Amsterdam-based StartGreen Capital, an impact investment firm, announced on Wednesday the launch of its sixth fund, the StartGreen Transition Fund (SGTF). The fund aims to hit the €200M mark and is now open to investors.
With the new SFTG fund, StartGreen Capital intends to focus on accelerating the Dutch energy transition by financing regional energy projects.
Low-risk and stable return
The fund will be a debt fund, and will provide mainly junior loans to regional energy projects starting from Q4, 2023.
The company says that these projects will focus on energy generation, storage, and saving, but also, for example, on making mobility sustainable via charging stations and on making buildings more sustainable.
Since the fund has a low-risk profile, offers a stable return, and also helps achieve climate goals, Stijn Welage and Erhan Yildiz, the fund’s Investment Directors, expect to finance the first projects this year.
Stijn Welage says, “Consumers are becoming increasingly empowered. This also applies to participants of pension funds and capital insurances: they want to see that their retirement reserves are invested wisely so that their children and grandchildren will also have a bright, green future. With the StartGreen Transition Fund, institutional investors can show that they are making a double impact: both financially and socially.”
Erhan Yildiz says, “With the StartGreen Transition Fund, we are making a big, tangible impact locally. We want to connect local institutional investors with local entrepreneurs to enable the transition to a sustainable future together. The need seems greater now than ever given the amount of projects we see that are looking for a financing solution.”
The StartGreen Transition Fund, like StartGreen Capital’s other funds, belongs to the highest category (9) of sustainable funds, according to the SFDR.
Anouk Blüm, Managing Partner of StartGreen Capital, says, “Due to inflation and the scaling back of the SDE subsidy, banks now often only finance a limited share of renewable energy projects.”
“Previously, this share could be as high as 95 per cent. We want to help fill this financing gap, so that project developers and local energy cooperatives can still realise their projects. From our other funds, we have been successfully financing these types of projects in Overijssel and Nooord-Holland for over ten years,” Blüm continues.
“It, therefore, seemed logical to us to deploy that experience and knowledge to make the acceleration of the energy transition possible in time in the rest of the Netherlands,” she adds.
StartGreen has assets under management of €485M (excluding the SGTF).
