The All Aboard Coalition may have fallen short of its ambitious goal of raising $300 million to co-invest in promising climate tech ventures, closing its fundraising at $133 million.
But a year after its launch, the co-investment platform of leading climate VCs is positioning itself, and the climate tech ecosystem, for long term success.
Key to that new momentum is the addition as a strategic partner of Macdoch, the UK-based family office of Prudence Murdoch, daughter of Rupert, and her husband, Alasdair MacLeod. In addition to investing in All Aboard’s fund as a limited partner, Macdoch also invested in All Aboard Investment Management Company, for a 20% stake in the GP. Ramsay will join the management company’s board and to act as an observer on its investment committee.
“This is about scaling into fund two and beyond, where it’s increasingly more meaningful capital that can be aggregated and flow up into the signatory transactions,” Mike Ramsay, the CEO of Macdoch Group, told ImpactAlpha. All Aboard co-invests into transactions backed by its venture capital members.
“We think long term and intergenerationally in everything we do,” Ramsay said.
All Aboard was launched last September, by TED cofounder Chris Anderson and True North Institute’s Stan Miranda, to mobilize capital for ready-to-scale ventures tackling decarbonization challenges. It was in part a response to headwinds swept in with the Trump administration that threatened to hamstring climate tech progress.
Leading VCs signed on as coalition members, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Just Climate, S2G, Capricorn Technology Impact Fund, Khosla Ventures, Temasek’s GenZero and others. The fund entity, run by Anderson, Miranda and Staffan Qvist, an entrepreneur and partner at Exa Ventures, would lean on the VCs’ talent spotting and due diligence and co-invest in any venture that at least three coalition members backed.
The idea, the coalition says, is to identify attractive opportunities and help assemble the larger syndicates often required to finance capital-intensive climate businesses ready to commercialize.
It hoped to raise $300 in a matter of months to coinvest alongside coalition members. “Anybody starting a first time fund is going to pull pretty much a number out of thin air when they announce what they’re going to raise,” Miranda told ImpactAlpha this week.
All Aboard, he said, quickly raised $100 million primarily from family offices, but kept the raise open until July to accommodate Macdoch, which came in as the second largest LP investor.
Other LPs in the $133 million fund include Arnold Ventures, the foundation of John and Laura Arnold; Valhalla Foundation, the foundation of Scott Cook and his wife Signe Ostby; Three Cairns Group, an investment and philanthropic firm founded by Mark Gallogly and Lise Strickler; David Baldwin of SCF Partners; Sir Ronald Cohen, Miranda’s family office True North Institute and All Aboard’s Anderson.
Ramsay will join the management company’s board and to act as an observer on its investment committee. In addition to investing, Miranda said the coalition aims to leverage its position at the center of so many top climate investors to synthesize and share knowledge more broadly.
Family affair
Macdoch has had a longtime interest in regenerative agriculture and natural capital. With its strategic partnership with All Aboard as an investor in the GP as well as its first and future funds, it is diving more deeply into technologies that power the energy transition.
A high-profile settlement of the Murdoch family estate last September gave control of the Fox and News Corp. media empire to Rupert Murdoch’s son Lachlan; Prudence and her siblings James and Elizabeth were to share a $3.3 billion payout.
“We felt that the transition to a lower carbon economy had hit some headwinds in recent years, and we felt strongly that for the greater good and harmony of the world and this globe we live on, there needs to be meaningful capital that assists the the the energy transition,” said Ramsay, who previously worked at Carlyle Group and Generation Investment Management.
As an LP, he added, he appreciates the collaborative VC model. “You leverage the fact that they’ve done their homework and they’ve got their investment committees, as well as all the board doing its own confirmation and review of the due diligence.”
“Co-investment, of course, exists between LPs and GPs, but this aggregation of a specific fund that will trigger a release of its capital based on certain parameters to help aggregate that capital flow is pretty innovative,” Ramsay added. “The timing was quite right for us at the start of the journey to have access to the network and the club, if you will, that the signatories form.”
Picking up the pace
The fund has deployed $25 million to date across three companies: Terra CO2, a green cement producer, Zanskar Geothermal, and its latest, Antora Energy, a maker of thermal batteries for industrial energy storage. San Jose, Calif.-based Antora raised a $550 million series C round in late July, and was backed by All Aboard members Activate Capital, G2 Venture Partners and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
Activate and G2 are among the newest venture firms to join the coalition.
The coalition is expected to trigger another investment in the coming weeks in a virtual power plant provider.
If the first All Aboard fund was couched as a pilot fund to demonstrate the collaborative model, fund principals now talk readily about funds two, three and beyond. Based on the pace of deployment, Miranda expects the current fund to stretch through mid-2027, when it would hit the 75% threshold and fundraising for the next fund would begin.
“We have a handful of institutional investors that have large mandates in the sustainable investing space that are looking at fund two already at this point in time,” Miranda said.
And, of course, there is a multi-fund commitment from Macdoch.
