Circulate Capital Ocean Fund, a US-based investment fund targeting technologies that could mitigate plastic pollution, has raised $106m in capital from backers that include several corporate investors, Nikkei reported yesterday.
Chemicals and plastics producer Chevron Phillips Chemical Company is among the limited partners, having provided $15m.
The other corporate LPs are beverages producers PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, chemicals supplier Dow Chemicals, food product provider Danone and consumer product manufacturers Unilever and Procter and Gamble.
Circulate Capital intends to provide debt or equity financing for developers of technologies or infrastructure intended to reduce the flow of plastic waste into the world’s oceans. Areas of interest include circular supply chains, waste management and recycling.
The firm will also incubate startups through a vehicle called Circulate Initiative that will also create open source metrics which will measure the social and environmental impact of investments.
Investments will be sized at between $2m and $10m, Circulate Capital founder and CEO Rob Kaplan told Nikkei. It is initially concentrating on India and Indonesia ahead of possible deals in South and Southeast Asia.
Kaplan said: “There are lots of sexy things out there, like alternative materials…but really what we are talking about is 8 million tonnes of plastic getting into the ocean because it is not being collected or managed properly. We can cut that in half by investing in those fundamentals of collection, sorting and processing.”
Although the firm is yet to close an investment, it is conducting due diligence on three potential deals, with the first expected to be revealed early next year.
