Follow the Money Edition 8: Monday, January 13th, 2025

Saving the World One AI at a Time?

Deep Insight: Who’s our ultimate savior; the climate tech gurus or Sonny from iRobot?

Dear reader,

Is it time? Have we advanced enough as a society to have figured out the answers to fix the climate? Or is AI going to provide the answers? Look beyond the e-waste and excessive energy consumption of training and inference data centers; maybe we are finally on to something. Our headline investment this week is Tangible. Their tagline is “turn buildings into climate solutions”. We also hope those solutions are tangible. Big VC stepping in to turn our warehouses and office buildings into trees. Carbon negative sounds good. It sounds good.

Can advanced compute, despite its carbon impact, actually be the solution? We could horsepower our way out of this thing. I guess what I’m trying to say is, if we can’t slow down, let’s SPEED UP.

Robot cabinets at Mashura are making sure your dog gets proper treatment at their vet. How they’re doing it is simple: they keep track of what’s inside the cabinets so vets can think about your dog’s condition, instead of whether they have the right swab or antibiotic. AI is up-leveling where human compute is spent and real estate is no different.

Ares Management has raised over a billion dollars towards its second climate infrastructure fund. This second fund will act similarly to the first: investing in energy efficiency, storage, renewables and vehicle electrification among other things. Saving the earth? We sure hope so. Otherwise we’re gonna have to call in the robots…

When you’re spoken in the same breath as Emma Watson’s gin company - it’s gin not tequila! "It's Leviosa, not Leviosar!" Let’s be honest, you’re out to make a buck. Can we really trust you to save our little green planet? At the end of the day business is business, and we’re not that sure that social good although its a strong marketing tale, is necessarily aligned with profits.

At the end of the day, will it be the AI that Elon tells us is so scary, that saves us from ourselves?

VC Funding Rounds

• Tangible, a maker of carbon emissions software for the construction market, raised $3m co-led by Prologis Ventures and Pi Labs

  • Quick Insight: Something, something, something, something, “green tech”. Mr. O’donnell (Prologis Ventures’ leader who likes to be formal) needs to get back in touch. I meant to call him this year but we should give him time for all this to sink in. Talk to you in ‘26 Will.

• Jones, a New York-based insurance verification startup, raised $15m in Series B funding. NewSpring Capital led, and was joined by Hetz Ventures, Camber Creek, Khosla Ventures, JLL Spark, DivcoWest Ventures, Rudin Ventures, and Ground Up Ventures.

  • Quick Insight: If you know what “COI tracking” is, you’ll love this one. Masterclass in marketing by Monsieur Khosla

• Parsyl, a Denver-based supply chain insurer, raised $20m Series C funding. The Lightsmith Group led, and was joined by insiders HSCM Ventures, GLP Capital Partners, Lineage Ventures, and FirstTracks Ventures.

  • Quick Insight: Supply chain insurance is risky business. But Lineage, who made their name by cracking the very tough nut of cold storage, has also absolutely crushed with the very few venture investments they’ve made. This will be one to watch.

• Beams, a British provider of home renovation market software, raised $9m in Series A funding. ETF Partners led, and was joined by insiders Giant Ventures, firstminute capital, and Borusan Ventures.

• Renais, a luxury gin brand co-founded by actress Emma Watson, raised £4.95m from InvestBuy and Jean-Sébastien Robicquet.

  • Quick Insight: This one has 0 things to do with Proptech except Emma Watson is a cutie, and some dude in LA who runs a little fund went on a couple dates with her. Also, she’s done less work on her face than he has, so points to her for that. Holy hell man you used to look like Pierce Brosnan, what happened?