Women redefining the climate tech landscape in India – Venture Capital

ClimateAngels | Mar 08, 2022

This International Women’s Day, Climate Angels is featuring pioneering women leading the fight against climate tech In India.

Women are the primary caregivers in most communities across the globe which also means that they are our front-line soldiers who are experiencing climate change in real-time. Yet their perspectives are often missing from the climate decision-making table. Owing to their unique position in society, they are better suited to tackle climate change head-on and they should be our preferred troops for the ongoing battle. This fact was more profoundly realized in the Paris Agreement, which explicitly stated the global need to empower women in climate decision-making.

Women across the world are stepping up to the challenge. They are working tirelessly everywhere from Science Labs and startups to VC firms to prevent the worst catastrophe our species has ever experienced before it is too late.

We are featuring a few of these amazing women and highlighting their contributions to inspiring the next generation of women to invest in, invent and ideate solutions for climate change.

Early-stage or seed-stage investment can make or break a climate tech startup. The following women are actively investing in and nurturing the climate tech ecosystem in India while generating outsized returns for their LPs.

Anjali Bansal

Avaana Capital

After a brief stint at ISRO, Anjali realized that she was better suited to work on the business side of things and left for the states for a master’s degree. But she came back to India because according to her the entrepreneurial revolution in India was and is the disruptive force she did not want to miss out on. Anjali has led and grown the India division of several PE funds and has also been at the center of a merger between three of India’s largest consumer banks, all in the last two decades.

Anjali started her VC fund, Avaana Capital in 2018. Through Avaana, she invests in innovation-led business models that can achieve impact at scale. She measures their impact through their ability to leverage technology to catalyze climate action and sustainability and deliver exponential returns. Avaana has invested in Praan a filter-less outdoor air purifier manufacturing company, Fasal a data-driven precision agriculture platform, and Groyyo a B2B Manufacturing Growth Platform among 20 other companies in the climate and sustainability sectors.

She is also associated with NITI Aayog’s Women Entrepreneurship Programme, a platform that promotes investment and support for the participation of women in entrepreneurship. She has been listed as one of the “Most Powerful Women in Indian Business” by numerous publications including Business Today and fortune India.

Janavi Papriwal

Aavishkaar Capital

Janvi is an engineer turned banker, entrepreneur, and investor. After a brief stint in banking, she pivoted to a family-owned tier I OEM of rubber products. She was responsible for conceptualizing and executing deals, brand promotion and networking, leading initiatives from ideation to completion among other things in her role as the director.

She joined Aavishkar Capital during the fund’s growth phase, since then Aavishkar has grown from a relatively small fund to a $450 Million (AUM) behemoth. Aavishkar is one of the first firms in the Indian ecosystem that prioritized investing in enterprises targeted towards rural India. She firmly believes that impact investing and the generation of oversized returns are not mutually exclusive events.

Janvi is the board observer for several of Aavishkaar’s portfolio stars including 3S a High-Quality Recyclable, Portable Sanitation Rental and Cleaning Service, and Soulfull (acquired by TATA) a brand that promotes the introduction of ragi, a highly resilient and low carbon footprint cereal, back to the Indian breakfast bowl while cutting down on western corn-based products.

Rema Subramanian and Ritu Verma

Co-founders and Managing Partners, Ankur Capital

Ritu started out in life as a physicist. But her inherent desire to bring what was happening in the labs closer to the markets led her to spend a decade at operational roles across corporates like Unilever and Philips.

Rema is a cost accountant by training. Her experiences spanning multiple decades range from C-Suite positions in numerous companies across the education, IT, and ITES sectors to mentoring up and coming startups and making them the next game changers.

During the early 2010s Ritu and Rema, while working with numerous startups and realized that the lack of capital in the preliminary stages often resulted in a roadblock that the founders could not find a way around. They started Ankur with a vision to bridge the gap between wealth and innovation.

Ankur Capital primarily invests in transformative businesses in AgriTech, healthcare, fintech and edtech. Their portfolio currently includes brands like Suma Agro, India’s first manufacturer of humate-based products for soil conditioning, String Bio, a company that produces single cell proteins to meet the rising global protein demand from methane among 19 others.