Climate technology investment remains inconsistent: More than half of all dollars invested since 2020 have flowed to energy and transportation initiatives. according to To Sightline Weather.
“It's great to see those solutions working so well,” said founder Michael Luciani. Redtold TechCrunch. But as he points out, it represents those sectors. less than half. of all carbon pollution
“The main contributors are the way things are produced; industries, Chemicals plastics, Food and agriculture and buildings,” he said. “I've come to believe that engineering biology is the best emerging answer to most problems in those categories.”
Juniper's other founding partners, Luciani and Jennifer Kan, have invested in climate investing for years, initially as part of Climate Capital, which often writes small checks to early-stage companies. Kan told TechCrunch that he had invested in 30 companies and led the company's special purpose vehicle investments before raising the new fund.
Initially, Juniper invested in climate-focused synthetic biology businesses as Climate Capital Bio. But “as we got further down the path, we realized that we could be climate biotechnology people,” Luciani said. “Climate Capital is a great brand, but it's really a brand as a generalist, and that's a much different kind of signal than what we want to send.”
The company exclusively told TechCrunch that the first Juniper funding was $10.6 million and was oversubscribed. Family offices in limited partners; Foundations and Allocator One; Includes institutional funds serving as anchors.
Luciani adds, “There are decent scientists in the field that allow us to invest our funding at a minimal minimum.”
Juniper writes checks for between $100,000 and $500,000 to scientists commercializing their research. Kan's goal, he says, is to “be the first institutional investor to think about how to build a company.”
Some of the fund's early investments include California Culture, which is cultivating cells to make more sustainable coffee and chocolate, and Cache DNA, which is developing a better way to store DNA and RNA.
“We are building too many data centers and they are not the most sustainable way to digitize our world. If all the data in the world today were stored in DNA, It would only take a shoebox of DNA,” Kan said. “The difference is huge.”