With its second fund, London-based Transition Ventures is building on its initial focus on early-stage climate tech to back AI infrastructure, energy, robotics and industrial systems. The firm has raised €128 million ($150 million) for the new fund, less than two years after closing its debut fund at a similar size.
Transition cofounder David Helgason said the company is applying the same Planetary Boundaries framework developed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre that guided its first fund; this time it is backing AI-driven climate solutions and companies that reduce the carbon and energy footprint of AI and data centers.
“The rise of AI hasn’t changed our thesis, it has validated it,” Transition’s Kristian Branaes told ImpactAlpha. “As demand for compute scales, the energy systems and physical infrastructure underpinning it have become urgent bottlenecks. Transition Ventures is built on the realization that human prosperity is limited by physical, planetary constraints.”
Most of the LPs from Transition’s first fund returned for the second one, said Branaes, who would not identify the firm’s backers.
“There is no pivot. Our LPs are aligned,” he said.
Planetary boundaries
AI firms scooped up 61% of venture capital last year, and big tech companies are projected to spend upwards of $700 billion on AI this year. The shift follows the collapse of ocean-based carbon sequestration company Running Tide, a Transition portfolio company that shut down in 2024, citing low demand for large-scale carbon removal.
Transition’s new fund will cut seed and Series A stage checks for companies working on “the building blocks of the next century.” It has already invested in UK-based Olix, a photonic chips company valued at $1 billion that is developing higher efficiency AI processing, Los Angeles-based Applied Atomics, which develops 100 megawatt to one gigawatt nuclear power plants and Seneca, a Sausalito, Calif.- maker of AI-enabled autonomous drones for wildfire defense.
