There's a mismatch in investment in climate technology: According to Sightline Climate, more than half of total investment since 2020 has gone to startups working on energy and transportation.
“It's great to see these solutions working,” Juniper founding partner Michael Luciani told TechCrunch. However, as he points out, these sectors account for less than half of all carbon pollution.
“A big contributor is the way we make things, not just food, agriculture and buildings, but also industrial products, chemicals and plastics,” he says. “I have come to believe that artificial biology is the best emerging solution to most of the problems in these categories.”
Luciani and Juniper's other founding partner, Jennifer Kang, have long invested in climate action, initially as part of Climate Capital. Climate Capital is a prolific venture fund that typically writes small checks to early-stage companies. They have invested in 30 companies and led the company's investment in special purpose vehicles before raising new capital, Kang told TechCrunch.
Juniper originally started out as Climate Capital Bio, investing in climate-focused synthetic biology startups. But “as we got further down the road, we realized that what we had to rely on was the fact that we could be the climate biotech talent,” Luciani said. “Climate Capital is a great brand, but it's really a generalist brand, and that's not quite the kind of signal we wanted to send.”
Juniper's first fund is worth $10.6 million and is oversubscribed, the company exclusively tells TechCrunch. Limited partners include family offices, foundations, and Allocator One, an institutional fund of funds that serves as the anchor.
“We also have a significant number of scientists in our field who allow us to invest in funds with lower minimums. We also have over a dozen different partners from venture capital and private equity firms.” added Luciani.
Juniper operates as a regular venture fund, writing checks of $100,000 to $500,000 to scientists working to commercialize their research. The goal is to “be the first institutional investor and help them think through how to build a company,” Suga said.
The fund's early investments include California Cultured, which grows plant cells to make more sustainable coffee and chocolate, and Cache DNA, which is developing better ways to preserve DNA and RNA.
“We're building a lot of data centers, but that's not the most sustainable way for our world to grow digitally. If we stored all the data in the world in DNA today, , we only need one shoebox's worth of DNA,” Kang said. “The difference is huge.”