German startup Maya Climate closes €1.2M pre-seed round to their global natural capital project financing platform to market

February 1, 2023

• Funding round led by High-Tech Gründerfonds, alongside Antler and high profile business angels
• Maya Climate’s platform will provide project financing for natural capital projects – an investment market set to grow to $100bn per annum by 2030
• Pre-seed funding will be used to launch Maya Climate into the market and accelerate product development

Berlin, Germany: 1st February 2023: Maya Climate, a global project financing platform for natural capital projects, has today announced a pre-seed funding of €1.2m.

The funding round was led by Germany’s High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), one of Europe’s leading seed investors. HTGF was joined by Antler, one of the world’s leading day-zero investors, the Berlin Angel Fund, and further technology founders and carbon market veterans.

The funding will allow the Berlin-based startup to enter a market set to experience rapid growth over the next decade. As Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are increasingly recognised as one of the most effective and scalable solutions to avoid and remove carbon from the atmosphere, research suggests that the investment market for NbS will accelerate to $100bn per year by 2030.

Despite the critical importance of launching NbS projects around the world, project developers often face prohibitively high capital costs at launch. There is an urgent requirement for capital solutions to bridge the gap between project start and first carbon credit issuance.

Maya Climate is focused on removing the bottleneck of early-stage project funding to ensure that developers are able to start the NbS projects the world so desperately needs.

Since their soft launch a few months ago, Maya Climate has on-boarded a series of large-scale projects, collectively raising more than $100m in project financing. Agreements are in place with a significant number of investors that use their platform to originate, diligence and invest in those projects.

Maya Climate was co-founded in 2022 by Christian-Hauke Poensgen and Till Tornieporth. The two German entrepreneurs – both in their mid-20s – were previously building legal tech software and consulting corporates on carbon procurement. They left their previous jobs to launch their global digital platform for NbS project financing.

Maya Climate will use the funding to grow its team in Germany, specifically looking at hires for technologists and natural capital experts.

Carbon & biodiversity markets are seeing great interest from professional investors, as well as large emitters that increasingly pursue direct investments in early-stage project stages to ensure highest quality of their portfolios. But access to this fragmented & complex market remains a challenge. We are here to enable investors to build best in class nature capital portfolios.

Till Tornieporth, co-founder at Maya Climate

We are incredibly excited for HTGF, Antler and a range of mentors and industry experts to join us! With their strong ties to the German financial sector and the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, our new partners enable a great positioning for Maya to scale investments into Natural Capital.

Christian-Hauke Poensgen, co-founder at Maya Climate

Nature-based solutions play a key role in tackling the climate crisis and with the Maya Climate platform projects can be launched faster and more easily.  We are impressed by the speed of the founding team gaining great momentum in a fast growing market.

Daniela Bach, Senior Investment Manager

We are very grateful to have been with Till, Christian-Hauke and the entire Maya Climate team right from inception. The team is tackling a tremendous challenge for the planet and we are excited to back such a strong and mission-driven team.

Christoph Klink, Partner at Antler

About Maya Climate
Maya Climate is looking to build a category leader in the emerging Nature Tech market with its digital project financing platform for natural capital projects. Its technology platform connects project developers with institutional investors on a single platform that digitizes project origination, risk assessment and due diligence. Its focus is on unlocking early-stage conservation and restoration projects in the areas of forestry, agricultural land and wetlands as well as coastal ecosystems that generate revenues through carbon, biodiversity or other environmental markets.

Link to website: https://www.maya-climate.com/

Media contact
Till Tornieporth
till@maya-climate.com

About High-Tech Gründerfonds
The seed investor High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) finances tech start-ups with growth potential and has supported over 690 start-ups since 2005. With the launch of its fourth fund, HTGF now has over 1.3 billion euros under management. Its team of experienced investment managers and start-up experts support young companies with expertise, entrepreneurial spirit and passion. HTGF’s focus is on high-tech start-ups in the fields of digital tech, industrial tech, life sciences, chemistry and related business areas. To date, external investors have injected more than 4.5 billion euros of capital into the HTGF portfolio via more than 2,000 follow-on financing rounds. In addition, HTGF has already successfully sold shares in more than 160 companies.
Fund investors in this public-private partnership include the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, KfW Capital and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft along with over 40 companies from a wide range of industries.

Media contact
Stefanie Grüter, Partner Communications & Relations 
s.grueter@htgf.de
T.: +49 228 – 82300 – 188