Partner Interview: Stefan

March 4, 2024

Why did you launch an Article 9 fund?

I decided to launch an Article 9 fund after meeting Morten and discovering we were both interested in climate tech investing as the first form of fully commercial impact investing. I was developing high impact innovation projects for biotech company Novozymes at the time. The work was interesting but I didn’t love the more political and bureaucratic aspects of corporate operations. Having previously founded a not-for-profit corporate impact venture studio, I was eager to return to the entrepreneurial world. So when I met Morten, I grabbed the opportunity to form Climentum Capital and launch our first Article 9 VC fund.

The determination to use business acumen to create meaningful change was honed while working for the UN in Guyana. After earning my Master’s in Development Studies at Cambridge University, I started documenting profitable solutions to poverty reduction in the region. I took those learnings to Novozymes, where I developed a biorefining value chain in Mozambique, which won a lot of international acclaim. The desire to create impact at scale has always stayed with me.

But ultimately my path to launching this Article 9 fund can be traced back to my childhood in West Africa, where I grew up in large houses while my neighbors were extremely poor. The injustice was impossible to ignore and it instilled a desire to create meaningful change. My whole family ended up working in different impact related areas as a result of this — and my personal career since then has been dedicated to building solutions to societal challenges.

How does your skill set complement the rest of the team?

Malin is the deal-making machine. She can always be relied upon to lead a deal, especially in the Swedish ecosystem, where her expertise is unparalleled. Dörte is excellent at due diligence. While the rest of us mere mortals sometimes quickly fall in love with ideas, Dörte doesn’t let this cloud her assessments. She is able to consistently ask the right questions and focus on the details and facts of the situation to come to a savvy decision. Morten is the diplomat. He is skilful at managing the interests of all stakeholders at all times, also when things are tricky.

That leaves me. I am more of a strategist with an eye for impact. And I’m good at documentation. I like the high level thinking and keeping our narrative as a VC fund tight. I also maintain a clear market perspective throughout the investment process, balancing Dörte’s emphasis on the founding team.

Which success are you most proud of?

Co-leading the Novatron deal. I was initially skeptical of Novatron’s ambitions to be first to market with a commercially viable nuclear fusion reactor. But after digging into Novatron and gaining a basic understanding of the fundamental engineering proposition, I was convinced. They’re taking a delightfully pragmatic approach to a classic reactor design that has been underexplored for many years — but offers superior commercial promise. I really enjoyed making the case for us to be involved and co-leading the deal.

Since closing the deal, Novatron has been hitting engineering milestones at an impressive pace, so it’s hard not to fantasize about Novatron delivering the first commercial nuclear fusion reactor in the world already in the 2030s. Being able to tell my children that I played a small part in such a monumental achievement is an exciting prospect.

Which founder has inspired you recently?

I’m constantly impressed by the founding team at Qvantum, which produces heat pumps to enable the decarbonization of cities. It is hard to impress on those outside of the venturing world just how different the skills of developing a great idea are from growing it into a successful business at scale. Both these skill sets are essential in a founding team, but founders rarely possess both.

Yet Qvantum has a team which has clearly graduated into the large-scale execution game. As with every startup, not a month goes by without a novel situation emerging that the team must deal with, but the team has such a diverse skill-base that there is always someone on-hand to swiftly and expertly engineer solutions. Watching them work gives me confidence that they are on track for great success.

Why do you invest in hard tech?

If I was only interested in short-term impact, I should have stayed at the UN. But non-commercial funding for non-commercial solutions is inherently unscalable. I’m excited by innovation, creation and scale. All these together spell hard tech VC to me.

Hard tech also appeals to my tendency to work and think at a structural logic level. I’m not interested in judging others for their environmental decisions. I don’t point fingers at people for flying on a plane or eating meat. Let’s not waste energy sending unhelpful micro-signals and demonizing each other. This only distracts from the bigger problem. Instead, let’s make a wide variety of lifestyles sustainable. By creating radical structural change, hard tech can allow people to live the lives they want.