Norrsken VC - Impact investing in a market downturn with Agate Freimane

Climate Insiders

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Norrsken VC - Impact investing in a market downturn with Agate Freimane

Yoann Berno

May 23, 2022

Agate Freimane is a General Partner at Norrsken VC, a €125m Swedish early stage impact VC investing in technology that solves some of the world’s greatest challenges.

She comes from investment banking at Morgan Stanley and then worked at a PropTech/Fintech startup: Brickvest.

In today's show, we will discuss with Agate:

the state of Climate Tech in the Nordics
the correlation between impact and financial returns
What the current economic slowdown means for Climate Tech VC
the biggest learnings from raising Norrsken VC and investing in 41 companies

Listen and Learn

The Norrsken backstory: how 3 unicorn founders started 6 years ago a one-stop shop for impact investing (2:00)
Agate’s views on the Climate Tech scene in Sweden and the Nordics (4:50)
How Stockholm wants to become the global impact capital (5:00)
The transition from a tech ecosystem to impact ecosystem (5:30)
The power or role models to scale the ecosystem (6:00)
How Northvolt’s success led the charge to a booming Swedish electric ecosystem (trucks, airplanes, boats) (7:00)
What Agate thinks of the “classic VC downturn letter” that most VCs have been issuing to their portfolio companies (9:40)
Startups with strong fundamentals will remain the best VC cases (11:20)
Why impact startups might be the most resilient in an economic downturn
VC investing comes down to two options: vitamins vs painkillers. Impact companies are the painkillers (12:00)
Is 10 years sufficient as a time-horizon for deeptech hardware solutions? (13:00)
Why Norrsken looks for deep tech startups that have immediate pent-up demand (14:00)
The one area where Agate has completely changed her mind in the past 2 years (17:10)
Why Norrsken’s biggest mistake was to fall in love in something else other than the team (18:00)
Agate’s tips to people that want to break into Climate Tech and join a startup (22:50)
The 700 Climate tech jobs listed on Norrsken’s job board with (24:00)
Why the hardest part is to break into the Climate community and why it gets much easier to transfer between companies once you understand the climate ecosystem (25:00)
How Norrsken runs investment decisions (27:40)
The 1-to-1 correlation between financial and impact returns (29:00)