List of the 500 largest Renewable Energy Startup Investors [2025]

List of 5 large renewable energy startup investors

Renewable energy development has become a current and important point of research over the past years for a more sustainable world. This article describes five renewable energy startup investors from our list.

1. Downing Ventures (USA)

Downing Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in innovative, high-growth technology businesses, with a strong focus on sustainability and renewable energy. Part of Downing LLP, the firm provides capital to startups and scale-ups across various sectors, including cleantech, deep tech, and healthcare. Recently, the firm completed the acquisition of land and associated lease income related to an operational 200MW onshore wind farm in the Scottish Highlands. This investment was facilitated through Downing Sustainable Investment, a vehicle designed to provide UK charitable institutions with exposure to stable, long-term, inflation-linked cash flows derived from core renewable energy assets. In May 2024, Downing Renewables and Infrastructure Trust acquired two operational ground-mounted solar photovoltaic projects totalling 13MW in the UK for £12.6 million. This portfolio includes approximately 1,600 commercial and residential installations, all secured with feed-in tariffs and renewable obligation certificate subsidies.

2. Vireo Ventures (Germany)

Vireo Ventures is a venture capital fund interested in early-stage startups with high scalability. They mainly invest in B2B businesses that aim to electrify and decarbonize the world. They have, for example, invested in e-mobilio, a digital support system for electric car sales, and ampere.cloud, an operating system for renewable energy.

3. Almi Invest (Sweden)

Almi Invest actively invests in companies across various industries, including renewable energy. An interesting portfolio company is Climeon, specializing in converting low-temperature waste heat into clean electricity. Another example is Blixt, who develops intelligent grid sensors and software that optimize the management and monitoring of power distribution networks.

4. High-Tech Gründerfonds (Germany)

High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) is an early-stage venture capital firm located in Bonn, Germany. Companies included in their portfolio are, for example, Sonnen, who developed smart energy storage solutions that enable homeowners to store excess solar power and use it during peak demand periods, and tado°, a company specializing in smart climate control solutions by offering heating and cooling systems that optimize energy usage based on occupancy and weather conditions.

5. Giant Leap (Australia)

Giant Leap is a VC firm with a strong focus on sustainability and positive impact. Within its portfolio, Giant Leap has invested in three notable companies: Sunrun is a leading provider of residential solar energy systems and, therefore, offers homeowners the opportunity to harness clean, renewable energy through rooftop solar installations, reducing their dependence on fossil fuels and lowering their carbon footprint. Limejump uses technology and real-time data analytics and machine learning algorithms to help businesses optimize their energy consumption. Carbon Clean Solutions implements carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies focusing on solutions to capture CO2 emissions from industrial processes, helping companies reduce their carbon footprint.

Picture Source: Dan Meyers

Included information in our list

Our keyword analysis-based list includes the following general columns:

• Name of the VC fund
• Country of origin
• URL
• E-mail (general)
• Investment focus (if data available)
• Corporate VC (yes/no)

The following columns are based on the keyword crawler, which is a Python-based, in-house developed tool that crawls every page for at least 45 seconds to find the respective keywords.

• total_frequency (e.g.: 1051) – total counted occurrences of keywords on the VC website
• average_keyword_rate (e.g. 0.01) – average rate of keyword occurrences per subpage in relation with total number of words
• most_common_keyword (e.g. „renewable energy“) – keyword that was counted the most often on respective VC website
• most_common_keyword_frequency (e.g. 351) – number of times the most common keyword was counted
• sub_url_highest_rate (e.g. https://toyota.ventures/portfolio.html#jasper) – sub url with the highest number of found keywords
• highest_rate (e.g. 0.03) – highest keyword rate per subpage
• frequency_per_keyword: {‘renewable energy’: 349, ‘green energy’: 349, ‘renewables’: 351, ‘wind energy’: 0, ‘solar energy’: 0, ‘solar power’: 0, ‘photovoltaics’: 2} – dictionary of number of keyword occurrences per keyword

Picture Source: Nicholas Doherty