Building a premier and enduring firm focused on the sustainable transformation of the global economy.
Our mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to a sustainable, resilient, and adaptable future by investing in the category-creating companies of tomorrow.
Building a sustainable firm for decades ahead
We are committed to building a firm where diverse perspectives are actively sought and believe building with people from a range of backgrounds and experiences makes us better partners to our investors and our companies.
Our team brings a diverse set of skills, styles, and experiences that inform our collective perspective. We focus on learning every day from our exhaustive research, companies, and each other. We embrace challenging conversations, question all assumptions, and believe the best ideas rise in a flat, intellectual environment. Activate’s Executive and Strategic Advisory Boards, comprising industry experts, executives, investors, and operators, bring another layer of valuable insight, perspectives, and networks to bear.
Our values are the blueprint for our actions
Persistence: Building companies is hard. Entrepreneurs are all in. We are, too.
Candor: Direct and transparent communication drives trust and better decision-making.
Humility: Self-reflection is essential for building balanced perspectives and learning from our past decisions.
Our mission drives us forward
Activate Capital is a growth-stage venture capital firm that invests in companies building critical physical systems, grounded in deep energy, space, and infrastructure technology expertise, rigorous diligence, and high-engagement partnership.
We believe that sustainability, resiliency, and adaptation are the critical themes that will define the future of energy and infrastructure. The integration of these themes provides the foundation for Activate’s differentiated investment strategy and forms the lens through which we view and measure impact creation across our portfolio.
Sustainability, Resiliency, and Adaptation
Activate believes economic systems must not only be sustainable but also resilient.
Global economic disruption poses one of the greatest existential threats to a successful sustainable transformation. Such disruptions could be exogenous to the transformation or a byproduct of it and may derail the project. For instance, the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), which leads to global conflict due to scarce resources, could delay timely deployment or render the transition infeasible.
Low- and zero-carbon energy solutions must be coupled with reliability and affordability, or countries may revert to traditional forms of energy and abandon commitments to carbon reduction. Declines in population and productivity threaten to bring about long-term inflation and stagnation that will inhibit governments’ ability to make critical capital investments if they are not countered with breakthroughs in production efficiencies. Success is not inevitable.
But don't take it from us...
“We chose Activate because of their strong reputation as a value added investor. Activate has lived up to its reputation. The Activate team has been by our side every step of our journey since they invested actively helping us grow the business. We couldn’t have asked for a better investor to lead our Series B.”
Mark Liffmann, CEO, Omnidian
Why does this company matter? Does it make the world a better place?
We believe that sustainability and resiliency are critical properties that define the future of energy, infrastructure, and our broader systems of production, transportation, and trade, which work together to mitigate the effects of climate change. Our focus sectors contribute almost 90% of all global GHG emissions. As we work towards a greener economy, we must also strengthen its core systems in a way that promotes broad prosperity, growth, and stability.
Sound economic investing across our target sectors is key to driving further capital flows. This belief grounds our conviction that working towards sustainability and measurable impact fully aligns with generating best-in-class economic returns. Activate addresses the “missing middle” of climate finance. We typically invest $10–$30M into companies at the Series B to pre-IPO stages, focusing on investing in technology companies at the inflection point of their growth.