Top Tier Impact x Sustainable Future Fund: Investor Roundtable on Climatetech

This week, we cohosted an Investors’ Roundtable on Climatetech, alongside our partner Top Tier Impact’s Helena Wasserman Eriksson and Christine Amour-Levar, in bringing together leading family offices and thought leaders around Southeast Asia’s climatetech ecosystem to discuss current trends, opportunities and gaps in the market. Climatetech ventures have progressed significantly over the last 15 years, driven by a wave of pressure from policy-makers, industry focus and aspiring talent flooding into the space.

Venture funding to climatetech accelerated to US$37b globally in 2021, which is more than 20x over the last decade. In Southeast Asia alone, 10% of all climatetech ventures was founded during the pandemic alone. Within the last decade, we have seen 43 climatetech unicorns, of which more than 20 of them emerged from the last year. Decarbonisation, in particular, is a rapidly segment of the ecosystem, which currently only benefits from about 5% of venture funding globally. This is an area where one of the panelists, Milena Nikolovea of Aera VC (an early-growth fund investing in deep tech ventures), sees amazing potential in for example, in reimagining the manufacturing processes to make these mass-scale production lines more scalable, efficient, and cheaper.

Despite top-of-mind attention surrounding sustainability, panelists discussed how many investors still tend to look at the climate space from only a philanthropic lens. Jessica Cheam, one of the General Partners of the Sustainable Future Fund expressed that investments in climate tech?should instead be viewed as the biggest opportunity of our generation. The industry has grown from a niche theory to a US$35 trillion market, with the amount of venture capital pouring into the industry reaching a record US$17 billion even during the pandemic.

With a robust due diligence process to assess founders and ventures’ technical roadmap, alongside international accountability frameworks from organizations like SASB, B Corp and GRI, downside risk can be mitigated.

Asia is lagging behind the USA and Europe’s combined 18,000 founders’ talent pool in climatetech, but Singapore, with strong support from government initiatives, has the potential to catch up, in becoming one of the main sustainability tech hubs globally. The Singapore government has launched several initiatives to meet our target of keeping emissions below 65 million tonnes by 2030. This includes the Singapore Green Plan 2030, to produce 30% of local nutritional needs by 2030 and the launch of a new global carbon exchange this year. Out of Singapore, there is an entire ecosystem in the region within Southeast Asia in which capital can be deployed. This is a geography that the Sustainable Future Fund is focused on to bring capital to an otherwise underserved region.

To engage with the Sustainable Future Fund, please drop us a note through our Linkedin page. To learn more about climatetech and the issues we face in sustainability management and monitoring, please join our Project Drawdown: Earth Day Special event which will take place on 28 April.