Ask any founder or investor: fundraising is never easy. And in a market with this level of uncertainty, the difficulties are compounded.
“Everyone has to go through fundraising, and it’s a relatively challenging market right now,” Kyle Teamey, managing partner at RA Capital Planetary Health, told TechCrunch. “That’s good for a bit of empathy.”
Teamey and his colleague Brigid O’Brien, also a managing partner with the firm, know this as well as anyone. They just closed a $120 million fund, their first for RA Capital Planetary Health.
In the two years the team was fundraising, the market changed course dramatically. When they started, the ink was barely dry on the Inflation Reduction Act, and global trade was humming along. All of that changed in the past six months.
“All of this is cyclical,” O’Brien said. “Kyle and I have often talked about this, and thinking about our careers and the highs and lows of the market that we’ve gone through multiple times.”
Both have seen their share of ups and downs in the market. O’Brien started out as an investor at In-Q-Tel and BPH, the mining giant. Teamey, for his part, was a founder in the first clean tech era over a decade ago before becoming an investor at In-Q-Tel and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
Over the years, the pair have developed a rubric that helps them decide where to place their fund’s money.
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“We have three screening criteria,” O’Brien said. First on their list is time to market. How quickly can a prospective company begin generating revenue? “We saw a lot of success in companies, even seed stage companies that were able to do that,” she said. “We look for companies that can be in-market in less than five years.”
Second, they look at product market fit.
“We really want to have some sense that they’re building something that people actually want to buy,” Teamey said. “A common mistake among entrepreneurs is the ‘if you build it they will come’ mentality.”
Lastly, Teamey and O’Brien look for companies that use the money they have efficiently. “How fast can you graduate from venture capital?” O’Brien said.
For many investors, the answer to those questions is usually “software,” though it doesn’t always have to be. “There’s a lot of things that are different,” Teamey said, though he adds that one common misconception — that deep tech startups aren’t capital efficient — doesn’t add up.
“Capital efficiency can actually be somewhat analogous [to software], but the capital intensity is often very different,” he said.
That’s part of why the company will write first checks with figures in the hundreds of thousands all the way up to $10 million, with rounds ranging from seed to Series C. “The name of the round doesn’t really matter, right? What matters is, what’s your time to market and does their return profile fit our strategy?”
RA Capital Planetary Health has written checks to Koloma, which is prospecting for geologic hydrogen, and AM Batteries, which has developed a new lithium-ion battery manufacturing process that promises to slash costs dramatically. AI-enabled recycling startup Sortera also made the cut, as did solar power electronics company Optivolt and energy retailer Bia.
It’s a wide range of sectors, and the choices were informed by market maps the RA Capital Planetary Health team has been assembling over the last couple of years. The maps help the team “understand what matters most in a market, what are those adoption barriers, and then what companies can overcome those adoption barriers,” O’Brien said. “It also helps us inform what are the average time-to-markets.”
That detail is top of mind for the team as they navigate the current downturn in the market. “This won’t be the first time or the last time there will be a cycle,” O’Brien said. “It’s not always going to be like rocket ships.”
“There’s pluses and minuses of every part of the cycle,” Teamey added. “If you can figure it out now, you’re going to crush it as the markets get better.”
