In This Economy? How to Raise a Nature-Tech Fund
Session Description
This session addressed the roughly $700 billion annual Nature-tech financing gap, attributed to geopolitical headwinds, a lack of standardised monitoring, long return timelines, and scalability constraints. Holly Stower and Amelie Desrochers opened with their background in the sector. Holly's research spans carbon markets, biodiversity markets, water technology, and waste and biomaterials. Amelie led development of an ocean cluster in Canada before moving into blue economy investment. Afloat has partnered with Nature Tech Collective to stress-test a nature tech taxonomy against venture and fund data, identifying around 2,500 funds open to nature tech investment and over 3,000 ventures seeking funding.
The session then covered fund mechanics, including SPVs versus full VC funds and the GP/LP relationship. One point of focus was how SPVs let small-dollar LPs, as little as £10,000 to £20,000, pool into a single deal without the overhead of a full fund structure. Audience discussion raised two open questions: whether the VC return model can work for infrastructure-heavy or indigenous-partnered projects, and what founders need to hear from investors to become fundable.
Speakers
Holly Stower, Co-Founder & COO, Afloat
Amelie Desrochers, CEO, Afloat
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Key Takeaways
Nature tech is being defined from the investor side outward: the working definition is innovation (hardware, software, or business model) that is nature positive, nature supportive, or nature neutral, deliberately broader than pure biodiversity or conservation tech.
Current VC investment into nature tech is projected to reach $6 billion by 2030, which speakers repeatedly called nowhere near enough against the $700 billion annual funding gap.
First-time fund managers were advised to start small (single-digit millions), close quickly, and lean on existing personal networks rather than waiting to raise a large fund on a long timeline; this was framed as the advice given to the speakers themselves by fund-formation programs like VC Lab.
AI tools and cold outreach were explicitly called out as poor substitutes for relationship-building when raising a fund; trust and personal networks were positioned as the actual mechanism that gets funds closed.
A sustained audience challenge centered on indigenous and community-partnered ventures: the standard VC fundraising cycle (build a proposal, pitch, get rejected 9 times out of 10) was described as actively damaging to long-term community trust, and several speakers agreed the current fund structure isn't built for that kind of partnership.
Blended finance and patient, evergreen capital (cited examples: a Paris-based evergreen fund, family office vehicles) came up as a better fit than traditional VC returns for nature-based projects that are infrastructure-heavy or slow to scale.
A recurring funding gap was named around governance and operations costs, since many grant and innovation funding structures cover technology or activity but not the staffing and operational capacity needed to sustain it.
On investability, the panel argued the differentiator between funded and unfunded startups is rarely the quality of the idea. It's the quality and rigor of the sales and financial forecasting strategy, i.e. being able to show investors exactly how the venture gets from its current state to a specific revenue target.
