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G2 Venture Partners (G2) is a venture and growth investing firm focused on emerging technologies driving sustainable transformation across traditional industries like transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, energy, supply chain, and logistics, which together make up over half of the global economy. G2 is investing and supporting startups that are digitizing these industries (hardware and software). G2 is also investing in startups with diverse business models.
Fund Snapshot
- Stage: Series B – Series D
- Check Size:Â $15M-50M
- Geography:Â Developed markets (primarily US)
- Lead/Follow:Â Both (primarily lead)
- Revenue/Valuation Thresholds:Â Millions or tens of millions of dollars of revenue (preferred minimum threshold)
Fund Snapshot
Why was the fund started?
G2 Venture Partners spun out of Kleiner Perkins’ Green Growth Fund in 2016. The Green Growth Fund was originally formed to invest in clean energy but quickly expanded to encompass broader digitization of traditional industry – specifically energy, transportation, logistics, manufacturing, agriculture, and eCommerce.
What is G2 Venture Partners’ core belief?
G2 Venture Partners is focused on the digitalization of traditional industries to reduce emissions and increase efficiency. The underlying belief is that the sectors G2 is investing in are analog (not digital) and ripe for disruption. By using digital technologies to make these resource-intensive sectors more efficient, G2 portfolio companies can simultaneously improve profitability and reduce emissions, doing well while doing good.
What domains in climate tech does G2 Venture Partners have expertise in?
G2 has expertise in all of its investment sectors listed above but wanted to highlight two areas in particular.
Transportation was a trend that G2 started noticing back in 2010, well before the general market considered it a core piece of climate tech. G2’s thesis is that the future of transportation will be shared, electric, connected, and autonomous. A few of G2’s transportation investments that have recently gotten press include Luminar, Proterra, and Shift.
Another theme is around Industry 4.0 and IoT – collecting data and using it to generate insights in industrial settings to modify and optimize operations.
What type of portfolio support does the team provide?
The G2 team brings investing and entrepreneurial experience in growth equity, venture capital, and technology. As such, G2 Venture Partners aims to be a service provider to their portfolio and a “go-to” board member for portfolio companies.
The team can help in many ways:
- Industrial network serving as a community of customers and co-investors
- Operational improvements and best practices on topics such as OKRs and governance
- Recruiting
- Financing and exit strategies
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About Investments
What are G2 Venture Partners’ investment process and timeline?
G2 Venture Partners likes to meet entrepreneurs early in their process and build long-term relationships, but can make investment decisions within weeks when needed. The whole team participates in evaluating each deal, with 2-3 team members driving the process, digging into topics such as customer feedback and unit economics.
It is important to note that G2 prefers to connect with startups after a Series A round (G2 invests as early as Series B). Fostering this relationship is critical so G2 can understand a startup’s mission and track milestones, in addition to ensuring that G2 can add value to a startup.
What would make G2 Venture Partners consider deviating from their typical criteria?
G2 is focused on investing within its investment thesis. That said, over time they have expanded the sectors they are investing in – originally G2 was only investing in energy, and over time have added transportation, logistics, manufacturing, food/agriculture, and retail/eCommerce. If there is another trend that fits within the thesis of digitizing the industry to reduce emissions, it is possible they would explore broadening the verticals they invest in.
About The Author
Daniel currently works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a Product Manager. Outside of his day job, he is a Principal at C3, Tech Scout at For ClimateTech, and Venture Scout at Prithvi. He also works with various climate incubators/accelerators (Cleantech Open, Techstars, and Joules Accelerator) and runs The Impact and Innovate Climate – both are newsletters covering startups in the climate space.