Sriya Sundaresan

🌍💡 Embracing Interoperability: The Evolution of Carbon Markets 💡🌍 The landscape of carbon markets is rapidly evolving, with a significant shift towards fungibility and interoperability. What does this mean? We (at the SoHo Global Climate Fund) spoke with leading climate fund manager, Charles Bedford of Carbon Growth Partners, to shed light on this important trend in the carbon markets. It's about creating seamless connections between compliance and voluntary markets, allowing for the exchange and recognition of carbon credits across borders and sectors. This trend marks a pivotal moment in our collective efforts towards combating climate change. By enabling carbon credits to be fungible and interoperable, we're fostering a more efficient and scalable approach to carbon pricing and emissions reduction strategies. Companies and organizations now have greater flexibility to participate in markets that align with their goals. #CarbonMarkets #ClimateAction #Fungibility #Interoperability #Sustainability #Innovation #GlobalImpact

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🌍 Exciting news! Apparel Impact Institute (Aii) has just announced the newest round of Climate Solutions Portfolio (CSP) grants, part of the $250 million Fashion Climate Fund aimed at unlocking $2 billion in blended capital for industry-wide decarbonization. These grants provide essential funding and support for scalable, science-based solutions that help the fashion industry reduce its environmental impact.🌱 This round of grantees – Pozzi, Grant Thornton, and Amphico – are tackling unique supply chain challenges with innovative technologies, offering measurable greenhouse gas reductions. Collectively, these projects have the potential to save over 24,000 tCO2e within their first year of implementation! 💡 Highlights include: * Pozzi's advanced heat recovery system for the textile wet processing sector * Grant Thornton's innovative approach to energy conservation in the lubricant industry * Amphico's cutting-edge color-mixing technology for textiles, creating vibrant fabrics with reduced environmental impact A huge congratulations to these trailblazers for their commitment to a sustainable future. Learn more about their projects and how Aii is driving decarbonization efforts across the industry #Sustainability #ClimateAction #Decarbonization #FashionIndustry #ApparelImpactInstitute #InnovationForImpact #CSPGrantees #SustainableFashion #Decarbonization

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Barclays has called on Keir Starmer to address a crippling ‘funding challenge’ that is hindering growth-stage climate-tech firms to scale up their operations and make a meaningful difference to reducing global emissions. Bloomberg News covers the story. Over the past few years, huge amounts of capital have poured into ‘transition finance’, i.e. funding the decarbonisation of highly polluting industries. But this has restricted growth opportunities for early stage climate tech firms progressing at a radically faster pace. The Financial Times covers the story. As positive sentiment towards ESG investing continues to wane across Europe and the US, the UK’s largest pensions provider is ramping up its investment in UK defence as the global economy confronts a dangerous geopolitical backdrop. The Telegraph covers the story. 🔗 Bloomberg: https://lnkd.in/eWeQRMqy 🔗 The Financial Times: https://lnkd.in/ew7eCRJB   🔗 The Telegraph: https://lnkd.in/eQbmM449

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Had a great conversation with SustainCERT during Climate Week NY 2023. Excited to announce that we will be back in NYC in September to launch and workshop our "Brand & Retailer Sustainable Finance Playbook." The playbook will bring together brands, retailers, suppliers, banks, development banks, and philanthropies to defragment and align various ways to invest in decarbonization, creating demand for suppliers to take on critical factory efficiencies, upgrades & improvements. Join us in creating a more sustainable future for the fashion industry. Check out this interview from last year's Climate week NYC with SustainCERT #ClimateWeekNYC #SustainableFinance #FashionIndustry #Decarbonization

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Summary: Co-founder of Collaborative Fund, Craig Shapiro speaks about their unique investment strategy in sectors like climate, health, and food and their impressive fundraising success in a tough market. Key takeaways: Collaborative Fund invests in non-traditional sectors like climate, health, and food, rather than the popular SaaS business model. The firm's sixth flagship fund raised $125 million in just over 90 days, despite the current challenging fundraising environment. The firm focuses on seed stage companies and emphasizes on addressing changing consumer spending habits and climate sustainability in their portfolio. Counter arguments: Some may argue that Collaborative Fund's focus on non-traditional sectors may not yield as high returns compared to popular sectors like SaaS. The difficult fundraising environment and lower interest from LPs could potentially affect the firm's future investments and success. #venturecapital #vc #venture #startups #fundraising

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There’s lots of opinions in the press about Amazons’ decision to bring employees back to the office five days a week from next year. Our experience from talking to VC and PE investors about their office attendance has rested on three days a week in VC and four days a week in PE. Friday tends to be the most popular day at home. Of course, this is subject to deal related activity and there are some people who just prefer to work in the office every day. Would be interested to hear if your experience of a normal working week in the office in VC or PE is different to this or if you agree?

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It's been an exciting two weeks for climate action and carbon market integrity progress! The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) has just released its initial methodology assessments. These assessments are important to ensuring that carbon credits meet rigorous standards, promoting transparency, credibility and trust in the voluntary carbon market. https://lnkd.in/gqEmcNbq Additionally, the Biden administration unveiled its Principles for High-Integrity Voluntary Carbon Markets aiming to bolster the credibility of carbon offset initiatives in the fight against climate change. These principles emphasize robust measurement, verification and utilization, ensuring that every carbon credit represents a real and measurable climate benefit. https://lnkd.in/gcAZ94sN Integrity is critical to the functioning and expansion of the VCM, and initiatives like these demonstrate welcome progress.

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Check out my recent post on why President Trump is the forcing function for us to solve the “Missing Middle” and catch the industrial Tsunami of onshoring coming to the US!

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We've been working under the hood at LIVSN on the execution behind the word "sustainability" and what it means to put our money where our mouth is. And by "we" I mean Abby Hollis and Wyatt Rice - who have gone above and beyond in this pursuit. I hope you take some time to read the article linked below for context on the how.

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Prime Coalition has long taken a different tack to climate finance compared to its for-profit brethren. It makes the usual venture-style investments in startups through Azolla Ventures and also helps philanthropists direct their money to climate-related projects that it deems high impact. Trellis Climate follows the latter model with a focus on middle stages, where capital has grown scarce. #climatetech #climateVC #climatefinance

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Good summary about the Climate Tech Market by Adam Thatcher, Emily Townsend and Amie-Louise Corry from Goodwin. It's clear that the Climate Tech market is not going anywhere, and relatively to the investment numbers in general in the Ventures industry, climate tech is fairly resilient. I do think that the main problem we have is down to this sentence: " Certain climate tech companies may therefore not fit neatly into the traditional venture capital model because, while they can offer the potential for extraordinary growth, they tend to require a longer-term commitment from investors. As a result, investors are pushing companies to find other use cases for their technology in an attempt to generate new lines of business and potentially earlier returns, or to speed up the development process by designing and scaling in parallel rather than optimising each stage of the journey before proceeding to the next." I think we are in a situation, where we apply in some cases the wrong financing models to the wrong types of businesses. The VC model, is about high risk, fast-paced ventures that grow faster than the ongoing market and they disrupt the market. I think that taking risk in deep tech, infra startups and things that are high CAPEX and require 30 years to become commercially viable are extremely important, but both founders and investors should face the reality and seek the truth to do the right thing. I have seen CEOs pushed to do things that serve the return of the funds to their LPs, and distract themselves then building their business. Bottom line, it's Ok also NOT to raise from venture! remember that. It's OK to build a business with traditional funds. We need to use the right financing mechanisms to accelerate the right companies and the right founders and innovation! #climatetech #technology #venturecapital #venturedebt #sustainability #greeneconomy #investments

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Not all of the investments that Kindred Capital VC makes can be a 13 year sourcing process.... but... this is one of those very fortunate moments in which a relationship that started over a decade ago in the Bay Area where the brilliant A-H. Hleileh and I overlapped has now turned into an incredibly exciting opportunity for Kindred to lead his and Ron Holifield's first institutional round at Civic Marketplace. We believe: 1. Local government procurement is one of the most underserved areas in technology today, and has failed to keep pace with the private sector. They deserve better. 2. This is a huge opportunity, with US local governments spending alone amounting to over $1.5 trillion in annual spend, which is only going in one direction... 3. As the brilliant Kip Harkness shared with me in our diligence phase, "this industry moves at the speed of trust." And this is a unique founding team with A-H. Hleileh and Ron Holifield at the helm who bring together two critical ingredients: 1) decades of trust-building within this domain, and 2) a team who can build beautiful and scalable technology platforms. Onwards!! 🚀

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As we scale climate tech solutions, we need to carefully consider the impact to local communities. Thanks Evan Halper for a great front page article in today's The Washington Post that highlights this issue with a proposed CO2 storage plan in Montana. Injecting and storing CO2 in porous geological formations sounds scary, particularly given the negative side effects of fracking. I think the concerned ranchers in Montana are completely justified. But, we need to solve the climate crisis, and CO2 removal is an important part of the solution. This issue will continue as more and more first-of-a-kind (FOAK) projects break ground and expand. Early, frequent, and transparent community engagement is critical. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climateaction

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THIS WEDNESDAY: 🗓 Join us for a discussion on our Climate Career Standards White Paper and the skills it takes to succeed in a climate career. You’ll hear from Meghan Daniels, the White Paper Principal Consultant, Neil Farrell of Farrell Associates | Certified B Corp™, a leading ESG and sustainability recruiter, and Diego Espinosa, one of the most experienced climate career coaches in the space. Together, they will spotlight the results of our interviews with 35 hiring managers, recruiters, and climate professionals and explain what it means for you. ❓ The discussion will be followed by a Q&A session, so get your questions ready! Whether you are recruiting or hiring in the climate field and want to improve how you screen for candidates or seeking to pivot into a new climate career and want to know what skills to highlight, this discussion will help you identify the day-one skills that sustainability and decarbonization professionals need to succeed. Don’t miss this unparalleled, free coaching session that can help guide your job search and recruitment strategy toward success. Find the registration link below. ⬇ #FreeOnlineEvent #ClimateCareers

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Thanks for the interview Connie Loizos. More to come about investments yet to be announced and the founders who are working every day to build in these spaces. Excited to have shared the gamut across where we invest from Earth to TimberEye to Monaire. We're investing out of $440m under management across 3 funds and are thankful every day that we started this focused fund to partner with entrepreneurs who are ready to turn the last bastion of old world industries into tech sectors. The physical world is driven by huge industries that need to change...and not simply by completing work incrementally better or by fitting into existing buying cycles and budgets. Many of our companies are totally reinventing how products are made or services are delivered and their customers win. We want to see more of this in every sector including industrial, transportation, energy, defense, space, manufacturing to name a few. https://lnkd.in/e-TqpvFh

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WVC:E Maternity Research - 2 mins appreciated! 🙏🙏🙏 We’re conducting research into the experiences of women in VC having children, taking parental leave and returning to work. We will be gathering insights on industry issues and best practice, which will be shared back to the community. We’d 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐞 if you could take 2 minutes to complete this anonymous form if you have any views on this topic. Link in the comments.

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WE DID IT! After 2 years of pushing through the biggest downturn in VC in decades, Matthew Stotts 🌐 and I made it to the finish line with Fund I! We couldn't have done this without One Small Planet (Will Peterffy and Jack Wielebinski 🙏), Regen Network and Regen Foundation (Austin Wade Smith Gregory Landua and Will Szal), and a dozen other family offices and angels who believed that we can build a nature-positive economy utilizing our eye for software and our history as founders from day 1 A shout out goes to all of our founders (only four announced today, but watch this space - there are multitudes!) who trusted us enough to give us a spot on their cap table for this 10-15 year journey. This is the best job in the world, and it's because we get to work with people like you who have weird ideas in the best possible way. Using Bitcoin as anchor base load to decarbonize residential housing in America's most expensive energy market? Make every complex supply chain legible to machines so we can find and eliminate deforestation in commodity supply chains? Build deeply liquid environmental asset markets to price ecosystem services, on a blockchain, that no one needs to know is a blockchain? I'm so excited to get to work on this stuff for the next 10-15 years minimum, and to see what we can accelerate with our tiny fund in the next 5-6 years as we approach 2030 Onward! https://lnkd.in/gy3B-DFe

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Corporate investments in climate-tech have consistently increased since 2005, even when other sources of investment declined. The startups they invest in are more likely to achieve a successful exit. Public grants are not significantly associated with exits on their own but are likely to act as catalysts for high-risk startups. Publicly funded startups exit at a higher rate with the addition of corporate investment (155% increase) compared with other private investment (78% increase). #climatetech #corporateVC #venturecapital

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Mindful mountain biking is more than just a personal hobby for me—it aligns with my passion for transitioning into the realm of climate change solutions. Check out this insightful read on Nature's Heart-Shaped Wave to dive deeper into the connection between our actions and the environment. #climatechange #climatechangesolutions #climatepolicy #nativeplants #biodiversity #vote #nature https://lnkd.in/gQnsiYVJ

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