First Half Results for the Climate Market

By John Tough | June 30, 2023

Two of the top media / research firm in the climate space are Canary Media and CleanTech VC. They collaborate to publish market and fundraising statistics on a semi-annual basis. Today they released their 1H 2023 results, and the figures are below.

Here are some of the takeaways:

Climate tech venture funding totaled $13.1B in H1 2023. Compared to H1’22:
Total funding down 40%
Overall deal count increased 8%
Growth funding plummeted 64%
Seed funding grew 23%
Average deal size decreased 44%

These trends are consistent with what I have been seeing in the market. The growth/late stage market is effectively shut down and the larger crowd has moved to seed. As someone who has been in the space long enough, this isn’t a new trend when the market gets hard. But the second order affect is that the technologies that can deliver financial and impact return today or in the near-term are all in the growth stage, and those firms are likely to be starved of the capital they need to reach scale. I’ve covered this here and directly with our LPs… and 2H 2023 will be one to watch closely.