Chris Sacca: Ukraine war has pushed Europe’s climate tech agenda to ‘continental security scale’

Chris Sacca, the serial tech investor behind Lowercase Capital and now founder of climate-focused Lowercarbon Capital, says the war in Ukraine has created a new impetus for European cleantech.

“One silver lining of the tragic war in Ukraine is that it highlights that Europe needs to be energy independent,” says the billionaire. “That has raised discussions around climate tech to true national and continental security scale.”

Sacca, an early backer of Twitter, Instagram, and Stripe, argues that the business case for climate tech is only getting stronger – with competitiveness and security, not feel-good environmentalism, the biggest drivers of that shift.

While many early climate tech ventures, he says, “weren’t necessarily smashing business successes,” today “small, highly skilled teams” are building commercially viable solutions that can scale without relying on a green premium. Europe, Sacca argues, is uniquely positioned to capitalise on this next wave.

“Europe just has an incredible amount of talent,” he said. “And I really feel like they get this problem. They understand the climate imperative. In the US, we’re still stuck in culture wars.”

Despite the talent, countless founders and investors in recent years – many of them European – have criticised the continent’s cautious regulatory frameworks and risk-averse culture. But Sacca thinks the situation has improved.

“Europe was missing an entrepreneurial culture 20 years ago… you weren’t rewarded for taking risk,” he said. “But that’s changing. Regulators have been giving more room, and they’re now truly engaging with startup founders.”

Sacca’s optimistic outlook is reflected in the investments of Lowercarbon Capital, which has backed 28 European climate tech startups since it launched five years ago. Twelve of those investments were made this year, including in UK-based Seabound, which captures carbon onboard ships, French startup Genomines, which mines metals from plants, and Fuse Energy, a British energy supplier that has seen hockey-stick growth in the past year.