Pippa Gawley is the founder of Zero Carbon Capital, a deep tech climate investment fund. She reveals to Mewburn Ellis her vision for creating a clean energy economy.
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Pippa Gawley is the founder of Zero Carbon Capital, a leading deep tech climate fund backing visionary founders across Europe with pre-seed and seed investments.
Hi, Pippa! Tell us about your commitment to zero-carbon technology
I’ve always been motivated by making the world a better place and fixing things that seem unfair to me. When I graduated, it was about poverty alleviation in Africa. As a student engineer, I got involved in water pump charities. I took some time out when our children were young and by that point it was clear that the defining problem of our age was climate change. It’s an existential challenge. I founded Zero Carbon Capital with this at the forefront. I started angel investing in early-stage scientific companies working on climate solutions, and that developed into our current investment fund.
A lot of investors in the UK are still thinking about climate mitigation as a cost, rather than an amazing opportunity. The potential for impact and returns here could not be greater. It’s not often that you get to bet on a dead cert, but climate change is happening. If we can solve the problems and the causes of climate change, we can create very valuable companies too. And that’s why I chose venture capital to solve this problem rather than philanthropy or charity, because to have the necessary impact we have to scale as fast as we can.
Some campaigners suggest market forces are to blame for climate change. What do you think?
Certainly, there are things that markets have got wrong. Not least in the assumption that everyone has perfect information and people are going to make rational decisions. Governments can correct market failure and, from my perspective, climate change is one massive government failure. Carbon emissions have a very real external cost, but that externality has not been recognised or corrected.
Love or hate it, capitalism is the mechanism we have in place. It has the strength of stimulating innovation and then testing ideas against each other, with the best one winning.
What I think is unrealistic is expecting individuals to solve the problems themselves by making virtuous choices such as giving up meat or stopping flying. Given an equal choice, they will choose the better one for the planet, so it’s our job to help generate alternatives that are more efficient, faster, taste better, sexier – and are lower carbon.
What can the UK do to improve the greentech sector?
One thing we need in the greentech sector is more lab space. When I was investing in the US there was a brilliant programme called Activate, which makes use of national lab space to support entrepreneurs who are coming out of PhD programmes and want to commercialise their idea. I would love to see that in the UK. There’s nothing like it. Actually, since the financial downturn and the increase of people working from home, there is an enormous amount of office space available in London. Offices just need retrofitting to turn them into lab space.
Regulation which supports the Greentech sector is also key such as removing blocking powers for implementation of renewable energy infrastructure e.g. offshore wind farms. And we’d love to see enforcement of no new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. Really obvious stuff like that can make a huge difference.
What are the big hurdles British greentech companies face?
It can be hard to attract the funding needed to scale in the UK. The domestic market is much smaller. The US had the Inflation Reduction Act, which offers incentives for clean energy production. It created a business case for companies in areas such as green hydrogen, carbon capture and carbon removal. We don’t have anything like it. So British companies have been going over the US to scale because of that. The UK needs more support capital from the government to crowd in private capital and boost these companies. There is a new National Wealth Fund, which is intended to stimulate green growth sectors with blended finance, and we need to see that having an impact.
There is a lot of criticism around governments when they try to act like VCs. And absolutely they should not try to be VCs, but they should be supporting VCs investing in areas critical to the nation’s future. For example, later-stage investors need support to reduce the risk they are taking on these first-of-a-kind projects. The EU has a brilliant programme with Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, which can provide that kind of capital, as well as large loans for scale-up projects. It would be fantastic to see something like that in the UK.
Turning to the technology itself, where is the UK succeeding?
We are strong in battery technology. We invested in a company called Echion, which makes a fast-charging anode for lithium-ion batteries, based on niobium oxides. It is scaling via a partnership with a company in Brazil. I see a lot of companies start in the UK and then grow a little, then look to other markets that have scale and government incentives, or in this case proximity to raw materials.
The UK is also in a strong position to lead in industrial biotech. We’ve backed quite a few companies in that space. And carbon markets and insurance products are strong in the UK because of the link to finance and fintech. There’s a trend in insurance around doing clever things with AI, and monitoring and sensing.
What about hydrogen?
Two years ago there was massive hydrogen hype. I think hydrogen has a unique role in certain places – for example, decarbonising steel and chemical production. It may have a future in a few specific applications such as aviation, energy storage and furnaces.
There’s actually a lot of excitement right now around geologic hydrogen, or white hydrogen. It is naturally occurring and you can drill it from a well, similar to natural gas. We are excited about the space and are looking for opportunities. If we could get hydrogen for under one dollar a kilogram, it would be a complete game-changer. Even marginal uses could become competitive at that price point. However, at the moment, they aren’t viable because hydrogen is just too expensive to produce.
Lab-grown meat seems to be slower to progress than many hoped. What are the prospects for lab-grown beef and chicken?
Cultivated meat and dairy are complex technologies and have experienced ups and downs both technologically and commercially over the last decade.
There has been real progress in the last couple of years in some areas of the world, such as Singapore. You can buy cultivated chicken nuggets there, which is amazing.
We’ve invested in a British firm called Multus Biotechnology. It develops growth media needed for the production of cultivated meat. We are betting on the company that’s going to supply all of the technologies producing lab-grown meat and dairy!
We also invested in a French company called Nutropy, which has developed a way to make animal-free milk through precision fermentation as a drop-in replacement for regular milk for a cheesemaker. We like Nutropy, because it doesn’t have to market to consumers. It fits into an existing supply chain and business models. Hopefully, that should allow the solution to scale faster.
In the future, we hope the sector will recover. Molecularly, cultivated meat is just the same, so it could be a great replacement for animal meat if the costs can come down.
How do you keep up with innovations in the UK greentech sector?
We have good relationships with universities TTOs [technology transfer offices]. We work with early-stage ecosystem partners, such as incubators and accelerators, that work with companies at the earliest stages. We work with other funds that might pass on things which are too early stage for them. We get a lot of inbound enquiries as we build our portfolio and get better known. We go to a huge number of conferences and talk on panels. We are open to engagement via our website and LinkedIn.
Final question! Is Ed Miliband realistic to talk about the UK becoming net zero by 2030?
It could happen. We’ve got some of the best resources in the world in the UK. We have all this wind. We have tidal. We’ve just invested in an exciting tidal company! We could power the whole of the UK and export to Europe with just the tidal power we have around our coast. It’s better for a baseload, as it’s more predictable than wind.
We just need to embrace technologies. We’ve been unintentionally geo-engineering the planet for 150 years and we are wrecking it. We have to act now. Of course, we should have support and retraining for those whose jobs are affected, but there are going to be so many more opportunities from embracing green growth than trying to stop progress with protectionism.
Leading with zero-carbon tech
Eleanor Maciver, Partner, Patent Attorney and Sustainability Champion at Mewburn Ellis, comments:
"Pippa’s work underscores the vital importance of investing in zero-carbon technology to tackle climate change and unlock economic opportunity. By backing early-stage climate innovations through venture capital, she shows how the UK can lead in building a sustainable, high-growth economy. Her message is clear: solving the climate crisis isn’t just necessary — it’s a huge opportunity, and with the right support, the UK can be at the forefront of it."
Written by Charles Orton-Jones
