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Temasek's GenZero invests in At One Ventures' US$375 mil Fund II backing 'disruptive climate tech'

Jovi Ho
·3-min read

Five of the firm’s 35 portfolio companies are currently focused on biodiversity, and 11 are already booking product sales.

Temasek’s decarbonisation-focused investment subsidiary GenZero has invested in At One Ventures’ US$375 million ($514.08 million) second fund, focused on backing early-stage start-ups with disruptive climate technology.

Other investors include the World Wildlife Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, CalSTRS and New Mexico State Investment Council (NMSIC), says At One in an Oct 4 announcement.

In addition to institutional investors, At One received continued support from “mission-aligned” individual investors and family offices, such as One Small Planet, Toba Capital and Valhalla Foundation.

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The firm is led by Tom Chi, a founding member of moonshot factory Google X. It is focused on four, often interconnected areas: air, water, soil and biodiversity.

Five of the firm’s 35 portfolio companies are currently focused on biodiversity, including automated ecosystem restoration start-up Dendra Systems. At One wants to expand on those investments, ensuring that 20% of the start-ups in its portfolio are addressing ecosystem health by 2025.

According to the firm, 11 of its portfolio companies are already booking sales of their products.

The firm’s investment thesis focuses on disruptive deep-tech that ushers in “radically better” unit economics paired with “radically better” environmental economics.

“This combination eliminates most adoption friction as the industry gets to upgrade their production in a way that will be massively more profitable, all while their core production gets much more aligned with planetary health,” says Chi. “Specifically, 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 change entire systems of production and use. We then get detailed and disciplined in understanding what it will take to commercialise that technology and successfully displace existing brownfield approaches.”

Fund II is more than double that of Fund I, which raised US$150 million in October 2021, bringing the firm’s total assets under management (AUM) to over half a billion.

Among At One’s investments is battery recycling firm Ascend Elements, which raised a US$542 million Series D round in September.

Other portfolio companies include Dalan Animal Health, which developed a USDA-approved vaccine for honeybees; and Colossal Biosciences, the start-up attempting to resurrect the woolly mammoth and dodo bird.

Some 40% of At One’s start-ups are run by “under-represented” founders, such as women or people of colour. The firm also has a globally distributed portfolio, with 70% of companies in North America, 15% in Europe and 15% across Africa, South America and Israel.

Speaking to Bloomberg News, Chi says: “If everybody in the world is looking at the same entrepreneurs, these white dudes that just came out of Stanford, then those things get massively over-picked. That means you’re going to pay way too much for something relative to its value.”

In addition to Ascend Elements, which has received over US$1 billion in total funding to date; At One was an early backer of Colossal Biosciences, currently valued at US$1.5 billion; and Monarch Tractor, which was named in August as a “next billion-dollar start-up” by Forbes.

May Liew, investment director at GenZero, says nature and technology-based solutions can complement each other and unlock cost-effective decarbonisation at scale. “At One Ventures’ focus on finding solutions at the intersections of nature and technology for a net-positive future aligns with GenZero’s core purpose of accelerating decarbonisation globally. We are excited to support At One Ventures in their pursuit of disruptive and scalable solutions with positive catalytic impact.”

Photos: At One Ventures

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