History has proven time and time again that FOMO can easily lead to massive losses if investors aren’t careful. But wealthy investors and institutions must be pretty anxious about missing out on the next big ‘sustainability’ play after the success of Beyond Meat, because a group of investors just handed Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management – a sustainability-focused VC firm – $1 billion for its latest fund.
Generation’s ‘Sustainable Solutions Fund’ will focus on environmental solutions, healthcare and financial inclusion, and it has already closed two of its first investments (though it looks like the firm missed out on ‘Impossible Foods’ latest $300 million fundraising round).
The firm led Andela’s Series D round, as well as the latest round of Sophia Genetics. Andela focuses on connecting teams of engineers with software developers in Africa, while Sophia provides ‘data driven medicine applications’.
As Pitchbook points out, Generation’s latest fund is a “big step up”, considering that its last sustainability-focused fund raised just $300 million. But given that ‘ESG investing’ is suddenly in vogue, we imagine funds with a similar focus will receive sizable windfalls. The ‘Sustainable Solutions’ fund is the third raised by the firm to date.
Gore said in a statement that the “sustainability revolution” will have “the scale of the industrial revolution and the pace of the digital revolution”, which is an extremely grandiose thing to say.
But as long as Beyond Meat is trading at more than 45x sales, the ‘sustainability is the new bitcoin’ will remain the market’s conventional wisdom du jour.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2JyUl38 Tyler Durden