Climate tech investor research and the latest updates in Partnerbase

A quick note on what's in the database this month. Two areas of coverage were expanded: LinkedIn organization and people records, and the investor-round table that backs the "Investment rounds" section on CVC, LP, family-office, and angel detail pages.

LinkedIn contacts

Partnerbase now holds 6,625 organization LinkedIn records and 15,033 curated key-person profiles, spanning CVCs, LPs, and family offices / foundations. Every record is joined to a Partnerbase entity by entity_type + entity_key, so the people surface inline on each detail page rather than as a separate directory.

Investment round data

The investor_portfolio_rounds table now contains 20,265 investor-round links covering 11,607 unique rounds announced between January 2021 and May 2026 — an average of roughly 2,100 rounds per year. Each row records the actual investing entity, so a single round with multiple Partnerbase investors shows up once per investor on their detail page.

Round rows are kept separate from the relationship table that explains parent / fund / sub-entity context — if you click an LP and see a round attributed to a sub-fund, the sub-fund is named on the participant line rather than rolled up into the parent.

For each of the top-12 CVC home markets by total touched-round dollars, the chart shows how much of that year's deployed capital went to startups in the CVC's home country, the United States, or somewhere else.

Across all non-US CVCs in the database, the share of yearly deployed dollars going to US startups was 53% in 2021, fell to 24% in 2024, then rebounded to 67% in 2025 — the highest share in the five-year window. The 2025 absolute total ($25B attributed to US targets) is also the largest of any year since 2021.

Read by market, the rebound isn't evenly distributed: German, UK, and Australian CVCs send the majority of dollars to the US in every year of the window, while South Korean, Swiss, and Indian CVCs stay closer to home throughout.

We binned every company in the database into three groups by climate-tech partnership count — zero, 1–10, and more than 10 — and asked what share of each has a public net-zero year filed.

Going from zero partnerships to 1–10 triples the rate of having a net-zero year on file (12% → 35%). The 10+ bucket (245 companies) sits a notch lower at 30% — that group is dominated by diversified industrials whose target reporting spans many business lines.

But partnership count is only one signal. A company can also put climate on the cap table by writing checks through a CVC arm or committing capital as an LP. The real question for an investor isn't whether a company has set targets — it's whether commitment and activity show up together. The matrix below cross-tabs climate commitment (a 0–4 count of net-zero year + near-term target + 2030 year + 1.5°C alignment) against financial activity (partnerships + CVC rounds touched + LP fund positions). Bubbles are scaled to the number of companies in each cell.

The top-right of the matrix is where commitment and capital reinforce each other — the small group of companies that are both stating ambitious climate goals and showing up on real deals as partners, CVC backers, or LPs. About 1,400 companies hit 3-of-4 climate criteria without any partnership or fund activity in our data: stated ambition that hasn't shown up as deal flow yet, and a useful watchlist of where signal could appear next.

We compared the funding-stage mix of rounds touched by each type of climate-tech investor in the database. Each row sums to 100% of that investor type's stage-labelled round activity.

Among institutional investors in climate, family offices have the highest seed share by a wide margin: 38% of family-office-touched rounds are seed, versus 23% for both CVCs and LPs. CVCs concentrate in Series A/B, where 58% of their touches land, and LPs push the deepest into Series C+ at 22%.

Angels are off-scale at 66% seed, which is exactly the shape you'd expect — they sit between "institutional check writer" and "friends and family". For a founder mapping a round, the takeaway is that a family office is the most likely institutional check at the seed line.

Each bar is the total dollars a sector's CVCs put into sub-$100M climate venture rounds over the last 24 months, segmented by stage. We exclude mega-rounds and Post-IPO financings — both tend to be growth bridges or public-company secondaries rather than venture behavior. The annotation on the right is the trailing 12-month change versus the prior 12 months.

Technology (+24%) is the standout. Tech-sector CVCs are not only deploying more capital year-on-year — they're the most willing to follow on into Series C and beyond, with late-stage rounds making up roughly a third of their cheques (the highest share of any sector). That means the conviction isn't just new-bet enthusiasm; tech CVCs are also doubling down on companies they already know.

Industrials (+8%) is the other sector adding capital, and its footprint is recognizably different from Tech's. Industrials capital concentrates in Series A and B — Series C and later account for only about 10% of touched rounds, roughly half the rate of Financials or Tech. The pattern reads like industrial CVCs funding product-market fit on technologies they want close visibility into, then rotating out before the growth-stage premium kicks in.

Among the larger pools that didn't grow, Financials remains the single biggest absolute deployer ($5.5B over 24 months) and Oil & Gas continues to be a meaningful participant ($2.7B). Both are down year-on-year, but they're still writing more climate cheques than any sector outside Tech and Industrials. Automotive, Utilities, and Food & Beverage are the sharpest pullbacks (each down 40%+) and the smallest absolute pools — a useful cue for founders calibrating who to spend time with.

Corporate investors in different countries are taking different approaches to climate tech investing.

Heavy US Investment

Corporate investors from these countries put most of their climate tech capital into US startups:

• Canada: 84% to US
• South Korea: 81% to US
• Japan: 67% to US

Domestic and Regional Focus

Other countries keep their capital closer to home:

• Spain: 99% non-US, mostly within the EU
• Turkey: 75% domestic
• United Kingdom: 69% domestic, only 16% to US
• Switzerland: 80% non-US, mostly EU

AI-Driven Analysis Approach

As the CVC database expanded to approximately 300 entries with hundreds of mapped pilots and offtake deals, manual analysis became impractical. We adopted agentic AI coding systems—primarily Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, with testing of Google's Antigravity—combined with Python and file-based memory for research at scale.

One orchestrated agent workflow operated for approximately one week using a Python-based system with up to 30 parallel agents.

Climate Tech Database Coverage

The database now encompasses five investment activity areas:

• 600+ global CVC investment units
• 1,100 corporates investing as LPs in climate tech funds
• 7,000+ climate tech-related pilots, offtake deals, and startup partnerships
• 6,000+ climate tech startups and scaleups
• Over 800 VCs that are climate tech-focused or adjacent

Deal Trends and Investor Preferences

In 2025, later-stage funding (Series C+) represented more than 50 percent of total equity capital in CVC-inclusive rounds.

Despite overall decline in 2025 total funds raised in CVC-participating rounds, Series A round values increased notably.

Sector-Specific Investment Patterns

Climate Tech Growth Verticals

CVC deal count growth areas (2025 through mid-November vs. 2024):

• Battery Storage
• Gridtech and Power Management
• Nuclear
• Logistics and Warehouse Tech
• Material Innovation and Nanotech
• Marine Technology
• Mining Tech
• Building Materials
• Insurance Tech
• Aerospace
• Additive Manufacturing
• Chemicals
• Geospatial Imaging

Corporate Limited Partner Participation

Approximately 70 percent of 1,600 tracked global corporate investors participate in climate tech funds as limited partners. Roughly 10 percent maintain both CVC and LP positions.

Commercial Partnership Activity

Nearly 60 percent of tracked companies with CVC units also engaged in pilots, offtake deals, or other partnerships (go-to-market agreements, joint ventures) in climate-related technologies.

Cross-Border Capital Flows

Approximately 72 percent of 2025 CVC deal participation involved startups outside their corporate headquarters' country.

Despite US federal climate policy retreat, capital flows to the US remained stable in 2025 relative to 2024, declining only marginally.

Fastest-growing corridors: EU-to-EU transactions and EU-to-UK flows.

Insight for founders and VCs: maintain broad funding source views across countries; analyze CVC flow trends for fundraising prioritization.

Future Developments

Current projects include:

• Matchmaking AI agents for CVC/VC analysis of startup investment, pilot, and offtake opportunities
• Co-investor discovery agents recommending investment partners
• Vertical AI agents specializing in industrial decarbonization, urban climate resilience, and energy regulation
• Analyst productivity enhancement tools