Blue Bear Capital, a venture and growth equity firm focused on AI-powered solutions for the world’s climate, energy, and infrastructure challenges, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $150 million in fresh capital funding.
The latest round, which the company described as oversubscribed, is the company’s second venture capital fund. Like Blue Bear’s first funding, the new capital will be used to fund digital technologies making an outsized impact in markets including wind, solar, the electric grid, electric vehicle infrastructure, transportation, and energy-intensive industries.
Blue Bear partner, Ernst Sack, in a statement said that “trillions of dollars will be spent to scale renewable energy, modernize infrastructure, and secure sustainable supply chains.” “Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is redefining how data is captured, decisions are made and relationships are built all around us. Where these two forces converge — applying the power of AI-enabled technologies to the immense challenges of the energy transition — is where Blue Bear sees the greatest investment and impact opportunity of our lifetimes,” he added.
With the new funds, Blue Bear will continue to focus at the early revenue stage and help companies scale in customers, products, and talent through its network of thousands of industry contacts, including corporate and private equity leaders who often sit on the boards of major customers and future strategic partners.
Blue Bear will also continue to invest in the two strategies that the company’s partners refer to as “nail a vertical” and “scale horizontal”. The first encompasses vertical SaaS solutions that address key operational bottlenecks and dominate niche use cases, especially in energy, infrastructure, and climate tech markets. Examples include Omnidian for distributed solar asset management, Raptor Maps for optimizing large-scale solar performance, Shoreline for simulating and executing offshore wind development, FreeWire for managing electric vehicle charging, Accure for battery health and safety, Copper for wireless metering, Voyager for streamlining marine transportation, and EnMass for waste-to-energy logistics. The second category features horizontal enterprise software that has value across many markets, across which Blue Bear accelerates access to energy and climate use cases. Examples include Urbint for infrastructure safety, Everactive for self-powered data capture, First Resonance for scaling innovative manufacturing, Datch for industrial voice AI, Mira for visual computing, Demex for climate and weather risk management, Mission Secure for asset-level cyber security, and Transect for environmental compliance and protection.
Blue Bear’s model helps companies build past the startup phase and engage with large institutions and public equity markets which are increasingly looking for climate solutions with proven business execution, and the company claims that its strategy and execution are informed by the leadership team’s decades of experience in energy investing, startup building, and technology development.
Investors in Blue Bear’s new funding were top-ranking institutions; AIMS Imprint of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, ZOMA Capital, and the McKnight Foundation, alongside leadership from over a dozen large private equity firms and energy companies. Advisory Board members included First Reserve President Alex Krueger, former NASA astronaut Tim Kopra, and former BP Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Lord John Browne.
