The 22 Fund
Snapshot
Fund Type: VC
Fund Size: To be announced
Investment Stage: Early-stage growth (Primarily A/B series)
Geographic Focus: United States
Sector Focus: Climate/Sustainable Manufacturing
Fund Overview
The 22 Fund is an early-growth impact fund that invests in clean and sustainable tech-based, export-oriented manufacturing with a racial, gender, climate and social justice lens in order to generate above market returns and outsized impact. Their holistic investment approach targets systemic shifts to promote economic mobility, improved climate outcomes, and intergenerational wealth creation. The fund is focused on workforce development and reskilling to help ensure LMI communities, and women/WOC in particular, are not left behind by the transition to Industry 4.0 and a green economy. All companies in the fund’s portfolio are currently meeting or exceeding growth targets.
Why We Invested
The 22 Fund’s trifecta of cleantech manufacturing and export, Industry 4.0 and women/BIPOC-owned firms addresses a massive gap in the market and also creates an attractive risk profile, especially given the stage of investment and low technology risk. The fund has a female-founded, led and ethnically-diverse team that’s been at the forefront of gender lens & impact investing thought leadership, with the fund’s founder, Tracy Gray, a leading advocate for gender and racial equity.
HfC’s investment in a climate and sustainability-focused fund that’s intentionally investing in BIPOC founders and LMI communities is intended to shift critical capital and support to the communities who are often most impacted by climate change, and the most underserved to mitigate and adapt to those changes. In addition, through their curated advisory services, The 22 Fund empowers women- and BIPOC-owned businesses to adopt export strategies, fostering international growth, resilience, and high-paying clean jobs for communities historically cut out of the tech ecosystem. The fund’s emphasis on Industry 4.0 further enhances competitiveness through sustainable, efficient production and technological advancements.
Women as Agents of Change
The 22 Fund is very explicit in their belief that women are powerful drivers of climate change, which is reflected in the current makeup of their portfolio, with four out of five companies founded by women. As part of their investment process, they consider the role women play as entrepreneurs, innovators, consumers and in the supply chain.
Their International Expansion Process also helps portfolio companies to expand their strategies to include new global markets, many of them driven by demand from/the needs of women end users and consumers. One example of this is Re-Nuble, a Black woman-led company that takes unrecoverable vegetative waste from food production and turns it into a platform of sustainable technologies for indoor farms. The idea for a circular economy solution came to founder Tinia Pina while she was living in Harlem, NYC and struggling to find responsibly produced, nutritious food in her community, while at the same time trying to figure out a way to manage a large amount of food waste. According to the UN, food production will need to be increased substantially by 2050 to meet the demand of the world’s growing population. Most of the subsistence farmers around the world are women, specifically women of color. The 22 Fund is helping Re-Nuble to penetrate markets in the Global South, where their products can help women to continue growing food and providing for their families when climate change causes their lands to become dry.
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