Dear Vanagon Community,

We would like to express our gratitude to all our startups, investors, partners, friends and our readers! An exciting year that has passed. In our end of year briefing, we would like look back and reflect on 2023, in particular, on the past few months.

In today’s briefing

• 🎆 Vanagon 2023 Review: First Closing | New fund setup | Investment highlights

• 📚 ReFi Talents Review

• 🔎 Market Insights | Reflections on COP28

• 🗣️ Events: Women in Venture Capital Summit | TUM Blockchain Conference | etc.

•  📰 Vanagon in the Press: Startup Insider Podcast | Süddeutsche Zeitung | Weltspiegel | etc.

🎆 Vanagon 2023 Review

2023 was an eventful year for us. We would like to share some important milestones with you:

Our First Closing

A few weeks ago, we announced the first closing of our 30 Mio. EUR fund with 30 LPs and Jörg Walden as our anchor investor. A milestone, we celebrated together with our LPs, our portfolio companies and other Vanagon friends on top of the Deutsches Museum in Munich. More information on our first close here or in the press review below.

New Fund Setup

2023 is our Vanagon founding year. Originally emerging from an angel syndicate, we overhauled our setup and became an institutional grade venture capital fund. For instance,

• After obtaining our BaFin license (Special AIF (§44 KAGB), we hired the best legal boutique we could find, Orbit, a specialized fund law firm spun out of POELLATH, and revamped together with the amazing Philip Mostertz our fund structure and LPA to top notch market standard

• We hired fund administrator ACE ALTERNATIVES, founded by Matias Collan who spent many years as Earlybird’s COO. Matias and his team allow us to offer highest standards in LP experience regarding fund management as well as in implementing ESG/SFDR.

Selected investment highlights

In 2023, we invested in 4 companies, all next gen-software pioneers helping companies to navigate major transitions

• 🐙 Learn.xyz is a generative AI-powered learning app that allows with users to create courses on any topic, in any language. The app was designed to create a fun, gamified environment. Having started as a B2C app, whose community created >60 000 courses over the past few months, the startup manages to attract more and more B2B customers seeking to train their employees regarding technology & business transformation. One of our co-investors in the startup is Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn, the largest business network and one of the largest suppliers of online learning content globally. One of Learn.xyz’s founders, Christian Byza, is also one of the co-founders of OMR, an online marketing conference with 70 000 participants. The team’s marketing skills has not only resulted in the rapid user growth but also in media coverage by ARD, Handelsblatt, WiWo etc.

• 🛰️ Renoster.co is an eMRV company bringing deep transparency into the still largely low-tech voluntary carbon markets - by rating carbon projects with the latest technology and publishing the results.

  With remote sensing and machine learning, Renoster determines the carbon sequestration value for nature-based carbon projects at scale. Renoster's business model represents a flywheel of transparency and awareness and creates incentives for more honesty and accuracy in the market. The company received international media coverage for exposing low quality delivered by legacy carbon projects and registries and created a profitable business model while helping improve the market for nature-based carbon credits. For example, Renoster co-founder Elias Ayrey was prominently featured for his fight for more transparency in the market in the famous investigative report by DIE ZEIT / The Guardian exposing the low quality of rainforest credits by Verra, the world's largest carbon registry.

• 📊 Particula.earth is a "Moody's" for digital environmental assets such as digital carbon or biodiversity credits, green bonds, and renewable energy certificates. Particula built the first rating and data platform for tokenized assets providing quality ratings and in-depth analysis reports, focusing primarily on technical, economic, environmental and compliance aspects and leveraging AI tools for sentiment analysis, risk analysis as well as price prediction. Particula identified over 900 tokens in 25+ asset classes and launched its platform in September. The startup has already onboarded the first top tier customers such as the Liechtenstein Banking Association and a DAX conglomerate.

• 🗺 The Landbanking Group is creating the end to end infrastructure for nature as an asset class and enables nature and biodiversity conservation and regeneration at scale.

  The company is combining latest technologies to assess nature along dimensions such as carbon, water, soil & biodiversity and creates individual natural capital accounts. They serve as underlying for landbanking claims that can be assetized and traded. See 3-min. explainer video. The company was founded by serial founder Dr. Sonja Stuchtey and ex Mc-Kinsey director and founder of Systemiq Ltd., Prof. Martin R. Stuchtey. They already have >15 customers such as Weleda, with projects across the globe.

  Our co-Investors include BonVenture, Planet A Ventures and notable investors such as André Hoffmann.

Furthermore, other portfolio companies celebrated significant progress, e.g.

• 🌿 In the beginning of the year, our portfolio company Senken, the largest marketplace for digitalized carbon credits, was able to conclude a major financing round in the US raising USD 7.5m from top notch US tech VCs such as Obvious Ventures. In 2023, Senken helped 367 companies to invest in carbon credits. They collaborate closely with the German Mittelstand and offer industry-specific portfolios to invest in carbon credits, which are vetted by experts.

• 💚 Our portfolio company Heartstocks, was able conclude a partnership with one of the largest multi family offices (MFO) in Germany tokenizing stakes in major PE funds and creating an innovative and cost effective new product for the MFO’s customers. Furthermore, Heartstocks is advancing in various dialogues with potential customers, for instance a German Bundesland for tokenizing a peat bog carbon project. Heartstocks is a fully regulated tokenization solution, which allows to hold assets as digital stock in a traditional stock portfolio. Here is a 3-min. video explainer on the solution.

   

📚 Review of our ReFi Talents program

We successfully kicked off the ReFi Talents program in September this year with 160 talents, after receiving 600 applications from all over the world.

In collaboration with partners such as the Bertelsmann Foundation, ReFi Talents is an 18-week online program for participants of all career stages who would like to acquire the necessary knowledge, network, and footprint to become changemakers and help accelerate the transition to a regenerative economy with the help of frontier technologies such as blockchain & AI.

Participants explore topics such as climate change and other planetary boundaries, as well as frontier technologies - some of the most powerful tools we have today, providing innovative solutions for our most urgent problems. In each session, participants discuss their insights and learn from another. Additionally, innovators from the space introduce their work in 30-min. presentations.

Speakers included e.g.:

• our portfolio companies Particula (also a co-initiator of the program), Senken and the The Landbanking Group 

• the author of the World Economic Forum blockchain for good report

• the head of the UN World Food Program Accelerator 

• the head of innovation of the Climate Collective and also

• an indigenous leader from the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Foundation.

The feedback and commitment of our participants has been exceptionally strong and we decided jointly with our implementation partner, the Frankfurt School of Finance, to continue the program after the first cohort.

If you are interested in participating, follow the ReFi Talents Linkedin page and watch out for calls for application for the next intake. If you are interested in mentoring or sponsoring the next cohort of the program, please reach out to [email protected]. You can also find more information on the ReFi Talents website.

🔎 Market Insights

Reflections on COP28

Disappointment and hope… COP28 in 2023 marked unprecedented moments in climate action: the outcome is a climate deal that calls on all countries to transition away from fossil fuels - but not to phase them out. Despite the weak language and the disappointment around it, Prof. Martin Stuchtey, founder of our portfolio company The Landbanking Group, who has been on the ground in Dubai during COP28, intends to look at the bright side. He predicts that due to the current wording, despite its vagueness, more and more people will understand that fossils are timed assets. Capital will further shift away towards more sustainable destinations.

Despite not sufficient, several other remarkable outcomes were achieved during COP28. On day one already, a historic decision was made regarding the operationalization of the loss and damage fund, with commitments exceeding USD 700 million. The conference also introduced the first global stocktake to enhance climate action and keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C. The global stocktake is a process established under the Paris Agreement, aiming to assess collective progress towards achieving the Agreement's long-term goals - including assessing the effectiveness of actions taken by countries to mitigate climate. It emphasized the need for a 43% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 - a goal, which we will for sure miss, if we continue at the current rate of progress.

We recommend reading the analysis of COP28 of Anna Lerner Nesbitt of our friends and partner organization Climate Collective (see LinkedIn link below). She chose the photo below for her post, which in a painful way, reflects both, urgency and insufficient action.

We would like to end this review with the following quote of Martin:

“We know is that we will be dismissed into >=2.0 degree world. We have invented many mechanisms: Damage & Loss, green finance, carbon markets - and work hard to improve them further. I - for once - have not met anyone in the 100.000 participants at COP28 who believed that any of it will bring us onto the pathway we need.

The only shift that may give us hope is an alternative view that goes beyond penalizing bad behaviours. It must entail that investments into nature are needed, feasible, and attractive. We are working on that vision day and night, at The Landbanking Group. It’s too late to be pessimistic. We need all our energy for action.”

And we at Vanagon are proud to be working on this mission with you, Martin!

🗣️ Events

Our 2023 was filled with event participations. Here are some highlights of the past quarter.

• BaystartUp’s VentureCon conference with various VCs and business angels from Bavaria and beyond.

• Vanagon held a webinar on the technological transformation of the financial sector at Berenberg Bank for 50 portfolio and asset managers.

• Axel attended the TUM Blockchain Conference and talked on the ReFi panel about imperatives to take climate actions into the equation of economical growth.

  

  TUM Blockchain Conference

• Vanagon remotely co-organized a Founders Cocktail at New York’s Climate Week for our portfolio companies. The Landbanking Group, Senken held presentations and Renoster attended.

• Susanne was a mentor at SystAIn3r Hackathon for 100 Women in Tech Driving AI, Web 3 and Sustainability Innovation

  

• We attended WVC:E Women in Venture Capital Summit Europe at Station F in Paris, where Susanne held a keynote speech

📰 Vanagon in the press

First Closing Media Echo

We were quite delighted by the media echo we received following our First Closing announcement, e.g. the articles in EU Startups, Sifted and Startup Insider

Roland Berger Greenblock Report

🇬🇧 The Greenblock Report: Our portfolio company Senken (p. 44) and Vanagon Ventures (p. 66) were both featured with an article in the Greenblock Report issued by Roland Berger highlighting sustainability innovators and initiatives in the Web3 and AI ecosystem. Download the report here.

Vanagon featured in Financial Yearbook 2024

We were invited to share our view on Climate Finance and Nature Equity Markets and what role next-frontier technology startups can play in this emerging category.

Süddeutsche Zeitung

And last but not least, we made it into the Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest newspaper, which covered the work Vanagon and our portfolio companies Senken and PARTICULA are doing in renewing the voluntary carbon market with technology and re-establishing trust with data.

You can read the full article as PDF here 

Learn.xyz in ARD Weltspiegel

The Landbanking Group in The Pioneer Tech Briefing Podcast

Additionally, The Landbanking Group has was a guest in the Startup Insider Podcast 🇩🇪 and in the MA EARTH podcast 🇬🇧.

Senken in FUTUR3 Podcast

In case you cannot get enough from our ‘Vanagon in the press’ section and have a lot of time over the holidays, you can find more links to press articles, podcasts & co here.

Now, we wish you wonderful holidays!

See you next year!

Axel, Susanne & Sandro