Investor Spotlight: Earth- Betting on Buying Time When Mitigation Isn't Enough

In this investor spotlight we sit down with Co-founder and Partner at Earth, Maex Ament who, along with his Co-founder Philip Stehlik, are part of a new generation of climate VCs acknowledging that we've already partly lost the battle against climate change and are making bets accordingly.

Maex is refreshingly honest about the war on carbon emissions, admitting that we've "fucked up all our goals, promises and targets," and as a result are now "cruising through 1.5 degrees like no one was watching".

It's this clear-sighted view of our climate reality that drives Earth's investment thesis, split between modernising industry and buying humanity time through adaptation, leading the fund to consider backing controversial solutions like geoengineering and solar radiation management.

Interview

Could you briefly introduce yourself and share your journey into climate tech VC? What aspects of your background led you to start Earth?

There are at a minimum, two answers to this - the journey from founder to investor is one, and the focus on our thesis of “future of Industry + climate adaptation”, coming more from enterprise SaaS and FinTech.

Philip and I have a similar background - we founded several startups, in Europe and the US, and have been lucky enough to exit all of them, two of them rather successfully. That gave us the opportunity to start angel investing, which we did over the years in more than 150 deals.

From there, the step to starting a fund is a natural one when you start running out of your own money, but you want to continue writing checks and supporting startups, which we became pretty good at.

The path into the thesis of Earth, where we focus on “Industry of the Future” and “Resilience / Adaptation,” feels like a natural progression of the startups we built, combined with some of the angel investments we liked and saw success.

Both of our unicorn exits as founders, Taulia and Centrifuge, had strong touchpoints with climate-related topics such as Scope 3 emissions, Carbon Credits, Energy Certificates and much more. In addition, I launched a climate startup (called Pegada), only to realise I just don’t wanna be a CEO myself anymore, but much rather support dozens or hundreds of founders in that field.

With mitigation still at the forefront of most climate tech investors' minds, why did you decide to start looking at adaptation deals and how do you balance doing both as a small fund?

We will invest in about 40 deals out of Earth, which gives us ample opportunity to find future unicorns in either of the categories. The “Industry of the Future” vertical (aka mitigation) is a natural one for us - coming from the enterprise area as founders , and having had many investments as angels in the space. 

The Resilience / Adaptation bucket is a logical acknowledgement of the world we are living in. We fucked up all our goals, promises and targets (cruising through 1.5 degrees like no one was watching), and therefore need to recognise where we are and deal with it, while we are modernising our industries and upgrading the planet. In simpler words, one vertical can’t really succeed without the other.

You mentioned supply chain optimisation as a critical adaptation strategy - can you elaborate on why this is a focus area?

Sure. First of all, having built Taulia before, a supply chain financing startup (now part of SAP), gave us a bit of an unfair advantage in the supply chain space, which means it became a natural focus area. 

Supply chains must adapt to a more volatile, hotter, and more chaotic world. We saw incredible disruptions when Covid hit, we see them now (or soon …) when the tariffs take full effect, and we had many examples in between where extreme weather patterns, such as flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, caused transportation to be disrupted.

This will only get worse. Hence, having a clear picture of where your goods come from, what routes they take, and what alternatives there are is of utmost importance for a functioning economy. And since we are on it, why not optimise those for costs (i.e. shorter routes, less fuel/energy, less time in ports etc) and as a consequence, reduce emissions dramatically.

While we as investors are not relying on regulations, we can't ignore the fact that most governments require transparency about the goods that are imported, and the conditions at the first mile. Which again makes it a requirement to map those opaque supply chains.

What adaptation technologies do you believe are most overlooked by traditional climate tech investors?

I am a firm believer that we need more time. We had our shot 15 or 20 years ago to decarbonise and start sucking the evil out of the atmosphere - but as a society, we decided not to. This resulted in the fact that we lost that battle against time for now. We will not reduce emissions fast enough, we will not get to a point fast enough to capture the carbon already emitted.

So as an investor, we started looking years ago into approaches that will buy us the time we need. Geoengineering in general, but specifically Solar Radiation Management, is a solution that we identified as a necessary tool in our toolset and we are excited to have invested in what we believe will be the leading company in the space.

We agreed that a hardware+software investment approach will be critical going forward, how do you think this applies specifically to adaptation technologies?

Adaptation can't be a software-only play, given that bits aren't going to protect against wildfires, floods, temperature increases, or freak weather events. We see this space as inherently software + hardware, and will look to invest across the stack - for example combining an early deal we did in the weather prediction space with investments in new materials, IoT for water level tracking, drones for fire tracking etc. 

The days of people seeing software as a standalone solution are (rightly) long gone, and we believe that now to have real impact (as well as build defensible business models), hardware is going to continue to grow in importance for venture funds in our space.

Do you see a role for what some would deem "controversial" approaches, like geoengineering, in your broader adaptation strategy?

As I hinted before, geoengineering is something we look deeply into. I mentioned above Solar Radiation Management, specifically SAI (stratospheric aerosol injection), but we believe as well that companies like Rainmaker do a fantastic job (especially because they get unfair feedback because of floods they had nothing to do with), or startups looking to reduce the chances of lightning, which causes up to 50% of all wildfires.

Which adaptation sectors do you predict will see the most significant growth in the next 3-5 years?

We believe cooling of many types is going to continue to grow at a crazy rate - cooling for homes, offices, data centres etc., across phase change materials, HVAC and novel technologies not yet at mass adoption.

While not specifically adaptation, we're big fans of the geothermal space and see a huge amount of upside here, alongside fusion and fission for energy generation, and the need for better / novel critical minerals discovery and creation to account for our ever-expanding need for the components that go into digital devices.

Upcoming Events

Adapt Unbound Europe 2025, 14th & 15th October: The continent's premier forum on adaptation finance and technology in Amsterdam.

Handelsblatt Conference Corporate Climate Adaptation, 30th & 31st October: Adaptation Tech Award 2025 Spotlight on innovations in the climate adaptation economy. Selected startups will get access to the conference for free