Angel investing for impact: How to navigate real climate tech opportunities

Join a panel of female angel investors in climate, drawn from across the Carbon13 community.

This webinar is an introduction for women new to startup investing (known as “angel investing”), and also to current angels looking to add climatetech to their portfolio.

On the agenda:

• How to become an angel investor – the important first steps
• How to assess early stage climate startups on their future potential on carbon reduction and impact
• Why climatetech is an investable sector, where impact doesn’t mean reduced returns.

The panel will be hosted by Cherry Swayne, angel investor, founder, podcast host and climate super connector. Guest panellists tbc.

The panelists:

Kelly Price, Co-Founder and CEO @Agreed Earth

A native of Texas and serial ‘intrapreneur’, Kelly has spent most of her life heading west – first to California to attend Stanford University, where she earned her BA in Human Biology and MA in East Asian Studies, then to East Asia, where she put her new-found Japanese and Chinese languages skills to good use in a career in pharmaceutical marketing research. Kelly worked first in Tokyo then Shanghai, leading regional teams within the marketing research firm Synovate (now IPSOS). In 2010 she was headhunted to move west again, this time to London to start up an oncology-focused business unit within another firm. Seven years and one executive MBA later, she decided that the planet needed her help more than big pharma. Since then, she’s worked and consulted for clean tech start-ups that are trying to solve climate change. In 2021, she joined the first cohort of Carbon13, where she met her two co-founders. They combined their complementary backgrounds to form Agreed Earth, a clean tech startup on a mission to help farmers rewarded for reducing their reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser.

Tessa Clarke, Co-founder & CEO of OLIO

Tessa is Co-Founder & CEO of Olio, a female co-founded app tackling the climate crisis by solving the problem of waste in the home & local community. Olio does this by connecting people with their neighbours so they can give away rather than throw away their spare food and other household items, and lend and borrow instead of buying brand new. They also have over 100,000 volunteers who collect unsold food from local businesses such as Tesco, Iceland and Holland & Barrett, and redistribute it to the community via the Olio app. Olio has grown to over 7 million users in 63 countries and its impact has been widely recognised, most notably by the United Nations who highlighted Olio as a “beacon” for the world, and by Vivatech who awarded Olio “Next European Unicorn”. Tessa has raised over $50m in equity financing for Olio from a combination of angels, venture capital funds and impact funds.

Cherry Swayne, Founder @Above and Beyond Recruitment and Angel Investor

Cherry is the Founder of Above and Beyond Recruitment, facilitating the growth of pioneering companies who are solving the climate crisis. She has over 15 years’ experience working with Founders and helping them to build out their teams across Product, Engineering, Commercial and Operations. Cherry is also an active Angel Investor with a specific focus on investing in female-founded climate tech start-ups.

Why are angel investors crucial to the climate emergency?

As the earth’s tipping points careen towards us, it is crucial that we scale the solutions that can really make an impact on carbon emissions. This means investing in early stage startups to give them the strongest springboard to growth.

Just as the climate crisis is escalating, the economy’s demand for solutions is seeing exponential growth: investment into climate startups in Europe totalled $20B in 2023, and the sector is seeing stronger trends than other sectors during the 2023 VC winter.

Why do female investors have a unique role to play?

We’re missing women from the investment ecosystem for various reasons: lower visibility means women just don’t have role models to follow – which this webinar wants to change. There are also systemic inequalities, exacerbated by new UK Gov directives (which we’ll explore on the webinar).

This matters, because women are more likely to invest in women. Fewer female angels means fewer female founders, locking out brilliant scientific discoveries, or preventing solutions to problems invisible to the men holding the purse strings.

Lack of female angels prevents both female investors and founders from having a voice in the reshaping of our economy. Climate change disproportionately affects women worldwide, we can’t let the world’s response make this worse.

If we want to support women on the front line of the climate crisis, then we need to invest in female founders AND we need to grow the number of female investors.

Judging return x impact

But even for those who are accostomed to angel investing, the climate horizontal is unusual because investors must both assess the commercial potential of the idea, but also its potential carbon impact. The two should be intrinsically linked: the more carbon the company can reduce, the more valuable it will be.

These startups are working on world-changing solutions such as carbon negative concrete, robotics, bio-based materials, carbon capture and regenerative agriculture. Solutions the world’s economy is desperate for.

What is an angel investor?

Angel investors are simply people who invest in early stage startups in exchange for equity – to cash-strapped founders they often appear heaven sent! Usually this is the first round of fundraising for a startup. You can read more about angels on the British Business Bank website. The UK has a world class angel investment scene, underpinned by the government’s tax scheme called The Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, universally known as SEIS. One of the strongest benefits is the ability to receive half of the <£100,000 investment as tax relief, a strong incentive for many investors.

About Carbon13

Carbon13 is the Venture Builder for the climate emergency. We support founders deeply committed to fighting the climate crisis through entrepreneurship. We invest in the startups built through our programmes that have demonstrated to us a potential to reduce emissions by at least 10 million tonnes per year when at scale.

Since 2021, we have invested into 64 startups – 60% of which have at least one female founder (above the industry average of c.17%). We make most of our UK-based investments through our SEIS Fund. Click here to learn more or to speak to us directly.