Juniper Ventures spins off Climate Capital to invest in synthetic biology for climate

There is a disparity in investment in climate technologies: more than half of all dollars invested since 2020 have gone to energy and transportation startups. according to For Sightline Climate.

“It’s great to see these solutions doing well,” said Michael Luciani, co-founder junipertold TechCrunch. But as he mentioned, those sectors represent less than half all carbon pollution.

“The big contributors are how we make things, industry, chemicals and plastics, as well as food, agriculture and buildings,” he said. “I believe that engineering biology is the best solution that has emerged for most of these categories of problems.”

Luciani and Jennifer Kahn, Juniper’s other co-founder, have been investing in climate for years, initially as part of Climate Capital, a prolific venture fund that writes small checks to early-stage companies. Kahn told TechCrunch that they have invested in 30 companies and led the firm’s special-purpose vehicle investments before launching the new fund.

Originally, Juniper started life as Climate Capital Bio, investing in climate-focused synthetic biology startups. “As we got further down the road, we realized that what we needed to focus on was that we could be climate biotechnologists,” Luciani said. “Climate Capital is a great brand, but it’s a really generic brand, and that’s completely different from the kind of signal we want to send.”

The first Juniper fund is $10.6 million and oversubscribed, the firm told TechCrunch exclusively. Limited partners include Allocator One, an institutional fund of funds serving as family offices, foundations and anchors.

“We also have a decent number of scientists in the field that we allow our fund to invest with lower minimums, plus more than a dozen different partners from venture capital and private equity firms,” ​​Luciani said.

Juniper operates like a normal venture fund, writing checks of between $100,000 and $500,000 to scientists working to commercialize their research. Kahn said the goal is to “be the first institutional investor to help them think about starting a company.”

Some of the fund’s early investments include California Cultured, which is growing plant cells to make more sustainable coffee and chocolate, and Cache DNA, which is developing a better way to store DNA and RNA.

“We’re building a lot of data centers, and they’re not the most sustainable way for our world to grow digitally. If we stored all the information in the world today in DNA, it would only take a shoebox of DNA,” Kahn said. “The difference is huge.”