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At the speaker’s dinner for climate and foodtech conference HackSummit on Wednesday — where we ate finger food from rustic baskets hanging from trees in a Lausanne vineyard — the conversation turned to the elusive world of family offices, and their growing interest in climate tech funds.
That chatter continued on the conference floor yesterday. Greg Michel, the solo GP behind Ananke, which backs seed and Series A companies working on sustainable food tech production, told Sifted that his fund’s core LP is the Francis Family office — the vehicle that invests the private wealth of Nicholas Francis, the cofounder of video game software company Unity Technologies, which IPO’d in 2020 for $1.3bn.
It's a young office compared to those who are investing generational wealth. But punters at Hack Summit suggest that older offices are being pushed towards greener funds by younger family members.
“The younger generation of these family offices are banging on the table like ‘what the fuck, Dad, what are we doing?” said one VC.
Nadim El Khazen, who manages LP relationships at Peakbridge, said older family offices which made their wealth in heavily polluting industries are backing impact funds as a way to start offsetting that impact. “They're starting to think, ‘we owe it to our kids and to the planet to back less polluting companies.’” He added that he’s seeing more second-generation millennials join senior family office members when they meet VCs.
The VC who wanted to remain anonymous also said they aren't wholly convinced of the impact so far. “It’s 95% talk and 5% investing,” they told Sifted. They said when some investors they'd met at events returned home to the “grownups” — the more risk-averse older family members and the board, who prioritise protecting the family wealth — they often had their climate tech ideas vetoed.
The world of family offices is notoriously secretive, so stats on the trend can be hard to come by. That said, there are other examples. KIRKBI, the investment company that holds the wealth of the family behind LEGO, is focused on sustainability investments. So is Abacon Capital, which invests the wealth of the Hamburg-based Büll family. They made their money in real estate but Abacon now focuses on energy and mobility investments.
It also helps that lots of family offices own land, said Michel. “They see the impact of climate change on their own land,” he said.
Several land-owning families in the UK are understood to be acting as LPs in agritech funds — with an eye on how the tech could one day change their own estates.
We’re keen to learn more about this shift — so whether you’re a fundraising VC who has noticed younger family office members taking over pitch meetings, a family office interested in the space and willing to chat or have some intel on the topic, get in touch at freya@sifted.eu and sadia@sifted.eu.
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