🌍 Y1 Investing Complete | Venturing in ReFi | 2023 Update
Your 5-minute deep-dive into regenerative web3 investing
Hi team!
Lovely to write for you again.
This newsletter is big. We’ve included a strategic update from the DAO before a full ReFi news recap from January and February.
Key Notes
💰 Aera Force will invest in 1-2 more exceptional entrepreneurs by the end of Q2.
📚 Lessons from building the DAO and year one of investing will come out soon — feel free to submit any of your reflections on ReFi to alexfilotimo@gmail.com.
❤️🩹 We will pause this newsletter over the next three months. Interested in writing for climate/crypto investors? If it supports our audience, DM me to discuss.
Strategic Update
After some flooding and storms in New Zealand — events predicted and well discussed by Al Gore when he asked us to work on climate solutions decades ago — Aera Force's investment committee reconvened last Monday.
We are proud of the DAO, some extraordinary contributors who helped the journey, and the progress in our first investments (special shoutout to Digital Gaia and Open Forest Protocol).
Aera Force’s legal structure has now officially operated for over a year. We are one of the first investment communities, and the DAO is an experiment we both have learned a lot from and hope has left a positive mark in the development of #ReFi.
Despite the industry being plagued with broad challenges and periods that slowed our investment cadence, we believe ReFi continues to grow in strength. The dedicated ReFi investors, new accelerators and initiatives, and broader adoption like Davos 2023 events give us hope that novel, influential climate solutions will emerge.
Even more so, ReFi as a concept has enormous potential to encourage an efficient and resilient world, creating more value than markets that only consider financial capital.
As for our role. The DAO will finish investing the remaining capital, and then our core team is helping collate — and will publish a variety of lessons here. Lessons that will cover:
our investment model
seeing #ReFi develop since Nov '21
our hopes for blockchain climate startups going forward.
After finishing this first investment phase, the Aera Force DAO core team and investors will consider the next steps. Feel free to email alexfilotimo@gmail.com with any suggestions or lessons you learned over the past year — it will factor into our reflections and presentations.
Personally, as Alex, I hope this newsletter has served you well in your learning journey.
Let’s dive into our exciting ecosystem:
Global Ecosystem News 🌊
Fundraises 🚀
👁🗨 PlanetWatch, a French startup, raised €3M to support business development of their decentralized global air quality monitoring network.
🌲 Open Forest Protocol, a decentralized forest data measurement, reporting, and verification platform, secured $4.1M in pre-seed funding.
🧑🔬 Longevity Startup VitaDAO Raises $4.1M, backed by Pfizer and Balaji Srinivasan.
🏔️ Senken, a blockchain-powered carbon credit marketplace, raised $7.5M in a funding round led by Obvious Ventures.
🟣 Carbonplace, a London-based startup, raised $45M to scale its carbon credit investment platform, aiming to become “the SWIFT of the carbon markets.”
💸 KlimaDAO allocated $250k in USDC to fund the Improved Cookstoves project in Bangladesh which will produce over 31k certified carbon credits in the next two years.
⛑️ UNICEF Venture Fund invests in 4 startups developing blockchain-based solutions, working on better distributing aid, healthcare remittances, and distributing internet to remote locations.
💚 The Gitcoin Climate Solutions Alpha Round raised $76k from over 3,000 unique donors for Web3 projects working towards positive climate impact.
🪨 Carbonplace raised USD 45M in funding from nine major banks, including BBVA, BNP Paribas, Itaú Unibanco, and National Australia Bank, to build a carbon credit transaction network.
Ecosystem News
📢 Gold Standard released the results of their open public consultation on the development of tokenized Gold Standard carbon credits.
💵 Mercy Corps Ventures announced the second year of its $1M Crypto For Good Fund to support Web3 startups focused on positive ecological and humanitarian impact.
🎵 Musical artist Jack Johnson used the Regen Network Marketplace to offset the carbon footprint of his Meet the Moonlight tour using on-chain carbon credits.
🎟️ TicketMe, a Japanese NFT event ticket startup, announced a partnership with digital forestry data company Mountain View to issue carbon credit NFTs.
👕 Concrete, an Egypt-based apparel company, partnered with the Plastiks NFT marketplace to sponsor and tokenize plastic recovery projects.
🚨 Various crypto and climate organizations including Regen Network, Climate Collective, Sylvera, Everland, and Carbon Market Watch respond to an article written in The Guardian criticizing Verra Standard carbon credits.
Newly Launched Projects 🤔
🌐 Solana and Ripple launch The Blockchain x Climate Leadership Network with other leading climate and crypto organizations to accelerate Web3 climate solutions.
🌱 Verda Ventures, a Regenerative Finance investment firm led by former top executives from the Celo Foundation, launched to raise $100M for ReFi.
☀️ Crowmie, a València-based startup, launched the first tokenized renewable energy project in Spain.
🐨 Australia’s Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife launched an NFT collection where each NFT represents a tree planted in flood-affected areas of Australia.
Founders, feel free to DM our editor a project on Twitter @AlexFilotimo
Curated Readings 📚
Here are other places you can find exceptional #ReFi, crypto and climate analysis:
⛓ ReFi DAO's newsletter is exceptional, and their DAO supports founders looking to build in this industry.
🌎 Web3 for Good does a great job of collating projects and opportunities across crypto.
🦜 The deCarbonized newsletter gives a regular analysis of carbon markets from Toucan Protocol.
🤝 Aera Force’s news contributor (Thoughtfloats on Twitter) regularly shares news and is available for ReFi writing projects.
With love,
Alex Filotimo, Yoshi (Thoughtfloats), and the Aera Force DAO
Researching web3 venture investments for a flourishing future
P.S. If you want to contribute to web3-climate investing, contact us or contribute to this open-source insights repository.
This newsletter is for educational purposes only. While we strive for accurate and unbiased information, none of it is verified or intended to help as investment advice.