Murat Aktihanoglu, co-founder and managing partner at Remarkable Ventures, joined me on a recent episode of The Impact to discuss his journey in venture capital and climate tech investments as well as break down how Remarkable Ventures Climate Fund is investing with a focus on decarbonizing across sectors.
Jeff Gitterman: What made you drive into climate from being a generalist investor?
Murat Akihanoglu: For the past 15 years, we’ve been investing as a generalist VC fund. We made 360 investments and around four or five years ago we realized climate is a huge financial opportunity. It’s actually the largest financial opportunity in the history of humankind; it is a huge transition.
We started investing with our generalist funds into climate companies. And as we learned more about the climate space, we realized it’s such a huge opportunity. We went to our anchor [limited partners] and raised a climate fund.
JG: How is it going?
MA: Great. We already made seven investments with our climate fund, and they’re all very exciting companies, growing fast. Their valuations are increasing constantly. We also made more than 50 climate investments with our other funds, with our pre-seed fund, and follow-on funds. So overall, I personally know, I’m a hundred percent sure, this is the best time to invest in climate tech startups.
JG: What excites you this year about the climate tech space?
MA: Right now, we need capital in the climate space. For example, last year, only 2% of philanthropic capital overall globally went into climate; we need to increase this. Even if we get 1% of the $230 billion, it just changes everything. We would have the new technologies we need and we would have a better chance of getting to where we need to get to survive.
JG: What kind of interesting companies are you seeing or interesting trends in the industry? Can you share with us?
MA: As everybody knows and sees, data centers are being built, and they need energy. So we are investing in climate tech startups that are enabling data centers to be able to run on the grid and connect to the grid. We just invested in a company doing that, and we are excited about the U.S. grid. After 20 years, the load is increasing incredibly fast. So we are investing in technology that’s going to enable us to keep going.
And we are also looking at the transportation. We are looking at built environments, and we’re also looking at climate fin-tech, insure-tech and data analytics spaces. So we are very excited.
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