Axel Carbon Capital closes angel-backed impact fund – and drops ‘climate’ label

Federico Giannetti and Michele Morabito, two investors from Italy, launched COREangels Climate in 2023 as a climate-tech angel investment fund under the broader COREangels network.

The firm, which is an angel-backed investment holding company rather than a VC, emerged at a time when Italy’s climate tech ecosystem was entering second gear after years of stagnation. Giannetti and Morabito set it up to fill a gap in early-stage capital for clean tech, particularly in Southern Europe, where funding is scarcer than further north.

Two years on, COREangels Climate has invested in 11 companies, including underwater monitoring startup Wsense, carbon removal startup Limenet, and Rarearth, which makes permanent magnets from recycled materials.

Now, COREangels Climate is flying the nest and forging a new identity.

“We were ready to create something that could last under our own brand, not under another’s name,” Morabito tells Impact Loop in an interview. “We were already independent in our operations, but now we are independent also from a branding perspective.”

Dropping green labels

The rebrand to Axel Carbon Capital is also philosophical – and perhaps strategic. Morabito and Giannetti have consciously moved away from the language of “green” and “climate,” which they see as increasingly volatile and overused, and towards "industrial decarbonisation," mirroring some other venture firms in the space.

“We avoid using ‘green’ or ‘climate’ in the branding,” Giannetti says. “That’s not the value we want to capture. Decarbonisation is an unavoidable industrial path – it’s about operational efficiency and cost efficiency.”

That framing shapes Axel’s investment focus. The fund concentrates on energy transition and industrial decarbonisation technologies, with a bias towards hardware and solutions closely tied to real industrial processes. It has little interest in ESG reporting tools or what Morabito describes as “claim-based” climate startups.

“At the beginning, there were a lot of useless solutions – mainly claims about being green,” Morabito says. “We discarded those from the beginning.”

The partners believe the recent cooling of climate tech hype has strengthened their thesis. Fewer startups are raising money, but those that remain tend to be more grounded in real markets and real demand.

“Now there are fewer opportunities,” Morabito says. “But much more centred on what really lasts.”

Angel-backed fund

Along with the new name, Axel announced the closing of its first fund at €2m, backed by more than 50 private investors. These include executives, investors, and operators from across Europe and the US, such as Ignacio Lago Fernandez, consulting solutions and strategy director at Microsoft, Andrea Maggiani, climate tech investor and founder of Carbonsink, and Mónica Casañas Morales, partner at Eka Ventures.

Rather than a classic VC structure, the model sits somewhere between a venture fund and an angel syndicate. Axel writes early-stage cheques – largely pre-seed – but leans heavily on its investor base to support diligence, strategy, and commercial rollout. For founders, that means one cap table entry, but access to a wide European industrial network.

“You get one interface, one company,” Giannetti says. “But access to 50 investors in different geographies, each with their own network.”

With the first portfolio nearing completion, Axel is already thinking ahead. The plan is to spend the next year building under its own brand before launching a larger fund around 2027 – likely with a mix of private and institutional capital.