OnePlanetCapital increases the tempo of climate change venture capital investing with successful summer 2023 deployment

The OnePlanetCapital Climate Change EIS Fund has had a successful inaugural summer raise with just under £3m GBP incoming from investors and deployments into 3 new companies as well as an existing follow-on investments into portfolio company &Sisters.

In terms of new companies, OnePlanetCapital has backed innovative businesses in energy and recycling with huge potential impacts on climate change. MDFRecovery has the world’s fully scalable solution for recycling MDF – currently 200m tonnes of MDF is either burnt or send to landfill each year. Verv Energy also featured in this round. Verv provides software and hardware for air conditioning units to enable impressive energy savings – a massive global problem with as many as 40% of units running inefficiently. Finally, OnePlanetCapital also backed Electron in this round – a unique energy trading platform to facilitate grid flexibility by enabling more renewable providers to trade on its platform.

Anthony Chant, investment director at OnePlanetCapital, said of the raise, “we were really delighted to see good volumes coming into the fund in July and August as it is the first time we have raised in this period. Moving to 3 deployments per annum gives us a lot more scope to back companies and build the portfolio and also increases the flexibility of our offer to investors and IFAs. We have backed some great companies here and have taken board seats and so will be instrumental in taking them forward. We intend to follow up on July’s success with deployments in November 2023 and March 2024.”