The Climate Tech landscape is rapidly evolving, with new companies building innovative solutions emerging daily. For investors to keep up, they must quickly identify new solutions, understand the market, and map potential risks and opportunities.
That is easier said than done. The ecosystem can be hard to navigate, require deep technical expertise, an extensive network, and a thorough understanding of new policies and regulations. This is a guide on setting up automation on the Net0 platform to get notified about new climate tech deals as they happen.
What is deal-sourcing?
Deal sourcing refers to the systematic search for investment opportunities that align with an investor’s strategic objectives. For example, a growth-stage climate tech venture capital firm might want to maintain a steady pipeline of early-stage startups building clean energy solutions to start nurturing leads early on.
Effective deal sourcing is crucial to:
- Not miss out on top deals
- Discover high-potential investment opportunities
- Diversify investment portfolios
- Maintain a steady pipeline of deals
- Stay updated on market trends and emerging sectors
Deal-sourcing done well helps investors gain a competitive edge by identifying promising investments before anyone else.
Why is deal-sourcing challenging in climate tech?
Deal-sourcing in climate tech presents unique challenges compared to other sectors.
- Many climate tech solutions are novel and complex. This can make it challenging to assess their potential due to a lack of benchmarks and historical data.
- The fast-paced environment makes it difficult for investors to stay informed and make timely decisions.
- Climate tech spans multiple sectors and geographies, requiring investors to have broad industry knowledge and reach.
- Access to public information is limited. Most climate tech companies operate in private markets, making it harder to evaluate opportunities.
To effectively invest in climate tech, investors must access the right data at the right time. This is where deal-source automation comes into play.
How to automate deal-sourcing in climate
Deal sourcing is a top priority of VC and PE firms, but it’s becoming increasingly complex and time-consuming. According to Affinity, every deal needs an average of 34 hours of research – nearly a full workweek. By automating aspects of deal sourcing, investors can save time and quickly identify new opportunities. Our platform automates deal-sourcing by allowing users to receive shortlists of relevant companies straight into their inbox or CRM.
1. Open the ‘organizations’ dashboard
This provides a full view of companies building climate tech solutions globally. To create a shortlist based on your investment criteria, head to ‘Filters’ to narrow your search based on industry, geography, growth stage, technological readiness level, and more.
2. Create a filtered view
In the organization tab, you can filter companies based on location, year founded, number of employees, and growth stage. For example, an early-stage investor might only want to see startups in the ‘Ideation’ stage based in Europe.
3. Narrow your search with the Taxonomy
At Net Zero Insights, we designed a framework to organize and categorize climate innovation solutions based on challenge areas. This is useful for horning in on sectors or verticals eg. hardware companies building solutions within renewable energy.
4. Use keywords to find exact matches
You can also filter companies based on keywords. This can be useful to identify specific solutions such as those linked to the EU’s environmental objectives.
5. Filter based on funding
Our platform makes it easy to discover companies based on total funding raised, recent rounds, or other investment criteria. If you’re a VC Fund investing from Series A, that could be to only list startups that have recently closed a seed round or raised above $5M in total funding.
6. Advanced search
Use the advanced filters to narrow your search even further e.g. based on signals, investors, or impact metrics.
7. Review the shortlist
After you’ve selected the search criteria, hit ‘apply’ to review the qualified list of companies. Look through the list to see if the companies are relevant.
8. Save your search
Press ‘save search’ to stay updated on new deals meeting the criteria. Simply name your list and select how often you want to be notified. Or utilize our Affinity integration to receive deals straight into your CRM.
Not on the Net0 platform yet? Book a demo to learn how to use it to source deals, see funding trends, and gain insight into new markets.
