BP Ventures, DLA Piper and ex “Dragon” Nick Jenkins are backing a new fund focusing on innovations to deliver the UK’s net zero goal.
With its first cohort of 60 founders starting this month, Carbon13 has opened the Carbon13 SEIS Fund to qualified investors, sharing £1m among 10 start-up businesses.
The 60 founders have been through a competitive selection process, whittled down from over 600 applications.
Each founder was selected for the programme based on their potential to become founders of a highly scalable venture and, as a consequence, with 55% drawn from technical backgrounds.
Chris Coleridge, founder and CEO of Carbon13, said: “Net Zero is the biggest opportunity of the next 50 years.
“What the venture capital world is beginning to wake up to is that the investment opportunity posed by climate change is not like the internet, a general-purpose technology that has rolled out, steam-engine-like, through the economy, incrementally changing everything it penetrates; it’s more like a world war, where society’s awareness of the threat it’s under creates a prolonged and intense engagement of the private sector’s capital and its capacity for innovation.”
ET Capital is managing the Carbon13 SEIS Fund for Carbon13.
Further to the SEIS Fund, Carbon13 has partnered with several well-known later stage investment funds to secure follow on funding for the start-ups graduating from their cohort.
Partner venture funds include the government backed Clean Growth Fund, Potential Climate Ventures, Zero Carbon Capital, Revent VC, MMC Ventures, Ubermorgen Ventures, Pale Dot Blue VC and several others.