DCVC co-managing partner Zachary Bogue speaks at the Future of Innovation: Artificial Intelligence conference on Thursday, June 22, 2017 in San Francisco, CA.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Zachary Bogue co-founded DCVC, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, in 2011. Google, twitter, Amazon When microsoftDCVC invests in algorithmic finance, cybersecurity, smart agriculture, space access and intelligence, and climate resilience technology.
Investing in climate technology has social benefits, but DCVC does not invest for ideological reasons.
on the contrary.
“There’s a bucket of investing that we call ethical investing, and it’s where people invest in things they know they should invest in, or don’t invest in things they know they shouldn’t invest in, and they “We’re doing it for ethical or moral reasons,” Bogue told CNBC in an interview late last month. doesn’t do that.”
“My LP is a big institution, a university endowment, a large charitable trust that runs a hospital,” Borg said, referring to a limited partner or investor in a venture capital firm. “They give me money. Unless I give it back, they can’t run the hospital. So at DCVC, we take the profit motive and the profit motive very seriously.”
There are a lot of these trillion-dollar problems in climate space. And if we can solve them, we can have a huge positive impact on the world while building a large and successful capitalist enterprise.
Zach Bogue
Co-Founder DCVC
The theme of all DCVC investments is to help entrepreneurs solve trillion-dollar problems with computing power.
“There are a lot of these trillion-dollar problems in climate space, and if we can solve them, we can have a huge positive impact on the world while building large, successful capitalist companies.” “Our goal is to build a large, successful, publicly traded company,” Borg told CNBC.
When it comes to investing in climate technology, Bogue told CNBC that DCVC is doing exactly the same kind of due diligence it does in any other deal.
“There’s no free pass because someone just happens to be solving a climate hard problem, not a robotics or satellite or biotech hard problem,” Borg told CNBC. “They all have to meet our high internal standards when undertaking these deals.”
I’m not saying that Borg is indifferent to climate change. He grew up in Denver, where everyday life is defined by its proximity to nature, and studied environmental science and public policy at Harvard University. Also, DCVC has been investing in climate technology since 2012, long before it became trendy. Its first climate investment was in TempoDB. TempoDB has created a kind of time series database for geothermal energy among others.
“We’ve been quietly investing in climate for 10 years, but we’ve tried not to talk too much about it,” Bogue told CNBC. It is now accepted.”
According to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the amount of money being put into climate technology is steadily increasing. In the year ended 30 June 2021, $87.5 billion from venture capital and private equity went into climate technology, up 210% from the previous 12 months.
Most recently, more than $60 billion of the $87.5 billion occurred in the first six months of 2021. Transactions are getting bigger in this area as well. His average climate-related tech deal value in the first six months of 2021 was $96 million, up from his $27 million in the same six months of 2020.
DCVC Hot Climate Topics: Nuclear, Water, Methane, Geothermal
Borg is interested in investing in nuclear energy. But DCVC has about $3 billion in total assets under management, which is far less than the cost of building a conventional large-scale nuclear power plant, so it invests in less-capitalized nuclear companies.
One example is Oklo, which plans to build a micro-nuclear reactor. If the plan is successful, the revenue from the power purchase agreement will be able to fund further growth, he said.
“Advanced fission is the quintessential deep tech venture capital problem,” Borg told CNBC. … All these elements are the perfect recipe for venture capital.”
Water-saving technology is also a big focus.
“Water is rapidly coming to the fore as a climate problem, and as a problem that can be addressed with deep technology,” Bogue said. For example, DCVC recently led an investment in wastewater reprocessing startup He ZwitterCo. ZwitterCo is working to scale up membrane technology that allows industrial companies and large farms to reuse wastewater, reducing their use of fresh water.
Borg is also very interested in finding solutions to minimize methane emissions. Methane is far more potent than carbon dioxide in its impact on global warming, but it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as well as carbon dioxide.
“If we can stop the leakage of methane, it will have an immediate positive impact, climatically. It takes more time to perfect,” Borg told CNBC.
Kairos Aerospace, a DCVC-invested company, images methane leaks from airborne satellites and provides leak data to oil and gas companies. “This is a very easy problem to solve, a high impact easy problem to solve,” said Bogue.
DCVC has also invested in CH4 Global, which is working to grow the aquaculture ecosystem of Asparagopsis seaweed, a seaweed native to Australia and New Zealand. CH4 is ingested from certain seaweeds and supplemented in the food of ruminant animals such as cows, goats, sheep and deer to reduce methane emissions from burping.
Another area of climate technology investment mentioned by Borg is geothermal, which is heat generated from the core of the earth. DCVC recently led a $138 million funding round in his Google-client Fervo, a tech giant. Borg says much of the same geological and engineering talent currently used in the oil and gas industry could be transferred to geothermal. And unlike renewable energy, which only produces energy when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, geothermal he is a 24/7 baseload power source.
