Cerulean Ventures backs founders building the nature-positive economy. The company invests in projects focused on redesigning the economy around zero marginal cost energy, circularity, and nature-positivity.

Cerulean Ventures

Cerulean Ventures is a pre-seed and seed stage venture capital firm investing in software and asset-light companies for decarbonization, with a focus on energy and nature markets.

So excited for our 50th transaction, with the Pink Recycling team!  And a double whammy on impact (circularity and women's empowerment).  

Damn I love this job!!

I'm speaking at ClimateLaunchpad at J.P. Morgan, Palo Alto at 5p on Tues, Aug. 20. I'll be joining Stacey King, Advisor, California Innovation Fund and Terry Kelly, Partner, Dorsey & Whitney LLP to dive into climate tech investing strategies for scaling the solutions we need now.

ClimateLaunchpad is a global organization supporting entrepreneurs with new business ideas in climate and sustainability. https://cleanleap.org/

James C. Scott, the Yale political scientist and anthropologist, died last month, and his writings, particularly Seeing Like a State, had a profound effect on me. 

One can say they permanently scrambled my brain in a good way and made me a totally different person (ask my wife 🤣, who is probably sick of hearing about him).

For those of us who post about indigenous rights, the biodiversity crisis, climate change, and technological solutions thereof, I think Scott's work is critical to understand, especially if we aim to spark new economies, markets, and solutions to these things.

I want to share a few concepts that I think can be fruitful to those of us working in this space. In Seeing Like a State, Scott mentions two, what he calls legibility or the act of making people, land, and exchange visible to a bureaucratic system via surveys, census, etc, and metis, or traditional / practical knowledge that can only be gained from direct, tacit interaction with the world. 

In one part of the book, Scott shares what the Prussian state forestry service did when it started to consolidate around the modern german state. The early german state viewed its forests primarily through the fiscal lens of revenue needs, the revenue yield of the timber that might be extracted annually. Discarded was nearly everything else: grasses, flowers, lichens, ferns, mosses, shrubs, and vines. Reptiles, birds, amphibians, and innumerable species of insects, gone, as well as most species of fauna, except those that interested the crown’s gamekeepers. 

From the state's point of view, this was undertaken in the interest of "optimizing" the variable of production of timber, and everything else was seen as surplus to requirements. Scott calls this heroic simplification - simplifying a phenomenon after making it legible so that only the parts that "matter" are left. The new forest was easy to maintain, easier to manipulate for experiments, was amenable to tables (later, spreadsheets), and it provided a steady stream of a commodity, and in time the german model of Norwegian spruce trees managed via scientific forestry became the model around the world.

This is an extremely top-down, bureaucratic power-driven view however, with immense negative tradeoffs, and these were proven out over time - the forests died after the 2nd generation. Mostly due to the neglect of metis, or local and pragmatic knowledge. 

We're at a similar precipice here in our current time with our focus on carbon, to the detriment of the people stewarding ecosystems, biodiversity, and the agency and autonomy of communities and the complex information they can process over the top-down simplifying view of states and global agreements. 

Throughout this month, I'll start talking a bit about what Scott's work portends for those of us looking to support more of the former. 

see the comments for some of my favorite links on his work!

Renoster is aware of and saddened by the allegations highlighted in the recent Washington Post article regarding the manipulation of Brazilian carbon projects. These serious claims involve issues of improper land tenure arrangements and insufficient community consent. Given our commitment to deep transparency and rigorous science, we are actively conducting a thorough update of the implicated projects we have reviewed so that they meet the highest standards for accuracy and ethics.

Our commitment extends beyond quantitative assessments of climate impact. We take seriously the principle of Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) and support community rights. As we collaborate with FUNAI and indigenous rights groups, we are dedicated to refining our methods to properly advocate for responsible forest carbon management activities.

Read more in our full statement: https://lnkd.in/gZ4F5xPd

Why we invested in Asoba

We see incredible opportunity in Asoba's strategic alignment with the transformative changes occurring in South Africa's electricity sector. With evolving  regulations that will transition the country to a competitive energy market, Asoba's AI and machine learning platform is poised to play a pivotal role. By enabling utilities and market participants to optimize their decisions through accurate load forecasting and automated decision-making, Asoba supports the shift towards a more integrated, connected, and distributed smart grid. 

Founder Shingai Samudzi's background in energy strategy and technology, coupled with the team's expertise in AI and machine learning, positions Asoba uniquely to capitalize on this evolving landscape. 

We are thrilled to partner with Asoba and are excited about what we'll help the team build next!

You can read the full article on our LinkedIn (link in our bio)

Thrilled to be partnering with Cerulean Ventures and looking forward to our journey ahead! This collaboration represents a significant step forward for us, and we are excited about the innovative opportunities and growth it will bring. Together, we aim to achieve remarkable milestones in providing African communities with access to clean and sustainable energy. Stay tuned for more updates as we embark on this exciting journey!

Renoster put out a lot this month!

🎱 Tune into our upcoming webinar with our very own Elias Ayrey (PhD) and CarbonPool on Monday, register here: https://lnkd.in/g-7BwsHV

🔖 Read our join whitepaper on why the carbon market needs a new approach to permanence and how insurance can help: https://lnkd.in/g-Tt4QWN

🌳 We also made 3 project reviews public in conjuction with Farouq Ghandour and Neutral's new REDD product, allowing anyone to buy high quality REDD+ credits from projects in Colombia. 

Rio Jacareacanga (ER130): https://lnkd.in/guZ7xWZE
PAZcífico Sur (ER114): https://lnkd.in/gXkrSpmX
Juina REDD+ (ER139): https://lnkd.in/gRD9r7sB

⚡️ That's not to mention our new Global Database of NBS project offset boundaries, mentions in the The Guardian and more. Read it all below in our 005 Newsflash.

More to come, so stay tuned!

#carbonmarkets #mangroves #bufferpools 

Eilís O’Keefe Anna Lerner Nesbitt Mark Trexler Margaret Morales

Today we're excited to announce our latest investment in the energy sector — Asoba, founded by Shingai Samudzi, based in Cape Town, South Africa! (link in the comments)

South Africa has been facing energy struggles for nearly 20 years, with load shedding and grid reliability leading to blackouts across the country. If there's one thing that's a certainty for development and thriving, it's access to energy— there's a nearly 1:1 correlation between GDP growth and energy access.

However, in much the same way that the African continent leapfrogged telecom infrastructure and rapidly adopted mobile internet and fintech, we think there's an opportunity in energy infrastructure on the small, massively distributed scale. What is needed is data, coordination, and the ability to underwrite and take on the risk necessary to bring massively profitable and life-changing assets to market —

and that's exactly what Shingai and team are building, starting in South Africa. We believe the team's background in machine learning in the solar industry will be a huge boon and unfair advantage as they go to market to train optimization models on energy use and help add balance and reliability to the SA grid. 

We see a bright future powered by solar, geothermal, and hydro assets, coordinated by hard-to-get energy data, backstopped and hedged by deep energy markets, allowing people to thrive across the continent in partnership with state utilities, power producers, and grid operators. 

Onward and upward!

Joshua Romisher, CFA Abby Stern Dr. Emile-Reyn Engelbrecht Matthew Stotts 🌐 Duval Van Zijl chiwoneso mashapure Gordon Gould Amer Vohora Jack Wielebinski Rene Reinsberg Moritz Seidel Dr. Holger Sprengel Pablo Alonso Aja Miles Ward Tom O'Keefe Michael Smith

Excited to officially announce Popular Power's Pre-Seed funding round! Super grateful to my partner Manuel Wiechers and to our starting rockstar team members Juan David Behar Rodriguez and Abraham L.. 

We are so grateful to have awesome investors on board-- some of whom we've had the privilege to get to know closely through the industry in the past several years. We are honored to have on board Amplifica Capital, Cerulean Ventures, Mercy Corps Ventures, 0BS... and special shoutout to long-time supporters turned investors Sarah Valdovinos, Natalie Vergara Giron @ Mercy Corps Ventures, and Jay Dunn at Dunn Family Impact Capital :) We appreciate you all.

https://lnkd.in/gU_9duz2

Very happy Popular Power to announce our pre-seed investment round and the launch of our new monitoring platform! 

It’s been very rewarding to start a new venture with a rockstar partner Morgan Babbs and our growing team!

And very grateful to our investors Amplifica Capital, Dunn Family Impact Capital, 0BS, Cerulean Ventures  @MercyCorpsVentures, Sarah Valdovinos

Lots of work to do to continue to enable the energy transition to distributed solar!

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