Dear Vanagon Community,

Before the Vanagon team heads to Oktoberfest today, we would like to give you a update on some noteworthy events from the past weeks. As well as a small heads-up: If you are attending Bits & Pretzels, you can meet us there.

Today's Briefing

• Vanagon Table Captain at Bits & Pretzels

• Fresh From The Portfolio

  • Senken launched “Deutschland Portfolio”

  • LoopID Winner of the Weconomy Competition

• 🪲 DLD Nature

  • EU's Von Der Leyen quoting the Landbanking Group

• ReFi Talents Program

  • Renoster

  • LoopID

Vanagon Table Captain at Bits & Pretzels

Oktoberfest time is Bits & Pretzels time. This year, the conference will take place in Munich from 29 September till 1 October 2024. And Vanagon will be part of it. Susanne will be table captain this year and also Axel and Sandro will be present during the conference. Reach out to us if you would like to meet up.

Bits & Pretzels Founders Festival is an annual festival connecting thousands of global startup leaders, corporates and investors, occurring around Munich Oktoberfest. Launched in 2014, the event has swiftly garnered international acclaim, featuring renowned speakers like Sir Richard Branson and Barack Obama. For more information, visit: https://www.bitsandpretzels.com

Fresh From The Portfolio

Senken launched “Deutschland Portfolio”

Senken launched its “Deutschland Portfolio”, an exclusive portfolio consisting only of German climate protection projects🌱. The portfolio has been designed as a highly effective premium solution for all German companies that want to be a leader in sustainability and make progress on their net zero journey with premium domestic projects.

Senken’s Deutschland Portfolio offers:

• Premium CO2 certificates from local projects that support your community and your net zero goals.

• Highest quality certificates with low risk: Only 5% of projects pass Senken’s rigorous quality assurance process, for peace of mind and a clear conscience.

• Science-based approach: The portfolio is based on the Oxford Principles of Offsetting.

• Long-term benefits: Access to stable prices and avoid market volatility while securing availability of scarce, high-quality CO2 allowances.

With its Germany portfolio, Senken intends to strike a balance between quality, CO2 neutralization and the added value of the projects. It co-operates with top-notch project partners and change-makers:

• 👨🏻‍🌾 Regenerative agriculture: Klim

• 🌿 Restoration of peatlands: aeco

• 🔥 Biochar: Novocarbo

• 🪨 Enhanced rock weathering: ZeroEx

If you would like to learn more, Senken will host a webinar on 25.09.2024 at 3PM CET, bringing together all the partners involved in the Germany portfolio and showing what state-of-the-art German climate protection looks like.

Register for the webinar here: https://www.dasdeutschlandportfolio.de/#webinar

LoopID Winner of the Weconomy Competition

Our portfolio company LoopID, providing AI-powered circularity solutions, has emerged as a winner of the prestigious WECONOMY 24/25 competition.

WECONOMY is a joint initiative by Startup-Förderung - Wissensfabrik, UnternehmerTUM, Handelsblatt and various German companies. WECONOMY awards every year ten innovative tech startups in Germany and brings their founders together with experts and executives up to the board level of the German economy.

Since 2007, WECONOMY has been selecting the most innovative startups in Germany: CureVac, FOND of, komoot, Kinexon, inveox and other strong teams have convinced our jury over the last 17 years.

🪲 DLD Nature

DLD Nature recently took place in Munich. The conference was all about discussing solutions for biodiversity loss, protecting nature, and transitioning to a sustainable, future-forward economy.

Biodiversity expert Dr. Frauke Fischer set the scene with the facts:

• We have accelerated the species extinction rate by 1,000-fold.

• We are losing 150 species a day.

• We destroy a "soccer-pitch" of rainforest every 5 seconds.

Shocking facts that are widely known but still hardly spark any action.

During the following speech by Bavarian PM Dr. Markus Söder, however, suddenly everyone’s cell phones, including his own, went off with an alarm (🚨 statewide test alarm) and forced everyone into hectic action, trying to stop the sound. This ironically showed the kind of alarm and immediate action we need given the biodiversity crisis.

EU's Von Der Leyen quoting the Landbanking Group

🇪🇺 EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivered a ground-breaking speech on nature: “We need a fundamental rethink of the relationship between our economy and the natural world.” Von der Leyen also repeated the proposition “to bring Nature On The Balance Sheet” that Prof. Dr. Martin R. Stuchtey of our portfolio company, The Landbanking Group, brought forward in the previous panel with Prof. Johan Rockström, KfW’s Stefan B. Wintels, and McKinseys Solveigh Hieronimus. This was of course a big highlight of this conference for us.

Susanne was furthermore delighted to talk to Prof. Johan Rockström, director of PIK - Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and the father of the Planetary Boundaries framework, which we believe should be part of every business school's core curriculum.

In his keynote speech, Johan talked about the framework and sent some powerful statements: „The planet is subsidizing the economy - to make harmful practices as cheap as they are.“ But now, „Nature is starting to send invoices back to the economy.“

Furthermore, the conference highlighted powerful approaches to tackle the nature crisis with powerful technological tools, including those by The Landbanking Group and ExoMatter.

Many more powerful speeches and conversations followed - too many to mention them all. Particularly memorable are the ones held by Dr. med. Eckart von Hirschhausen and Club of Rome’s Sandrine Dixson-Declève and Allianz Group board member Günther Thallinger’s speech on a beginning age of uninsurability. The talks can be watched online here.

The spirit of the conference and the conversations there were very energizing and left us feeling even more proud of our portfolio companies who are working on powerful solutions to mitigate the biodiversity crisis.

ReFi Talents Program

Vanagon portfolio companies rocking the stage

Last July, we kicked off the 2nd cohort of our ReFi Talents global online education program. 200 talents were admitted to the cohort - mostly professionals from the finance, sustainability, and technology space and from all over the world and all eager to learn about how to change the world for the better with technology.

In every session, it’s a pleasure to see the power of this amazing group of participants unfold: Diligently assembled assignments are presented on topics ranging from planetary boundaries, to Ikigai to digital Measuring, Reporting and Verification of nature projects.

Our portfolio companies LoopId and Renoster have held key note speeches in recent sessions.

Renoster

Elias Ayrey (PhD) is the Chief Science Officer of Renoster, which he founded together with Saif Bhatti. As an investor in Renoster and a fan of his work, I was very delighted to announce him. Elias is playing a crucial role in renewing the voluntary carbon market by setting strong incentives for more honesty in the market.

🔎 Elias is quite well known in the Voluntary Carbon Market. He is reviewing carbon projects using his extensive experience, augmented by remote sensing and machine learning. Truly revolutionary in the still very opaque market: Renoster reviews are made public after some time delay.

📰 The results are sometimes truly shocking and have therefore caused global media echoes. His revelations uncovered pretty much all major carbon scandals, including the one around Verra (largest carbon registry) and Kariba (one of the largest carbon projects worldwide).

🌳 In his speech, Elias dove deep into the science of forest carbon projects and fundamental components. Read more here:

LoopID

Christian Adler, CEO of our portfolio company LoopID, a leader in AI- & blockchain-powered solutions for the circular economy, was guest speaker of the 3rd ReFi Talents session.

♻️ In his presentation, Christian stated that circularity can become a competitive advantage if properly applied.

♾️ Their platform, LoopID, enables brands to

• Add digital twins to products

• Create E2E supply chain transparency & fulfill regulation

• Improve customer engagement & traceability

• Run profitable business models

• Implement efficient R-strategies (repair, reuse, resell….)

Christian showed several use cases they implemented with industry partners such a digital product pass for washing machines co-created with Infineon.

Afterwards he dove into the tech:

• The tech concept of digital twins

• Semantic AI & Knowledge Graphs

• Blockchain technology (NFTs & smart contracts) to verify the data and leverage immutability

📚 About ReFi Talents:

Together with the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management and movers & shakers in the NatureFintech space, we have co-initiated and co-designed this global online education program. The 18-week long program, which admits 200 participants per cohort, helps professionals from various backgrounds and career stages to quickly get onboarded to regenerative finance and the regenerative economy. The goal of the program is to guide the way for talents to get active and become entrepreneurs, technologists, regulators, investors, or influencers in the space and to drive the transition to a regenerative economy via next gen technology. Participation is free of charge.

Thank you for reading our briefing. Any feedback? Let us know. Anyone you think should also read our briefing? Please forward.

Have a great week and all the best,

Susanne, Axel and Sandro