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Good day. SF Climate Week, which kicked off over the weekend, includes some 1,200 VCs among the tens of thousands attending events in the Bay Area, organizers said. One of those venture investors is Daria Saharova, general partner and co-founder of Munich-based World Fund. The firm, founded in 2021 and focused on European founders building products with global applicability, is investing out of its first fund, a €300 million vehicle.
These are challenging times for climate venture capitalists. Market-intelligence firm Sightline Climate said seed and Series A activity in climate tech investment contracted last year. Sightline said capital shifted toward more seasoned bets rather than underwriting new entrants in previously popular categories.
Saharova spoke to WSJ Pro about shifting climate policies, the rise of artificial intelligence, and World Fund’s goal of bridging the commercialization gap for startups in deep tech, among other topics. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation:
WSJ Pro: There is a lot of pressure right now on climate tech as a sector, how do you respond to that?
Saharova: I absolutely agree there is a lot of politically driven change of narrative focus, right? But at the end of the day, what we see is that the climate crisis is worsening, which pushes all the same problems even further and at a higher scale.
As a venture capitalist, I strongly believe that as a fund you're going to generate outlier returns when we invest in significantly better solutions for the most pressing problems. And you know, we were all climate tech, decarbonization tech—now we talk about industries we invest into. In Europe, we also talk about resilience and sovereignty—potato, potahto—because the core is the same.
WSJ Pro: How concerned are you that AI startups are making the climate crisis worse with their energy consumption?
Saharova: By 2030, we expect like 3x more energy consumption for data centers than today. It's quite a lot. But that's also the market where you have deep-pocketed companies also being able to understand technology and be open-minded to change and solve problems around that. And it's just exposing even more our need to redefine energy markets. But the biggest driver for climate change is not the data center.
WSJ Pro: How much pressure do you feel from LPs or generally to rebrand investments as AI?
Saharova: None. So our LPs are very supportive and they see what our thesis is—as I said, we focus on the three major industries which are being completely transformed [industry, energy, and food and agriculture]. There is a generational kind of investment opportunity.
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