Temasek Holdings is taking part in a new fund under Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate-focused investor founded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
Temasek, already an existing co-investor to several other Gates-backed ventures, is deepening its partnership, as Breakthrough Energy Ventures adds adaption to its investment categories.
This new fund by Breakthrough Energy Ventures is called Select, and is focused on helping late-stage clean-tech start-ups scale and build new facilities, with an eye on markets including Asia.
The size of Select has yet to be announced. Besides Temasek, other investors are expected.
To date, Breakthrough Energy Ventures has already raised more than US$2 billion via three funds, as indicated on its website.
They are BEV I, which has a size of US$1 billion, and BEV II, which has US$1.25 billion. There’s also BEV Europe, which has a size of €100 million.
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The money has been put to work in more than 90 “cutting-edge companies.”
Temasek, besides holding stakes in various large public companies in the traditional industries of finance and transportation, has in recent years been an active investor in deep-tech start-ups across the world.
Some of these investments are in companies in nuclear energy, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, hydrogen and nanotechnologies.
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In an interview with the MIT Technology Review, Eric Toone, technical lead for Breakthrough Energy Ventures’ investment committee, says it is “increasingly clear that adaptation will need to play a major role as global emissions continue to rise and the planet continues to warm.”
“Mitigation’s just not going to get us there fast enough, and suffering is unacceptable,” he says. Toone is referencing John Holdren, President Barack Obama’s former science advisor, who said that there are three ways to respond to climate change: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering.
“So while our focus will continue to be on mitigation, we will expand our scope to include adaptation,” Toone adds.
The new fund, Select, will mainly provide “large-scale, follow-on” funds to enable companies to move ahead with demonstration projects. These are built to test and optimize technologies on larger scales, though not yet commercial ones.
According to Toone, the funding will go mostly, but not exclusively, to Breakthrough’s existing portfolio companies
