NextStep, NextEnergy Group’s venture capital fund active since 2o22 and dedicated to the capitalization and growth of startups that innovate in the field of sustainability, announces that it has closed its first ten investments for a total of 1,090,000 euros allocated in the cleantech sector.
NextEnergy Group’s financial initiative is proposed as an Italian VC fund 100% dedicated to sustainability investments on the pre-seed target. Reducing the ecological footprint through the efficient use of natural resources, the reduction of polluting emissions and the minimization of waste is the goal of a sector, that of cleantech, which is growing rapidly, which is attracting more and more investments at European level following a general awareness of global environmental challenges.
Funded startups
NextStep invests mainly in Italy and the United Kingdom, but also in the rest of Europe, at the moment with an investment in Sweden, and in the USA, again with an investment, in startups engaged in the cleantech sector, as lead investor in the pre-seed phase, and as a follower investor in the seed phase; for this reason, the greatest interest of NextEnergy Group’s VC fund falls mainly on entrepreneurial realities that have come out of incubators and startup accelerators, but also from universities and research centers, focusing on the skills and resourcefulness of students and young innovators.
The cleantech scene in Italy is based on the work of many emerging startups engaged in critical technologies for decarbonization, from sustainable mobility and urbanization, to the energy transition, through storage and the reduction of CO2 emissions, up to the circular economy. About a year after the first investment, NextStep has already supported ten businesses, financing projects with a high ecological and economic impact.
In the carbon offset field, Bufaga (Italy) was the first company in which NextStep decided to invest, supporting the creation of a smart device to improve air quality with the aim of removing pollutants through a specific filtering process, and collecting data on pollution levels. The First Element (UK) is another pioneer of clean energy solutions thanks to Smart Tank technology, which allows green hydrogen to be generated in a safe and scalable way.
For the biotech sector, a solution for the selective removal of toxic mercury from water comes from Atium (Sweden), which offers a highly effective and cost-effective technology based on electrochemistry.
The process of waste collection and disposal is one of the key topics in the field of smart cities, with a view to achieving the 2030 sustainability goals: Iotilize.me (Italy) is a startup that improves the efficiency of waste collection by using fill level sensors and advanced algorithms to optimize collection routes. Ganiga (Italy), on the other hand, has patented the Hoooly! smart bins, who communicate with citizens, autonomously separate waste thanks to artificial intelligence.
Still on the subject of urbanization and smart management of the city of the future, ToMove (Italy) innovates urban mobility with electric vehicles, prioritizing the reduction of environmental impact to improve life in the city.
For the agricultural sector, the proposals come from Nina.Energy (Ecuador, UK) which transforms agricultural waste into solid biofuels and biochar. Agrisky (Italy) offers an IoT and AI solution for indoor farming to provide carbon credits to its users, while aiding decision-making in order to improve agricultural performance.
Even the fashion sector has not been excluded from the processes of innovation and efficiency of the production process thanks to the work of startups such as MustHad (Italy), which provides a data-driven automated platform for waste management, ensuring traceability and reporting impact KPIs.
An important funding of NextStep has been dedicated to space technology by investing in Chloris Geospatial (USA), a startup capable of integrating data from different Earth observation satellites to provide precise measurements of the above-ground biomass stock, as well as data on forest cover and changes.
Future goals
After a year closed with more than one million euros invested, NextStep has already developed scouting processes created in partnership with some players in the startup ecosystem, in Italy and abroad. In addition, one-to-one acceleration programs are already active with almost all the startups in which NextStep has invested, with ad hoc paths developed by the investor himself. “We are proud of the goals achieved in this first year of work, consolidating our commitment to a sustainable and innovative future. Looking ahead, we intend to expand our portfolio of investments in the cleantech sector and close the year with 25 startups supported. In addition, in June we finalized the launch of two startup programs on F6S and launched a call for startups with Ventive, confident in the opportunities that young entrepreneurs can really create to create a positive and lasting impact,” says Claudio Colombo, managing director of NextStep (pictured) in a note.
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