A San Francisco venture firm has raised its first fund of $150 million with a simple, clear and urgent mission: "Destroying the industries that destroy the planet."
At One Ventures closed the fund on Thursday and will support early-stage startups developing technology that promises to lighten our collective carbon footprint. It wants to invest $1 billion into climate change solutions over the next decade.
"By enabling old industries to persist without radical changes, we may protect 1,000 jobs, but at the cost of 10,000 lives,” founder Tom Chi said in a press release. “Our mission is to care about life on this planet first, and reform the outdated industries with this new foundational understanding.”
Chi was previously a founding team member of Google X, now known simply as X, which is Google's experimental moonshot research division that launched in 2010. Some of its most well-known efforts include autonomous vehicle company Waymo and healthcare laboratory Verily.
Behind At One is the conviction that current efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change are proving to be insufficient.
The Paris Climate Agreement, drafted in 2015 and effective since 2016, has nearly 200 countries that have signed onto the pledge, which calls for holding global temperature gain to at most 2 degrees Celsius over their pre-industrial levels. The United States abandoned the agreement in 2020 under then-President Donald Trump but President Joe Biden recommitted to it when he took office in January 2021.
Cutting emissions right away is crucial
But even if countries meet their existing commitments, the world is on track to warm by 2.7 degrees by 2100, the United Nations said last month. Getting anywhere close to the Paris agreement's goals will require cutting global emissions by nearly half over the next decade.
Some global leaders are calling for a tighter goalpost of 1.5 degrees.
"We need all countries to commit to net zero emissions by 2050, backed up by concrete long-term strategies, and enhanced Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) which collectively cut global emissions by 45 per cent by 2030, compared to 2010 levels," UN Secretary General António Guterres wrote in a recent report.
Chi co-founded At One Ventures in 2019 with Laurie Menoud, who formerly co-led the venture capital efforts at chemical giant BASF, and Helen Lin, who has two decades of M&A and operations experience across the world.
The firm currently has 21 companies in its portfolio working across various industries including agriculture, manufacturing, energy and habitat restoration.
One of their investments is Iron Ox, a San Carlos-based startup creating indoor farming robots that it says reduce water consumption by 90% compared to traditional farms. The firm has invested in Iron Ox since its Series B round in 2020.
Another is Colossal, a seed-stage Dallas-based startup trying to resurrect extinct species.
The firm plans on rounding out its first fund by investing in nine more startups over the next year and wants to have 100 companies in its portfolio within a decade.
"Even if it takes generations, we need to aim for full repair of the atmosphere and the transition to a world where humanity is a net positive to nature. Anything less than that just postpones the collapse date for our species, and we can do better," Chi told the Business Times via email. "We must aim for nothing less than destroying the industries that destroy the planet and building out the industries that will rebuild the planet."
