Our approach
We commercialize sustainable technologies by mapping the cleantech ecosystem, capturing the best opportunities, investing capital, and building companies.
Most VC funds claim that entrepreneurs are the central factor for investing and generating returns. We disagree.
Our experience, including being entrepreneurs, has taught us that three equally important groups contribute to technology commercialization.
Innovators
develop the technologies and power the ongoing research engines.
Entrepreneurs
create great products, disrupt existing markets, and drive the companies.
Prominent corporations
act as collaboration partners, customers, and exit partners.
Our 5 big ideas
1.
promising cleantech hubs are overlooked
Cleantech venture capital is heavily biased towards the Bay Area, Boston, and NYC. SEP’s experience in the Colorado “Clean Range” shows us that technology innovation is thriving outside the big three VC centers. More importantly, most innovation funding flows to the other 47 states, creating a tech commercialization gap.
SEP identifies and maps emerging cleantech innovation hubs in the United States to identify undervalued opportunities.
2.
Cleantech investors are missing vital information
Deep datasets are not available for cleantech innovation hubs and related topics nationally and internationally. Private capital markets have a poor understanding of the ecosystems that create cleantech innovation, including research institutions, startups, corporations, and other stakeholders.
SEP’s Research Forward platform tracks and analyzes data on Innovation Hubs, organizes it by Cleantech Sectors, and evaluates it relative to Green Metrics to generate in-house deal flow and optimize cleantech commercialization.
3.
Data drives the best tech Selection
Venture capital is missing the data-driven, multi-perspective processes needed to rigorously assess cleantech product cost stacks, technology viability, and essential market deployment metrics. Most firms do not have direct experience in product development for cleantech supply chains.
SEP’s technology selection system brings deep technology development and commercialization knowledge to the magical intersection of science, finance, industry, and planet.
4.
Building Companies Requires early investment and sustained support
Most venture capital funds are based on financing expertise, seek deal flow from existing channels, and rely on third parties to support their portfolio companies. Ultimately, this approach misses significant potential deal flow, technology capture, and opportunities to create and shape early-stage companies into valuable opportunities.
SEP starts early at the innovation stage to capture new technology, adds its company-building strategy with specialized startup resources, and drives capital availability. This approach accelerates product development and enhances capital efficiency.
5.
Corporations face a “Corporate Investing Chasm”
Corporations struggle with the risk of investing in innovation before an opportunity is well defined – but waiting for clarity during a Series X round means intense competition for investment and collaboration opportunities. SEP calls this murky stage between corporate R&D and Series X investment the corporate investing chasm.
SEP leverages its investment strategy to bridge this corporate investing chasm by providing corporate optionality for startup collaborations and follow-on investments.
The Story of SEP
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
We started SEP in 2010 as Saoradh Energy Partners, a small clean energy development firm. We chose our name — Saoradh or ‘to liberate’ in Gaelic — to play on the concept of free energy in thermodynamics, tying together our founder’s Scottish roots and our commitment to release the potential of environmentally sustainable energy. We worked with universities, labs, and startups on projects ranging from launching a new solar photoconversion technology to developing a substantial academic-industry cleantech research collaboration. Inspired by these projects, we realized that our firm should be in the nexus of science, finance, and industry – capturing innovation and building companies.
In 2015, we rebranded as Saoradh Enterprise Partners with an expanded focus on cleantech and developed our first cleantech venture capital fund. Before forming SEP, our core team and senior advisors built cleantech companies, new product divisions at F1000 companies, research institutes, and investment funds, so investing in young companies was a natural progression. We focused our first investment fund on advanced fuel vehicles, then added interim investments in other cleantech-related companies. Now, our work with corporate investment partners has inspired us to create the SEP research platform and develop additional funds and other capital resources in partnership with leading corporations.
Our team knows that the potential for any technology must be grounded in what is possible, bankable, and needed. We believe that clean technology is the key to a better world. No matter the trends, we never lose sight of this perspective.
We’re charting the cleantech ecosystem
Research Forward
We track innovation flows, develop and analyze deep market datasets, create tools and reports, and evaluate cleantech ecosystems to inform SEP’s funds and our corporate clients’ investments and innovation programs.
Building Companies
We displace existing technologies in high-value supply chains by starting early with tech capture, making data-driven investments in cleantech, providing exceptional support to startup teams, and enabling collaborations and follow-on investment optionality for our corporate partners.
Team SEP
SEP’s senior team is deeply committed to environmental sustainability and informed by experience launching, growing, and running successful startups and new product divisions in large corporations.