A new fund 2150 today announces the first close of its flagship €200 million fund. Based in London, Copenhagen and Berlin, the fund will back technology companies that seek to sustainably reimagine and reshape the urban environment.
2150 will focus on technologies that can directly address the resilience, efficiency and sustainability of cities. It will invest across all layers of the urban environment, from new materials and automation in construction, to algorithms making buildings more efficient, to sensors and software that improve the health, safety, and productivity of its occupants, and the data and tools that help mitigate the carbon footprint of our cities.
Crucially, 2150 will only invest where sustainability impact can be measured. With its first fund, it plans to build a portfolio of 20 companies, each with a potential to become a ‘Gigacorn’ – a commercially successful company with the potential to reduce or mitigate a Gigaton of CO2 equivalent. In order to nurture and grow these businesses long term, it has the potential to invest up to €40 million per company over time.
2150 is incubated and anchored by Northern European real estate platform NREP, one of the world’s most innovative and sustainable real estate fund managers and company builders, driven by making real estate and cities better. 2150 benefits from the institutional platform that NREP provides and its team of over 300 professionals across the Nordics.
The fund is supported by a stellar advisory board of technologists, scientists and designers of the future urban environment. Leading names include the famed architect, Bjarke Ingels, the Director of Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Dr. Lynn Loo, Unity’s head of AI Danny Lange, the former Chief Sustainability Officer in the Obama Administration, Christine Harada, the founder of celebrated sustainable developer EDGE Technologies, Coen van Oostrom, and Jeremy Oppenheim, co-founder of SYSTEMIQ, the leading global sustainability advisory firm.
The 2150 team comprises professionals with proven track records in venture capital, scaling technology ventures alongside strong backgrounds in urban planning and sustainability. The partners include NREP Chairman and co-founder, Mikkel Bülow-Lehnsby, Jacob Bro,former Chief Product Officer at Rocket Internet, Christian Jølck, the founder and former Chairman of industry climate advocacy group SYNERGI, Christian Hernandez, former Facebook executive and Venture Capitalist, who are joined by Nicole LeBlanc, formerly with Alphabet’s urban product incubator Sidewalk Labs, Rahul Parekh, founder of VC-backed foodtech startup EatFirst and former executive director at Goldman Sachs, and Alexandra Perez, who incubated and launched urban tech startups at Tech City Ventures.
Robert Niven, CEO and Founder of CarbonCure, said: “2150’s investment in CarbonCure is a great endorsement of our mission to put sustainable concrete at the heart of the cities of the future. Like us, the team at 2150 is in this for the long-term good of the environment and like us, they have committed to specific targets towards that goal. In our case, that’s a commitment to remove 500 megatonnes (500 million metric tonnes) of carbon dioxide annually from the concrete industry by 2030. ”
Mikkel Bülow-Lehnsby, General Partner at 2150 and Chairman and co-founder of NREP, said: “With NREP we have been on a 15 year mission of making real estate and cities more efficient, customer centric and sustainable. With 2150 we are leveraging all of NREP’s learnings and ambitions and partnering with our industry peers to identify and accelerate technology that can help us support our purpose of making real estate better. I am convinced that 2150’s mission-aligned team will play an important role in designing a future in which the convergence of entrepreneurship, technology and sustainability will reverse the built environment’s negative impact on the planet.”
Christian Hernandez, General Partner at 2150, said: “Cities are complex living systems that are constantly expanding, evolving and adapting, with half the world’s population now living in urban environments and rising. Cities, while vehicles for the betterment of humanity, currently emit 70% of the world’s greenhouse gases and generate the vast majority of the planet’s waste. We see a huge opportunity to make a serious impact on the way cities are developed and the way our citizens live, work and are cared for by completely reimagining and reshaping the urban environment for good.”
Limited Partners in this first closing include a mix of institutional capital and family offices including Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, Denmark’s Green Future Fund and Novo Holdings alongside an ecosystem of partners building or managing over ten million square meters of real estate, who will help evaluate and accelerate the adoption of the sustainable technologies that the fund backs.
Having raised almost two-thirds of the target amount to-date, the final close is anticipated by mid-2021.
