This Climate Fund is Enabling Industrial Markets to Decarbonize

Climate Enabling Industrial Markets to Decarbonize. (Image: Piva Capital)
Climate Enabling Industrial Markets to Decarbonize. (Image: Piva Capital)

Get the full series showing you how to raise from the top climate VCs in this industry. Subscribing also adds you to our weekly newsletter.

Founded in 2019, Piva Capital backs technology companies bringing new software and hardware solutions to the world’s industrial markets. Piva is actively looking for companies that are involved in industrial adaptation to make industry greener, more efficient, cheaper, and more productive. The three verticals Piva typically invests in early commercial-stage businesses are 1) the future of industry, 2) the future of materials and production, and 3) the future of energy and mobility.

Fund Snapshot

  • Stage: Series B
  • Initial Check Size: $5M-$10M
  • Geography: North America and Europe
  • Lead/Follow: Both (prefer to lead)
  • Revenue/Valuation Thresholds: Early commercialization

About the Fund

Why was the fund created?

Historically, a shortage of later-stage capital has limited the industrial-scale adoption of promising new technologies. Piva Capital was founded in 2019 by Ricardo Angel and Adzmel Adznan to address the need for industry to transition to a more sustainable, cleaner, smarter future. The firm’s managing partners bring almost 2 decades of individual experience in investing in the industrial space and have built a team with a strong combination of technical expertise to evaluate companies and technology, industrial experience to find the best areas to innovate and disrupt, and experienced investors to identify and support world-changing portfolio companies.

What is Piva’s core belief?

Piva believes we are now entering a new era of industrial disruption- significant changes in consumer and corporate behavior are accelerating the trend to re-envision industry. There is now more capital flowing into the industrial innovation space, and there is a need for investors that can marry technical depth with industrial experience to be able to support companies through their growth journey. Piva is investing in startups that enable industry to become smarter, more sustainable, and to adapt to climate change. The firm focuses on industries that represent over a third of global GDP, and over two-thirds of global GHG Emissions: food, agriculture, energy, transportation, steel, concrete, chemicals, manufacturing, etc.

What domains in climate tech does Piva have the greatest expertise in?

Piva’s team looks at their expertise in two ways – industrial and functional experience. Industrial expertise entails technical and commercial knowledge, which they leverage to evaluate and support companies throughout the technology development, scale-up and market adoption phases.  In terms of functional backgrounds, Piva has a diverse set of experiences that span startups, investing, big companies, deep technology development, and more. Additionally, Piva’s team members come from a variety of different roles, from project management to scale and growth and CEOs.
In terms of specific verticals, the team is always learning and developing deeper knowledge in new topics.

What type of portfolio support does Piva provide?

Piva likes to provide real support to startups by rolling up their sleeves for portfolio companies. This can include helping with:

  • Business development
  • Follow on fundraising
  • Storytelling / PR
  • Customer acquisition
  • Business strategy
  • HR (management team hiring, team building, board members, company culture)


Piva also has deep technical expertise in-house. This is not just understanding technology and science, but also scaling technology to maturity for massive industrialization and impact.

About the Fund

What is Piva’s investment process and timeline?

Piva tends to track companies and build relationships with teams prior to their fundraising process. The firm’s process is quite straightforward, internally. When a team member is excited about an opportunity, especially after a couple of calls with a startup and market research, the startup is invited to their Monday meeting to pitch to the entire team, including Piva’s advisors. The Piva team sees this as an opportunity to get the entire team excited about the potential company and all the different ways they could support them. After that, Piva’s team privately discusses/debates the opportunity. Ultimately, it takes a couple people to love the deal, and the rest to like the deal to move forward.

What would make Piva consider deviating from their typical criteria?

Piva is opportunistic when looking at deals outside of where they traditionally invest. On the early side, Piva would consider investment if the technology is compelling, differentiated, and if there is no later stage technology in the market already doing something similar. On the later stage, Piva would think about opportunities where companies have hit an inflection point for growth and that fit the thesis of helping industry become smarter and more sustainable.

About The Author

Daniel Kriozere

Daniel Kriozere

Co-Founder @ The Impact

Daniel currently works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a Product Manager. Outside of his day job, he is a Principal at C3, Tech Scout at For ClimateTech, and Venture Scout at Prithvi. He also works with various climate incubators/accelerators (Cleantech Open, Techstars, and Joules Accelerator) and runs The Impact and Innovate Climate – both are newsletters covering startups in the climate space.

Share this post →

DISCOVER CLIMATE STARTUPS & OPPORTUNITIES BEFORE IT HITS THE FRONT PAGE

A weekly newsletter helping climate founders and investors discover undercover climate startups, technologies and opportunities before everyone else. Written by founders, executives and investors with years across the climate-tech space. Subscribe for free today to grow your climate positive impact.

Related posts...

Lake Kivu • The Danger Of A Limnic Eruption

Lake Kivu is one of the African Great Lakes, located on the border between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda. Its claim to fame is not pristine waters, rare fish, or an elegant shoreline. Instead, Lake Kivu, along with Lake Nyos and Lake Monoun, share the deadly habit of sporadically belching massive gas clouds of carbon dioxide.

Read now ➜

Discover Pre Series-A Climate Startups Weekly

Develop your market map of up-and-coming climate startups and market opportunities by subscribing to our weekly newsletter for free.