Cerulean is a pre-seed venture capital firm backing founders using applied AI to build the nature-positive economy.

The global imperative to address climate change is driving trillions of dollars into climate finance, creating unprecedented investment opportunities.

According to some investors, we have enough venture capital in climate. That’s only true if you track money for status quo investments—business models that leverage the innovators' dilemma to disrupt incumbents to take their place as established industry leaders. These companies are mostly blind to innovations that are disrupting incumbent systems to make systemic change.

Moreover, traditional approaches to climate investing often focus on niche markets with green premiums or FOAK moonshots with decades before meaningful impact, and they are complicated by, if not reliant upon, a number of misaligned incentives from non-profits and government market intervention.

Cerulean Ventures takes a different path. We identify systemic leverage points where unique, proprietary data, compute and AI scaling, and finance and fintech solutions can rapidly scale into new, large, transformative niches in the economy that have been resistant to digital transformation. Think: mining, niche manufacturing, soft tropical commodities, pharma supply chains, and the emerging markets of natural capital and biodiversity.

We invest in founders building companies to deliver decarbonization solutions that have the potential to radically upend current markets—not just incremental changes or niche products, but software that will drive demand for renewable energy and environmental assets, and create radically new markets that value nature and protect it.

We practice the craft of VC by returning to its origins — we're former tech founders ourselves that roll up our sleeves alongside entrepreneurs. We get to know entrepreneurs months before we invest, and demonstrate our worth in that period by helping them get their first customers, make key hires, or find a co-founder.

Cerulean is a color made of brilliant combinations of blues and greens—like those weaved throughout the forests and oceans of our planet.