Pitchbook reported that specialist firms dominated the top 10 most active investors in climate tech. Data: Pitchbook; Chart: Skye Witley/Axios
In the past quarter, generalist VC firms and specialist climate firms have gone head to head in funding efforts, pushing up deal costs, according to Axios’ recent article, “Generalist VCs downshift Q2 Deployment”. But at least for the start of this year, the specialist firms seem to be grabbing more deals.
SOSV came in at the top of the list with 12 deals from January 1–June 30, 2022.
SOSV was followed by other climate tech specialist firms including Energy Impact Partners, S2G Ventures, and Agfunder. Notably, the only generalist VC firm to make the list was Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings.
Speaking of the role of large generalist firms on current investment activity, Breakthrough Energy Ventures‘ Dr. Eric Toone told Axios, “Those are the firms that have the real muscle, the real horsepower to deploy these technologies at scale, and this is not going to happen, you know, without that group of people involved in this.”
Last year, SOSV published an extensive analysis of the co-investors in SOSV’s climate tech portfolio.
The Axios list is based on PitchBook data, which recently published an analysis that showed SOSV is the #1 climate investor since 2019.