Silence desires to shake issues up in the case of local weather tech funding. This new angel-style VC agency has already raised $35 million and plans to make dozens of small investments in local weather startups to assist them apply the tech startup playbook.
The Silence group is led by Borja Moreno de los Rios who acts as a solo normal companion for Silence’s authentic fund. Earlier than beginning Silence, he was a enterprise companion at FJ Labs. He additionally based Merlin, an hourly jobs market within the U.S.
With Silence, Borja desires to use his expertise to local weather funding. He has surrounded himself with a group of tech consultants who’ve all finished the work to grow to be local weather consultants as effectively.
“I’ve been very related to nature and the atmosphere ever since I used to be a toddler. I grew up water-skiing competitively from a really younger age. Since I used to be 5 – 6 years previous, I spent each weekend and all my holidays by lakes and within the countryside,” Borja advised me.
“However as I used to be rising by means of my tech profession, I all the time had a watch on making an attempt to study as a lot as potential so I might actually have an effect on the local weather tech stage. So after my final firm bought acquired, I knew that I needed to do one thing in local weather,” he added later within the dialog.
A silent companion
For the reason that first shut of the fund in June 2022, Silence has already invested in 22 completely different corporations. They apply the identical funding technique (with a couple of exceptions). Silence doesn’t lead rounds and doesn’t take board seats.
This manner, they consider they’ll stay impartial and unbiased over the long term — identical to an angel investor, however with a bigger ticket measurement. “The common ticket measurement is round $300k. We make investments from pre-seed to Collection A and we make investments something from $100k as much as $700k,” Borja stated. There will likely be some follow-on investments for essentially the most promising investments.
In addition they don’t compete with prime tier VC funds, that means that they’ll get invited to take part in very aggressive offers. “We needed to discover a method in order that we weren’t competing with the present VCs,” Borja stated. As an illustration, Silence already participated in a number of rounds with well-known VC corporations, comparable to Level 9, FJ Labs, FifthWall, Firstmark Capital and Lowercarbon Capital.
I’m not going to record all portfolio corporations (examine the portfolio web page), however Silence’s portfolio corporations are constructing digital energy vegetation, vitality administration programs, dwelling vitality administration programs, financing platforms for photo voltaic tools and circularity-focused marketplaces.
“There’s one which simply grew actually quick. And we’re very proud as a result of we invested in pre-seed and we by no means lead offers. However on this case, the corporate was struggling to shut a spherical as a result of everybody was saying ‘we’ll put cash provided that you discover a lead.’ And nobody needed to be the lead. So we advised them ‘we’ll be your lead,’” Borja stated.
“It is a firm referred to as Cardino, which is a used EV market. So we invested with simply the deck, they usually’re doing like €72 million in GMV in 9 months. And now they raised a seed spherical with Level 9 main the seed. So clearly, it’s tremendous early, however thus far so good.”
Along with Borja, Sara Ramos Colmenarejo left the Hummingbird group to affix Silence. Guilherme Penna, who beforehand labored at World Founders Capital, can also be an investor at Silence. Lastly, Brendan Hayes acts because the CFO and COO for the fund.
Silence’s restricted companions embody normal companions at different VC corporations, comparable to Firstmark Capital, DST World, FJ Labs, Level 9 and Hummingbird, in addition to household places of work, profitable founders, and so forth. Total, Borja appeared like an enthusiastic investor. Although Silence desires to stay a small angel-style investor, he couldn’t cease itemizing a few of his portfolio corporations.
“There’s an organization referred to as Electryone that’s actually early that’s constructing a digital energy plant software program that we’ve invested in and we actually like,” he stated. “We additionally invested in an organization referred to as Runwise within the U.S., which mainly has constructed a know-how that integrates with the heating system in a constructing after which has sensors across the constructing and is consistently optimizing the temperature.”
Curiously, not like many local weather funds, Silence doesn’t need to take part in deep tech investments with a really long-term timeframe. Borja believes Silence’s experience is in SaaS and marketplaces.
“In the long run — I do know that is form of controversial — however, in the long run, I feel we’re going to be creating extra worth in direction of local weather by means of these safer investments than if we spend money on ten moonshots and all of them fail,” he stated.
