The venture capital firm aims to bolster investment in advanced technologies aimed at solving climate change, improving AI and solving health problems.parts of the United States while others are grappling with record amounts of rainfall and flooding–stark reminders of the consequences of climate change.
The new fund will give Rae’s firm more flexibility in the size of the checks it writes for seed and series A rounds. “It means that you can really develop these companies into the B and C rounds where you definitively de-risk the technology and begin to scale,” she said. A big driver of this growth, Rae said, has been a “major policy shift” by the federal government to bolster infrastructure and climate technology with measures like the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, which put more government funds behind these sectors and incentivize the private sector to do the same. “There’s a bipartisan understanding that we have to have a manufacturing base,” she said. “The capital stack is much stronger than it was 7 years ago.