BendTheCurve - Keeling Capital substack
Blog rebrand!
We interrupt our (quasi)regular publication for a PSA. The substack is getting a rebrand! This is really overdue, but I was helpfully prompted by a reader (hat tip: DG) to finally get around to it. When I first started sending out these notes, predating even the substack, it was literally just some bullet points jotted down from whatever energy transition podcast I had been listening to on my morning walk, and Keeling Capital was just a twinkle in my eye. Now, 60 posts later and a master Google doc at over 350 pages , it is time to bring it up to date.
Over time, I have shifted these notes to cover longer, more detailed industry reports or whole topic areas independently researched and drawing from multiple sources. And, whilst I have kept the tone conversational and informal, I am very much writing in my capacity as a co-founder and Managing Partner at Keeling Capital (named for the Keeling Curve, currently 427ppm). The research and writing of these notes are significant contributors to our thesis development and world view (our investment thesis, downloadable from the website, was originally published in stages here), but also very much draws on the network of subject matter experts we are close to thanks to our investment work at Keeling Capital.
We are now in the process of closing our first climate venture fund-of-funds vehicle, with an existing portfolio of managers that we are damn proud of - each and every one of them rockstars with deep and relevant expertise and a strong spirit of partnership (you will have seen evidence of some of these investments in previous posts here, here, here and here). We have also gotten our co-investment stream underway and will be ramping up that activity during the year, so we expect to be sharing more over time as we develop our theses for different subsectors, including occasional guest posts from the rest of the team. For anyone who is curious to learn more about what we’re up to, you can always reply to this mail, reach me on Linkedin or at bela@keelingcapital.com. You can also follow us via our company LI here.
The Energy Transition has reached an interesting juncture. Even as climate tech VC volumes have dropped year over year from the 2021 highs, energy transition investment as a whole has nearly doubled and grown by the guts of $1trn since that time, most notably in electrified transport, renewables, power grids and batteries. This is even as fossil fuel use has remained resilient globally and a few once-favoured areas have faltered as they met contact with physics (green hydrogen) and non-zero interest rates (VCM). The whole area is teeming with both opportunity and complexity. I’m looking forward to continuing to learn, and working together to get to better answers over the years to come.
Onwards!