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With portfolio companies generating over $1bn in annual revenue and employing 4,500 people, 2150 shows it can win and scale deals in Europe and beyond.
Venture firm 2150 today announced the final close of its €210 million second fund, bringing total assets under management to €500 million.
The fund remains focused on backing technology companies seeking to reshape our cities and the industries that power them.
I spoke to partner and co-founder Christian Hernandez to learn more.
Building a climate Fund around cities and industry
2150 is built on the belief that cities drive the majority of global prosperity and represent the greatest opportunity for sustainable progress. 2150 backs founders developing transformative solutions across energy, industrial decarbonisation, advanced manufacturing, mobility, and urban systems.
Why LPs re-committed in a tough climate fundraising market
When asked what convinced limited partners to commit such a large amount in a difficult fundraising environment for climate funds, Hernandez points first to continuity. “Raising money for Fund I happened in a very different market,” he said.
“We were lucky to have large institutional anchors back then, and the important part this time was getting those anchors to recommit.”
The second fund from 2150 garnered a broad international participation from financial institutions and family offices. Investors include Viessmann Generations Group, Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, Novo Holdings, the Danish sovereign fund EIFO, Security Trading Oy, Islandbridge Capital, Fund of Funds Carbon Equity, and the US-based Church Pension Group. Proving the investment model with a transatlantic portfolio
Beyond repeat investors, a second group of LPs came in only after the firm could demonstrate a real operating track record. “In a first fund, you’re selling a vision and a team,” Hernandez explained.
“People wanted to see that we could actually find deals, win deals, and that those deals could progress — with follow-on rounds of real scale. That validation matters.”
Since Fund I, the firm has built a transatlantic portfolio despite having no permanent US presence, with companies now operating at meaningful scale.
“We’ve proved that we can win deals in both Europe and the US. The portfolio has an aggregate run rate of around a billion dollars and about 4,500 employees. Some of these companies are already very significant businesses.”
Demonstrating a deep, repeatable pipeline was also critical. By the time Fund II launched, the team had already completed seven investments.
“That helped convince new groups that this wasn’t just one good vintage, but a sustainable platform,” shared Hernandez.
Those new backers include Germany’s B. Braun Generation Group, a large, mission-aligned family office; a Finnish family office; specialist climate investors such as Carbon Equity; and, for the first time, a major US institutional LP.
“Our first US institutional investor is Church Pension Group, a $17.5 billion pension fund for the Episcopalian Church,” Hernandez noted.
“They evaluated us first as a venture fund, and then on impact. They’ve been in venture for a long time and invest in many of the marquee names, but there’s also a strong moral compass behind how they deploy capital.”
With just 34 limited partners in a €210 million fund, ticket sizes are unusually large for the sector. “We only have about 34 LPs,” he said.
“So if you divide 210 by 34, the median cheque is pretty high.”
The importance of backing scalable climate solutions
2150 backs founders scaling economically competitive climate solutions. Fund I portfolio companies include 1Komma5º, Vammo, and Blue Frontier.
Secondly, 2150 has always focused on the industrial side. According to Hernandez:
“The first thing that never existed is going to be expensive. It’s literally cobbled together by hand. My partner Hernandez Yolk was in industry before, building stuff in factories. I worked in electronics.
We always asked: at what point does this become price-competitive with what it’s replacing? Is it unit one? It might not be unit 20. Is it unit 100 or 1,000? How do they get there, and how much is it going to cost? Do they need to build their own factory or can they outsource manufacturing?”
A third factor, Hernandez added, was demonstrating that the portfolio’s growth was not driven by equity alone.
For every euro of venture capital raised, the companies have attracted an additional €0.75 in debt or other forms of non-dilutive financing.
“That’s working capital, that’s factory build-out, that’s financing products for customers,” he said.
Unlike pure software startups, capital-intensive climate and industrial technologies must be designed from day one to access these alternative funding sources.
“If you’re doing hard tech, you have to think about this other type of capital from the start,” Hernandez explained. “It can’t just be venture equity.”
That discipline also shaped how the firm positioned itself to investors. Rather than relying on the idea of a “green premium,”
2150 focused on backing technologies that win on fundamental economics. “There was no green premium in 2021,” Hernandez said.
“Nobody was going to pay three times more for something just because it was better for the planet. It had to be cheaper, faster, better, or cheaper to own over time. That’s always been the core focus of the solutions we back.”
Over the last year, Hernandez has seen software for commercial and industrial energy management as the fastest way to scale, noting, “We’ve probably seen two dozen companies in that space, many in Germany.”
These startups focus on optimising energy use across factories, logistics centres, and cold-storage facilities, often applying AI to fine-tune complex industrial processes.
“It’s about how you use algorithms to make industrial systems run better, or to control robots and machinery more efficiently,” Hernandez explained.
“That’s less the case for areas like cement, cooling hardware, or other deep industrial technologies,” he said.. 2150 often co-invests with firms like Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Energy Impact Partners, who are willing to go down the hard-tech path. 2150 is intentionally a Series A investor.
Hernandez explained:
“It doesn’t have to be revenue, but it has to be a product we can touch, pilots deployed, maybe some ARR, and most importantly, the team: the PhD, the commercial lead, and often someone who can talk to banks for debt.
Two brilliant minds spinning out of Imperial with something that might commercialise in five years is probably not for us. Our bias is to have an impact today with solutions that can scale today.”
Investing for impact now
2150’s second fund is structured as an Article 9 fund under the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) — meaning every investment must qualify as environmentally sustainable under that strict regulatory regime. Hernandez explained that it’s an EU regulation to avoid greenwashing.
“Article 8 is light green, Article 9 is dark green. Everything you invest in has to have a positive planetary or societal impact.
You have to report annually. There are exclusions: no extractives, no weapons, no significant harm. It limits dual-use technologies. We were one of the first VC funds to choose Article 9, and it matched our mission.”
In terms of sustainability priorities, cooling stands out as one of 2150’s biggest focus areas. By 2035, global energy demand for cooling is expected to exceed that of data centres, making it a critical and fast-growing source of emissions and infrastructure strain.
Water is another major theme, spanning challenges from floods and droughts to contamination by PFAS and microplastics.
Further, “demand drivers like sustainable aviation fuel mandates, data centre energy costs, carbon pricing, and industrial partnerships are becoming very important,” shared Fernandez.