As the most recent venture capital firm to establish a fund specifically focused on climate technology, Blisce hopes to raise up to €150 million, or roughly $162 million. To oversee the fund, the company is appointing investor Pierre-Edouard Berion, while Too Good To Go co-founder Lucie Basch will serve as a venture partner.
If you’re not familiar, Blisce is a venture capital business with offices in New York and Paris. It’s most known for being the investment vehicle of Alexandre Mars, who can be seen in the top photo.
Mars, a former tech entrepreneur who is now a philanthropist, founded a few businesses in the early 2000s and sold them to well-known corporations like Publicis and BlackBerry. For its most recent fund, Blisce collected $240 million, or around €225 million.
Mars just established Blisce, a traditional for-profit venture capital firm that goes by the name B Corp. In addition, he established Epic, a nonprofit foundation that funds initiatives to combat climate change and lessen disparities in children’s access to healthcare and education. Because a portion of Blisce’s income are reinvested in Epic to meet the foundation’s operating expenditures, it’s difficult to discuss Blisce without addressing Epic. In a similar vein, Epic will receive 20% of the Blisce team’s carried interest.
It seems to have been effective, particularly in light of Blisce’s investments in other unicorns, including Spotify, Pinterest, and Headspace. The company has lately made investments in Welcome to the Jungle, Sorare, and Brut. As you can see, the corporation hasn’t yet concentrated on climate tech and instead has a diverse portfolio of consumer tech companies. Blisce intends to invest its new fund in software firms that mitigate climate change, particularly in sectors of the economy that produce a lot of pollution, such as food, building, transportation, materials, and energy. For this fund, the company will assemble a specialized team, and as previously indicated, Pierre-Edouard Berion has been appointed to lead it.
Berion is a familiar face in Paris’ VC circles. After working for a few years as investment director at Eurazeo (he invested in Zenly, Withings and Vestiaire Collective), he joined Raise Ventures as a partner.
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