Climate Finance | April 26, 2021

Congruent Ventures raises $175 million for early-stage climate tech

Amy Cortese
ImpactAlpha Editor

Amy Cortese

ImpactAlpha, April 26 – Trillion-dollar green infrastructure plans and corporate net-zero pledges?  “Fuel on the fire or, these days, electrons in the battery,” says Congruent’s Abe Yokell. “It’s only adding to the velocity of change.”

Yokell, with co-founder Joshua Posamentier, blew past the firm’s $125 million target for Congruent Fund II to raise $175 million for pre-seed, seed and Series A rounds of ventures solving climate-related challenges.

Congruent’s first early stage climate-tech fund, launched in 2016, invested in 29 companies across energy, food and agriculture, transportation and sustainability.

Limited partners in the new fund include Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, UC Investments, affiliates of Prelude Ventures, Three Cairns Group, Grantham Environmental Trust, and Surdna Foundation.

Smart tech

Congruent has made seven investments from Fund II, including Parallel Systems, a maker of electrified autonomous electric rail cars, and Hippo Harvest, which is using machine learning and robotics to optimize greenhouse growing systems.

A dozen of the firm’s three dozen portfolio companies to date use machine learning or AI.