Precision Agriculture: Does Climate Tech VC Money Flow Into Agri-Chemicals & Monocrops?

2 years Scott Cooney 0 Comments
Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.

In my experience, climate tech venture capital money is not so different from regular VC money. They still invest only in hockeystick type companies, long shots that might go bust quick, or might go big. VCs make 20 bets hoping that one of them becomes the next Uber and makes up for the rest of the lost millions.

I spent a summer trying to pitch climate tech investors to invest in CleanTechnica and most VCs didn’t even return my messages, even warm ones, even intros made on LinkedIn, you name it. I networked. I hustled. I understood media is not a hockeystick type of investment profile, but offered that CleanTechnica could help support the rest of their portfolio by promoting the rest of their companies (as long as we disclose it and make it clear, I saw no issue with that, if it helped promote climate stability, I’m all for it).

Hilariously enough, those same VCs still hire expensive PR firms who just pitch their story ideas to CleanTechnica. And we at CleanTechnica have to sit and be nice and try to respond with empathy while we watch the virtually pure propaganda media companies of the world get inordinate amounts of free Dark Money to peddle anti-clean tech influence.

I’ll follow this post with an analysis of one clean tech investment that aligns some VC money with corporate strategic money, and directly invests in a company that helps giant agribusiness keep their monocrops working longer and directly pays for chemicals made from fossil fuels. I’m not opposed to it, as you’ll see.

Just interesting how the cookie crumbles, isn’t it?

Image courtesy of Berkeley Law.

Sign up for CleanTechnica's Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott's in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!
Advertisement
 
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one on top stories of the week if daily is too frequent.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.

CleanTechnica's Comment Policy

Scott Cooney

Scott Cooney (LinkedIn) is a serial eco-entrepreneur focused on making the world a better place for all its residents. Scott is the founder of CleanTechnica and was just smart enough to hire someone smarter than him to run it. He then started Pono Home, a service that greens homes, which has performed efficiency retrofits on more than 20,000 homes and small businesses, reducing carbon pollution by more than 27 million pounds a year and saving customers more than $6.3 million a year on their utilities. Scott wanted to contribute to native ownership of the clean energy revolution, so he gifted Pono Home to a long tenured employee with native Hawaiian roots for just the liquidation value, turning down a mainland company interested in purchasing the company. In a previous life, Scott was an adjunct professor of Sustainability in the MBA program at the University of Hawai'i, a consultant at Saatchi & Saatchi S, where he worked with a team to educate and empower millions of employees to live healthier and more sustainably. He is the author of Build a Green Small Business: Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur (McGraw-Hill) , and Green Living Ideas. Scott is an occasional investor, currently he has investments in Rivian (RIVN).

Scott Cooney has 188 posts and counting. See all posts by Scott Cooney