Contrarian Ventures

TEAM ANNOUNCEMENT:  We're thrilled to welcome back Jonas Kavaliauskas to the Contrarian Ventures team, this time as an Associate! 🙌 After years of building his own ventures, investing at leading LPs, and living in 8 countries, Jonas is bringing fresh perspectives and global expertise to our operations. It's a homecoming story – Jonas interned with us back in 2019 during his sophomore year at Yale University in the US. Since then, he’s studied under legendary investors like Yale Investment Office’s David Swensen and Dean Takahashi, worked at Willgrow, a large European family office, helping cover VC and Public Equity investments, and earned a prestigious Schwarzman Scholarship at Tsinghua University in China. 🌍 While in Asia, Jonas witnessed the harsh realities of pollution in megacities and around gigafactories, which reignited his determination to tackle climate change and introduced him to whole new layers of complexity to this challenge. Now he's back, ready to make an impact in climate-tech across Europe. He’ll also help us harness AI and data science 🤖 in our decision-making given his coding and product development experience. Welcome back, Jonas! Let's create something amazing together! 💪 💚

THE CLIMATE BRICK GOES TO THE DROP: We are thrilled to announce the moderators for The Climate Brick workshop at The Drop this year! 🧱🌱 During this workshop, we will discuss what it takes to scale a climate tech startup successfully from pre-seed to IPO. We'll explore the critical unlocks of each climate tech journey and exchange experiences and learnings from the past to create a better future. For this workshop, we are excited to be supported by the knowledge and insights of strong experts in the field. We are happy to welcome early-stage investors, including Yair Reem, Thong Le Hoang, Dr. Moritz Belling, Ted Persson, Alessandro Bertino, Jessica Burley, Rokas Peciulaitis, Dr.-Ing. Mark Windeknecht and Philip Specht, as well as growth-stage investors with deep insights into raising debt and equity, such as Nathaniel Lowbeer-Lewis, Kristen Rocca, Ragna Portelli, Michelle Capiod, Elisabeth Schrey, Serhat Aydogdu, Sebastian Peck, Fabian Erici and Adam Ross. We are super excited to have you with us! 👏 Join us for an insightful session in the beautiful garden of Malmö. Let’s come together to innovate and shape a better future, one brick at a time. 💚 Thank you to EQT Ventures, DCVC and Morgan Stanley for co-hosting with us!

TEAM ANNOUNCEMENT: We are thrilled to welcome Alessandro Bertino to our team as Principal at Contrarian Ventures. With a decade of experience in climate tech investing, Alessandro brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to Contrarian Ventures franchise. 🎉👏 Alessandro has spent ten years dedicated to climate investing. Before joining us, he was an investor at Energy Impact Partners, where he played a significant role in advancing climate tech initiatives covering different verticals, including energy software, transport, flexibility, energy efficiency, the built environment, and driving impactful investments in the industry. 💼 🌱 Prior to this, Alessandro was a Vice President at Alexa Capital, focusing on capital raising and M&A for climate tech companies, as well as the sale and refinancing of renewable assets. He started his career at the investment banking division of William Blair. 🚀 As Principal, Alessandro will be the newest addition to the investment team and will contribute to the development of investment thesis, work on origination and execution of climate investments, identify new emerging industry trends, contribute to the success of portfolio companies and strengthen Contrarian Ventures’ brand. Alessandro is excited about disruptive tech-enabled business models including transformative AI, energy storage, decarbonisation of transport, climate risk & adaptation and green platforms to manage, optimise and aggregate different types of assets. He will be based in London and play a crucial role in fostering partnerships across the venture ecosystem in Europe, with a key focus on the UK. 🌏 Alessandro, welcome to the Contrarian Ventures family! 💚💚 We’re excited to have you on board and look forward to this new journey together!

THE CLIMATE BRICK GOES TO THE DROP: We are excited to co-host the upcoming The Climate Brick workshop at The Drop in Malmö this September! 🧱🚀 Join us with EQT Ventures, DCVC and Morgan Stanley for an exclusive afternoon dedicated to financing and scaling climate tech companies. This workshop is a unique opportunity to engage with leading experts in deep and climate tech investments, including: Dr.-Ing. Mark Windeknecht, from World Fund, Kristen Rocca from DCVC, Philip Specht from AENU, Jessica Burley from Planet A Ventures, Ted Persson from EQT Ventures, Yair Reem from Extantia, Thong Le Hoang from Visionaries Tomorrow, Alex Laplaza from Lowercarbon Capital and our own Rokas Peciulaitis. The full list of moderators will be announced soon. 🌱 Workshop Highlights: - Structuring offtake agreements - Financing First-Of-A-Kid (FOAK) projects - Capital stack considerations for each funding round - Collaborating effectively with strategics This workshop is designed to foster knowledge sharing and collaboration as we work towards developing common standards for climate tech investments. Our goal is to make scaling climate tech companies successful and ultimately achieve our net zero ambitions. We invite you to be a part of this mission!🌍 🔗 Sign up for the workshop (Link in the comments)

PORTFOLIO NEWS: Congratulations to the entire Metafuels team for securing a CHF 4.4m. grant from the Swiss Federal Administration's Swiss Federal Office of Energy SFOE 👏👏 Metafuels, in collaboration with the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), will use this funding to develop Switzerland's first pilot plant for sustainable aviation fuel (e-SAF) using their innovative aerobrew technology. This project, aligned with the Swiss Energy Strategy 2050, will significantly advance the decarbonization of aviation, contributing to a more sustainable future. 🌍✈️ Read more below 👇

TEAM NEWS: We are excited to announce Robina v. Stein's well-deserved promotion to Principal at Contrarian Ventures! 🎉 Robina, a founder turned investor, has been an integral part of our team since the launch of our second fund. Based in Munich, she has significantly contributed to our growth in Germany and the DACH region. Her exceptional passion for founders, dedication, and insightful analysis have contributed to our firm's success, earning her the respect and admiration of founders, colleagues, and partners. 👏 On the investment front, Robina is excited about technologies addressing resource scarcity, materials transition, climate fintech, and energy tech, as well as learning about the intersection of climate and AI. 🌍💡 She sits on the board as an observer for companies such as 42watt, Decade Energy, and altrove. Moreover, Robina is heavily involved in The Climate Brick project, supports the female founder ecosystem, and helps build a robust climate tech community, paving the way for more climate tech companies to thrive. 🌱👩💼 As Principal, Robina will continue to shape our investment strategies, nurture relationships with founders and entrepreneurs, and drive value creation across our portfolio companies. 🚀 Congratulations, Robina! 💚💚 We look forward to seeing you help take Contrarian Ventures to even greater heights, continue to source the best founding teams and push Climate Tech across Europe.

PORTFOLIO NEWS: Our Portfolio company, Switchee, secures a £5 million investment from Octopus Ventures and AXA Investment Managers. 📢 🏡 Switchee provides tens of thousands of high-tech devices to over 130 social housing providers, helping keep homes warm, safe and sustainable for residents. This includes helping identify and prevent mould in homes, lowering heating bills by up to 17%, and improving communications between residents and providers through a two-way platform that sees an 88% tenant response rate within 24 hours. 📈 This new investment will further accelerate Switchee's growth and see the business remain on the trajectory of being installed in 1 million UK social homes. Switchee will continue to serve housing providers with the richest, real-time data set in social housing, driving a new operating model in the sector with the proactive detection of mould or residents at risk of fuel poverty. Congratulations to Adam Fudakowski, Tom Robins and the rest of the team! 👏 💚💚 Read more in the comments. 👇

NEW INTERNS ALERT: As the summer heats up, we're super excited to welcome five awesome new interns to the Contrarian family: Gytis Greičius from Dartmouth College, Emilija Čapkauskaitė from Vilniaus jėzuitų gimnazija | Vilnius Jesuit, Adomas Norkus from University of Exeter, Lukas Kairevičius from Vilniaus universitetas / Vilnius University and Aistė Obolevičiūtė from Rīgas Ekonomikas augstskola - Stockholm School of Economics in Riga! 👏 🚀 These bright minds are diving into the world of venture capital with us, ready to get hands-on experience and work alongside our team. They'll be joining us in our mission to drive climate action, teaming up with startups and investors to make a real impact. We're confident they'll bring fresh ideas and tons of energy, making them an invaluable part of our team for the next few months. Let's give a big welcome to Gytis, Emilija, Adomas, Lukas and Aiste! 💚💚

PORTFOLIO: We are proud to announce the newest addition to the Contrarian Ventures family — altrove. 🚀🚀 We led their €3.7 million pre-seed funding round, supported by our friends from Emblem, Entrepreneur First and strong angel investors, including Thomas Clozel (CEO of Owkin), Julien Chaumond (CTO of Hugging Face ), and Nikolaj Deichmann (3Shape). 🌍Global demand for critical minerals for transition-related technologies is projected to increase 2-5 times by 2040. The mining and metals industry accounts for ~7% of global GHG emissions and contributes to water pollution, soil contamination, air pollution, waste generation, and social concerns, raising significant ESG issues. Altrove addresses these challenges by developing new materials for the energy transition, focusing on local and sustainable production methods. This significantly reduces the GHG footprint per unit produced and minimizes additional environmental externalities. 🤖With the power of AI models and an automated synthesis lab, Altrove aims to accelerate the discovery process up to 100 times. Their strong focus on the application layer, bridging the gap between material discovery and industrial use cases, was exactly what we were looking for. Welcome to the family, Thibaud Martin and Joonatan Laulainen, PhD —excited to embark on this journey together! 💚💚

BREAKTHROUGH ENERGY SUMMIT 2024: This week, our General Partner Tomas Kemtys is heading to London for the 🚀 Breakthrough Energy Summit. The Summit is one of the key events in the climate tech space, bringing together innovators, policymakers, and investors to drive impactful solutions for a sustainable future. 💡 🌍 🤝 If you're also attending, we'd love to connect!