According to a recent Dealroom report on the Spanish tech ecosystem, the combined enterprise value of Spanish startups exceeds 100 billion euros in 2023. The latest confirmation of this upward trend is the Madrid venture capital fund Seaya closed Seaya Andromeda, a €300 million “Article 9” climate tech fund based in Madrid.
Article 9 refers to the EU law on regulating sustainability reporting in the financial sectorwhich imposes a responsibility on investment companies to ensure that their investments have a positive impact on society or the environment.
Seaya has been in existence for 12 years and focuses mainly on startups with an international vocation in Europe and Latin America. The new fund “Andromeda” will invest in growing companies specializing in the energy transition, decarbonization, sustainable food value chains and the circular economy.
The company said the new climate fund will deploy between €7 million and €40 million as its first check; retain capital for follow-ons; and plans to make 25 investments by the end of 2027. So far, five investments have been made from the fund (see below).
Seaya was launched in 2013 by Beatriz González, a former private equity investor who moved into sustainable and climate investing after backing a recycled clothing line. She previously worked at Morgan Stanley, Excel Partners and Darby Overseas Investments in the US. She then became a director of Telefonica’s pension fund, where she led its alternative assets programme.
Under González’s leadership, Seaya has invested in climate tech companies including Biome Makers, Clarity.ai, Crowdfarming, Descartes, RatedPower, Samara and electric car charging station company Wallbox (which went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021).
In a call, I asked González if she thought there was any particular benefit to having a Spanish fund tackling climate tech, given the country’s proximity to some of the worst impacts of climate change, such as extreme heat, drought, wildfires and storms.
“That’s a good question,” she said. “If you think about the energy transition and decarbonization, coming from southern Europe, and particularly Spain, we see that we are better placed for two reasons. One is that southern Europe has more extreme heat waves, so clearly the social awareness is much higher. But we also think that we have competitive advantages in the sectors that we target.”
“We are pioneers in renewable energy, so we have the talent and the big auto parts manufacturing companies. So we have a big industrial base. The same goes for agriculture and real estate. So we think we have the industrial expertise and the talent, especially from southern Europe and Spain, that gives us a certain advantage.”
I also asked what kind of expertise they had to enable them to make investment decisions on climate technology.
“We have a few engineers, so we have in-house expertise, but in our LP network we have big EU banks like Santander that finance projects in the energy sector or factories. Having access to that knowledge helps us do our due diligence and move much faster.”
So far, Seaya has used this knowledge to invest in several relevant companies. Augmented reality skills training solution based in Spain, Sea bayfor example, has developed augmented reality software and hardware to train welders, meaning they don’t need to use real welding techniques to practice, reducing carbon emissions by 95% per welding session.
The company has also invested in a British AI-powered waste management startup Recycleye in February 2022, which builds robots to sort waste for recycling.
In San Francisco, the company has invested in Pachamaa climate technology company that uses data to verify the quality of carbon credits and enable the launch of new carbon credit projects.
News of the new fund follows other signs of a funding renaissance in Southern Europe. Just last week, Plus Partners spear in Barcelona with the aim of raising a fund of 30 to 50 million dollars.
The directory Report “State of European Technologies” For 2023, the Spanish ecosystem also occupies fourth place in the general ranking and has declared that it has the The highest number of startup fundings last year.
