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A couple years ago, when the pandemic was still in full swing, Raj Kapoor and Josh Felser started making some investments in climate tech startups. They called their operation Climactic, and initially they placed bets using their own money. Both are experienced founders, operators and investors, but they were new to focusing on this particular sector and began by testing the waters.
Things must have gone well, because now they’re jumping in: The firm today said it has closed a $65 million inaugural fund, using it to back founders who are starting climate tech software companies.
Both Kapoor and Felser have a long history as investors — Felser co-founded Freestyle Capital, and Kapoor spent seven years as a managing director at Mayfield Fund. They’ve also founded and sold their own software startups.
It’s a bit surprising it took the two so long to work together; their résumés are strikingly similar. Felser founded Spinner in 1997 (sold to AOL) and Crackle in 2004 (sold to Sony). He also started the #Climate nonprofit in 2014 and a public-private COVID task force during the pandemic. Kapoor was previously chief strategy officer at Lyft, and before that, he founded Snapfish (which HP bought) and FitMob (which ClassPass bought). He also started a nonprofit climate social app in 2007.
Those experiences, coupled with a growing concern for the state of Earth’s climate, led the two to form Climactic.
“If we could get the supply chains in the top 50 companies to hit their net-zero goals, rather than just talk about it, we will have the biggest impact,” Kapoor told TechCrunch+. “To get there, we think the low-hanging fruit is software, because there are a lot of efficiencies that can be gained.”
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