In line with a latest Dealroom report on the Spanish tech ecosystem, the overall worth of Spanish startups will exceed €100 billion in 2023. The newest affirmation of this upward development is the Madrid enterprise capital fund Seaya, which closed Seaya Andromeda, “Article 9”. The €300 million local weather expertise fund is predicated in Madrid.
Article 9 refers back to the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, which imposes an obligation on funding firms to make sure that their investments have a constructive affect on society and the atmosphere.
Seaya has been round for 12 years, primarily specializing in startups in Europe and Latin America. The brand new Andromeda fund will put money into rising firms specializing in vitality transition, decarbonisation, sustainable meals worth chains and the round financial system.
The agency mentioned the brand new local weather fund would deploy between €7 million and €40 million as a primary examine; will retain capital for follow-up actions; and plans to make 25 investments by the top of 2027. Thus far, the fund has made 5 investments (see beneath).
Seaya itself was launched again in 2013 by former non-public fairness investor Beatriz González, who grew to become concerned in local weather and sustainable investing after backing a clothes line comprised of recycled supplies. She beforehand labored at 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 various property program.
Led by González Seay, it has invested in local weather expertise firms, together with Biome Makers, Readability.ai, Crowdfarming, Descartes, RatedPower, Samara, and electrical automobile charging firm Wallbox (which went public on the New York Inventory Alternate in 2021 12 months).
Through the name, I requested Gonzalez if she noticed a selected benefit in having a local weather expertise fund from Spain, given the nation’s proximity to a few of the worst results of local weather change, reminiscent of excessive warmth, drought, wildfires and storms.
“That is a very good query,” she mentioned. “If you concentrate on the vitality transition and decarbonisation from Southern Europe, particularly from Spain, we see that we’re extra appropriate for 2 causes. Certainly one of them is that southern Europe is experiencing extra excessive warmth waves. So clearly there may be much more social consciousness. However we additionally consider we now have a aggressive benefit within the areas we deal with.
“We have been a pioneer in renewable vitality, so we now have the expertise and the large auto components firms. So we now have a big industrial base. The identical with agriculture and actual property publicity. So we predict we now have business expertise and expertise coming from Southern Europe, particularly Spain, which provides us a little bit of an edge.”
I additionally requested what experience they’ve that can allow them to make sound funding choices relating to local weather expertise.
“We’ve got a few engineers so we now have our personal expertise, however in our LP community we now have massive European Union banks like Santander which are concerned in financing tasks for vitality or factories. So getting access to that information helps us do our due diligence and transfer a lot sooner.”
Thus far, Seaya has used this information to put money into a number of related firms. Spanish augmented actuality abilities coaching resolution Seabery, for instance, has developed augmented actuality software program and {hardware} to coach welders, that means they needn’t use an actual weld to coach, lowering carbon emissions by 95% per welding session.
In February 2022, it additionally invested in UK-based waste administration startup Recycleye, which builds robots to type trash for recycling.
In San Francisco, the agency invested in Pachama, a local weather expertise firm that makes use of knowledge to check the standard of carbon credit and allow new carbon credit score tasks.
Information of the brand new fund follows different indicators of a funding renaissance in southern Europe. Simply final week, Plus Companions launched in Barcelona with the aim of elevating a fund of between $30 million and $50 million.
The annual State of European Know-how 2023 report additionally discovered that Spain’s ecosystem ranked fourth total, and obtained essentially the most startup funding final 12 months.
