Circulate hits second close on climate tech fund

A first close of $14 million was achieved in June. The fund, known as Circulate Capital Disrupt, is positioned as a companion strategy to the $106 million Circulate Capital Ocean Fund launched in 2019.

LPs in the new fund include various family offices and philanthropic organizations such as Builders Vision, Benjamin Duncan Group, Circocean, DF Impact Capital, Eden Impact, Huang Chen Foundation, Minderoo Foundation, Rumah Group, and Twynam Investments.

This is in contrast to the first fund, which is predominantly backed by large plastic-reliant companies including PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Dow, Danone, Unilever, Coca-Cola, and Chevron Phillips Chemical. Last month, that fund added US snack food giant Mondelez International as an LP.

Circulate Capital Disrupt can be seen as a formal expansion of Circulate’s mandate, which was initially marketed as tightly focused on preventing marine plastics pollution in the waters around South and Southeast Asia.

The firm now brands itself as operating at the nexus of climate-tech and plastics, recycling, and the circular economy. As such, the new fund will target a range of materials and deep tech concepts related to the recycling supply chain, opportunistically co-investing with its predecessor.

The first three investments are all based in the US. They include biomaterials developers Arzeda and Phase Change Solutions, as well as Circ, a recycling industry supplier with technology capable of separating and recovering textiles regardless of their ratio of polyester to cotton.

“Our first three investments … offer unique, scalable, and disruptive technologies transforming the global plastics and recycling supply chain while offering the potential for competitive financial returns,” Rob Kaplan, CEO and founder of Circulate, said in a statement.

“Ultimately, this will help us accelerate the development of a circular economy for plastic waste globally, with a focus in emerging markets like South and Southeast Asia where most of the plastic waste leaks into the world’s oceans.”

Separately, Circulate Capital Ocean Fund has confirmed an investment of undisclosed size in Singapore’s ACE Green Recycling, which claims to have developed the world’s only commercialized recycling process for used lead-acid batteries.

“Car batteries are a hidden contributor to plastic pollution as so many are recycled in ways where the plastic cases are burned, dumped or informally recycled, posing serious environmental and health costs to local communities,” Kaplan added, describing battery recycling as a potentially $40 billion industry.

Although Circulate considers itself a full value chain investor, the recycling segment has proven the easiest entry point for its overall strategy. Its first investments were recycling businesses Tridi Oasis and Lucro, which are based in Indonesia and India, respectively.

India has emerged as the core geography to date. Previous investments in the country include recycling businesses Srichakra Polyplast, Dalmia Polypro, and Ricron Panels, as well as waste management player Nepra and Recykal, a software provider for the waste management and recycling industries.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Fundraising
• Venture
• Cleantech
• Industrials
• Singapore
• Circulate Capital
• ESG
• Impact investment
• manufacturing