In response to a latest Dealroom report on the Spanish tech ecosystem, the mixed enterprise worth of Spanish startups surpassed €100 billion in 2023. Within the newest affirmation of this upward development, Madrid-based VC fund Seaya has closed Seaya Andromeda, an ‘Article 9’ €300 million climate-tech fund based mostly out of Madrid.
Article 9 refers back to the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosures Regulation Act, which places the onus on funding companies to make sure their investments have a optimistic impression on society or the atmosphere.
Seaya has been round for 12 years, primarily specializing in mission-driven startups in Europe and LatAm. The brand new ‘Andromeda’ fund will put money into progress firms which focus on vitality transition, decarbonization, sustainable meals worth chains, and the round economic system.
The agency mentioned the brand new local weather fund will deploy between €7M-€40M as a primary examine; will retain capital for follow-ons; and plans to make 25 investments by the top of 2027. To date, 5 investments have been comprised of the fund (see under).
Seaya itself was launched again in 2013 by former non-public fairness investor Beatriz González, who received into local weather and sustainable investing after backing a recycled clothes line. She beforehand labored for Morgan Stanley, Excel Companions and Darby Abroad Investments, within the US. After that she grew to become a director of Telefonica’s pension fund, main its different belongings program.
Below González, Seaya has invested in local weather tech firms together with Biome Makers, Readability.ai, Crowdfarming, Descartes, RatedPower, Samara, and electrical automotive charging stations firm Wallbox (which went public on the New York Inventory Alternate in 2021).
Over a name, I requested González if she thought there’s a explicit benefit in having a fund out of Spain tacking local weather tech, given the nation’s proximity to a number of the worst results of a altering local weather, resembling excessive warmth, drought, wildfires and storms.
“It’s query,” she mentioned. “If you consider vitality transition and decarbonisation, coming from Southern Europe, notably Spain, we do see that we’re higher suited to two causes. One is as a result of Southern Europe is having extra excessive warmth waves. So clearly, there may be far more social consciousness. However we additionally suppose that we now have aggressive benefits within the industries that we’re focusing on.
“We’ve been pioneers in renewable vitality so we now have the expertise and we now have the massive firms within the manufacturing of auto elements. So we now have an enormous industrial base. The identical with agriculture and actual property publicity. So we do consider that we now have the business experience and expertise coming from Southern Europe, particularly, and Spain, that does give us a little bit of benefit.”
I additionally requested what sort of experience they’ve that may permit them to make deep-tech funding selections about local weather tech.
“Now we have a few engineers so we now have that in-house experience, however in our LP community we now have massive European Union banks like Santander which do mission finance for vitality or factories. So accessing that information helps us do the due diligence and transfer a lot quicker.”
So far, Seaya has used that information to put money into a number of related firms. Spain-based augmented-reality ability coaching answer, Seabery, for instance, developed AR software program and {hardware} for coaching welders, that means they don’t want to make use of actual welding to coach, thus lowering carbon emissions by 95% per welding session.
It has additionally invested in UK-based AI-powered waste administration startup Recycleye in February 2022, which builds robots to kind garbage for recycling.
In San Francisco, the agency invested in Pachama, a climate-tech firm that makes use of knowledge to confirm the standard of carbon credit and allow the launch of latest carbon credit score initiatives.
The information of the brand new fund follows different indicators of the Southern European funding renaissance. Solely final week Plus Companions launched in Barcelona aiming to drum up a $30M-$50M fund.
The annual “State of European Tech” report for 2023 additionally discovered Spain’s ecosystem to be in fourth place general and mentioned it had the highest variety of startup fundings final 12 months.
