however most companies use the keyword renewable energy to describe their vc company focus. Additionally, the term renewables, sola energy, green energy, and solar power are used, whereas wind energy and photovoltaics are used less frequently.

Countries of renewable energy startup investors

The most common country renewable energy startup investors are located in is the USA. For instance, the previously presented investor Blue Bear Capital is located in Beverly Hills, California. Also, a lot of renewable energy investors are located in Germany, the UK, Netherlands, and Switzerland. As a result, these countries are home to many successful startups and are popular destinations for investors looking to invest in the green energy sector.