If anything has reached a state of emergency, it is the weather update. Venture capitalist Craig Shapiro looked at the orange skies of San Francisco as wildfires swept through 2020. For that reason, earlier this year, it introduced Shared Future Fund to invest $100,000 in a hundred startups with climate-fighting responses to replace – and do so very quickly. In other words, decisions are made within 10 to 20 days of receipt and approval of applications.
“We give them enough to get them and Array,” says Shapiro, who is the founder of the Collaborative Fund, a New York-based seed and startup venture capital fund that creatively budgets tech startups and collaborative consumption.
Shapiro’s interest in sustainability has also been sparked through its collaborative investment reports on customer products. The company manages more than $500 million in assets through five funds. climate goals,” he says.
However, the immediate inspiration was a grant-making fund created through various philanthropists at the beginning of the pandemic to revive the works of solution-oriented scientists. days. ” I thought, what a wonderful initiative,” says Shapiro. And it is clear to me that there is a similar urgency around climate change. “Why not provide small infusions to startups in the form of investments, rather than grants, that can provide catalyst capital?”The first dollars are very difficult. You have to convince someone to bet on you,” he says.
With that in mind, Shapiro reached out to his investors earlier this year and they designed a platform on the Fast Grants model, opening it up to applicants in March. INSURANCE), in order to invest a hundred until the end of the year. To date, it has been invested in 20 public limited companies.
While he’s not in a position to announce the names of the startups he’s investing in, Shapiro says he’s concentrating on 3 areas: new fabrics, i. e. more sustainable fabrics for customer products ranging from clothing to cosmetics; food and agriculture, adding soil health; and decarbonization, or generation that is helping to upgrade fossil fuels with renewable energy sources.
To speed up the verification process, Shapiro partnered with accelerators and scholarship systems focused on climate change, to further target startups affiliated with those institutions. Eventually, he plans to open it up to more applicants and also expand a fully programmatic generation for the exam. of applications. The plan is to have a new long-term fund shared each year.
Shared Future also partnered with several partners to provide support. The Goldhirsh Foundation, for example, is talking to corporations about “how to raise pure capital,” Shapiro says, while sustainable food company Sweetgreen will outline its efforts to maintain carbon neutrality through 2027 and Baniff Advisors will help recruit and hire.
Shared Future will also share a portion of its profits with the nonprofit World Central Kitchen for its billion-dollar Climate Disaster Fund.