A San Francisco-based venture capital firm co-founded by a former Google X member has raised hundreds of millions for its second flagship fund.
At One Ventures raised $375 million for its second climate-focused fund, which saw participation from limited partners that included Temasek's GenZero, World Wildlife Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, CalSTRS and the New Mexico State Investment Council, the firm announced Wednesday.
The new fund comes two years since At One Ventures closed its first fund with $150 million and brings the firm's total assets under management to $525 million.
"As all founders and other emerging managers know, fundraising is always difficult. The recent macroeconomic environment has not made it any easier," At One Ventures wrote in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday. "We're extremely fortunate to have strong financial supporters, from family offices to sovereign and pension funds, who believe in us and our approach to climate tech investing."
Tom Chi, an early employee at Google X, now known as the X division within Google parent Alphabet, co-founded At One Ventures in 2020 with Helen Lin and Laurie Menoud.
Their investing philosophy has been focused on early stage companies that have the potential to help push the planet beyond net zero emissions, and they invest across four main climate-related categories: food and agriculture; buildings, construction and manufacturing; energy and transportation; and ecosystem restoration.
In other words, they're looking for companies that are "destroying the industries that destroy the planet," Chi told me a couple of years ago.
The firm says it has invested in nearly three dozen companies over the past three years. That includes Livermore-based Monarch Tractor, San Carlos-based Iron Ox, Palo Alto-based Noon Energy, Berkeley-based Wild Earth, Santa Cruz-based Cruz Foam and Emeryville-based Finless Foods.
At One Ventures has also invested in a buzzy biotech based in Austin that's working on reviving extinct species, Colossal Biosciences, and Massachusetts-based sustainable lithium battery startup Ascend Elements.
"We look for 'invention catalysts' which are technologies that not only improve upon the domain of the invention itself, but also have the potential to ripple–change entire systems of production and use," Chi said in a statement released about the new fund. "We then get detailed and disciplined in understanding what it will take to commercialize that technology and successfully displace existing brownfield approaches.”
