Impact Tech | October 27, 2021

Fifty Years raises $90 million for high-impact bets on deep tech

Dennis Price
ImpactAlpha Editor

Dennis Price

ImpactAlpha, Oct. 27 – San Francisco-based venture firm Fifty Years’ early bets on “deep tech” include chemical decarbonization firm Solugen, now valued at $1.8 billion, satellite internet company Astranis, valued at $1.4 billion, and lab-grown meat producer Upside Foods, formerly known as Memphis Meats.

In an earlier interview, founding partner Seth Bannon said Fifty Years wants to “put a stake into the heart” of the notion “that big tech approaches to impact” are not a great approach. “You can find these profit models that sync so beautifully with these impact models.”

Fifty Years’ said in a blog post that its $90 million third fund is “exclusively for founders building insanely ambitious, incredibly hard, and radically important companies to solve the world’s biggest problems.”

  • Grooming impact unicorns. Fifty Years tapped 44 founders of unicorn tech companies as limited partners in the fund, including the founders Stripe, Spotify and GitHub, as well as Solugen and Astranis. The focus of the new fund: Climate tech, synthetic biology, platform therapeutics, healthcare, connectivity and space. The firm said, “We’re also excited by possibilities enabled by Web3,” the decentralized internet built on blockchain and peer-to-peer nodes.