Voyager is an early-stage venture capital firm backing climate technology companies building the foundations of a decarbonised global economy. Founded four years ago by climate-tech investors and operators Sarah Sclarsic and Sierra Peterson, the fund was set up with an explicit ambition: to become the leading early-stage climate-tech VC operating across Europe and North America.
Today, Voyager manages $450 million across two announced funds. It invests from Seed through Series A, writing tickets of up to €9 million as lead or co-lead.
I spoke with Matthew Blaine, who leads Voyager’s European team, about how the firm has managed to raise and deploy significant amounts of capital while remaining deliberately lean.
The value of a flat, independent structure
Blaine said, there are different models for building a venture capital firm. “You can be very centralised, with one or two locations and a large junior team under a small number of partners,” he explained. “Or you can be flatter, with experienced hires who cover a lot of ground independently.” The firm has opted for the latter approach, operating with a fully remote team.
“We like that because it gives us strong geographic coverage with a relatively small team,” Blaine said.
Decarbonisation is a cross-sector “trillion-dollar commercial” opportunity
Blaine is quick to push back on the idea of climate tech as a narrow or self-contained industry.
“I sometimes push back when people talk about “the climate-tech sector” or “the climate-tech industry,” because that conversation often very quickly narrows to carbon credits, carbon accounting, and what I’d call some of the more obvious or well-worn areas. That’s not really how we think about it.”
Instead, Voyager sees decarbonisation as a trillion-dollar commercial opportunity over the next 30 years.
The firm invests broadly across sectors, from the future of compute to industrial and manufacturing applications. This includes areas such as novel chip designs as well as cooling, photonics, and AI for manufacturers.
Rather than being narrowly focused on a single industry, the firm prefers to remain flexible, looking for situations where “an exceptional team, a huge market, the right timing, and excellent technology come together.”
Where Europe stands out — and where it struggles
In Europe, Blaine sees particularly strong momentum in energy and renewables, some progress in hydrogen, and growing headwinds in more crowded areas like carbon credits. “Europe is incredibly strong in the future of compute,” he said.
“Across the geographies we look at — especially Switzerland and the ETH ecosystem — there’s fantastic innovation in photonics, chip design, and data-centre cooling.”
Across Voyager’s two core markets, Blaine notes that much of the most exciting innovation in these areas is coming out of Europe. The challenge, however, is commercialisation. “These companies often need to sell into the US market,” he said.
“That’s where we like to help as a transatlantic fund.”
Another area where Europe consistently excels is climate software, particularly in energy management and grid orchestration.
“When I reflect on the ten best deep-tech companies I’ve seen over the last three years at Voyager, probably eight or nine of the most impressive deep-tech companies were in the US,” Blaine said
. “But on the software side, it’s almost the reverse: probably eight or nine were European.”
He attributes this to Europe’s more complex and heavily regulated energy markets, which create fertile ground for sophisticated software solutions.
“You see that in large rounds in Germany, in the UK, and across Europe — companies helping industrial, commercial, and consumer customers procure energy more efficiently and balance the grid to manage the intermittency of renewables.”
Scale, ambition, and a mindset gap
However, Blaine notes that Europe is a much younger startup ecosystem than the US.
“It’s easy to forget that Microsoft and Apple were founded in the 1970s, Amazon in the early 1990s. In Europe, the ecosystem only really got going around 2010. “
Even companies often seen as part of the old guard, like Monzo or Revolut, were only founded a decade later.
“Building enduring enterprise value takes a long time.”
He contends that Europe already leads in energy and grid-related software, as well as parts of the future-of-compute ecosystem.
“Orchestrating huge numbers of connected devices — smart meters, heat pumps, storage systems — to balance the grid is something European companies are particularly strong at.
What he’d like to see more of in Europe is ambition to build overwhelmingly dominant companies.
While historically, Europe has always produced foundational companies, ARM and ASML, for example, are central to how the global economy operates. What he would like to see more of, however, is ambition at the very top end.
“Too often, success is framed as exiting at €1–2 billion. That’s a huge achievement, but I’d love to see more founders push beyond that.
When Google tried to acquire Wiz for around $23 billion, and the founders turned it down because they saw a $100 billion opportunity, that level of ambition is still rare in Europe.”
Part of the challenge, he argues, is structural. Many US investors invest globally, including heavily in Europe, while most European investors focus almost exclusively on their home market.
“That can create a more myopic worldview, where people haven’t necessarily built or invested at global scale before.
Sometimes the grass looks greener in the US, but there’s also less experience in taking companies from continental scale to truly global scale.”
That’s where funds like Voyager try to help — providing a global perspective from the earliest stages, so companies are built for worldwide dominance rather than just becoming the European winner and exiting. European portfolio highlights
Voyager’s European investments reflect this thesis across software, energy, and mobility. Some of the key examples:
ENAPI (Germany)
ENAPI is building a unified EV charging software platform that enables seamless data exchange and transaction clearing between charge point operators and eMobility service providers.
Packfleet (UK)
Carbon-neutral courier startup Packfleet is operating an all-electric fleet and purpose-built routing software to deliver parcels efficiently and sustainably across the city.
InRange (UK)
InRange is creating a double-sided marketplace to enable the development and use of solar assets near load centres. InRange matches owners of property capable of hosting solar installations with buyers seeking reliable low-carbon electricity, and manages the asset development, power sales and operation.
ANNEA (Germany)
Starting with wind assets, ANNEA enables renewable operators to minimise downtime from predictable failures and maximise electricity generation through automated control inputs.
CarbonChain (UK)
From source to shipment, CarbonChain's software tracks the emissions intensity of commodities and industrial inputs across supply chains. CarbonChain provides asset-level and cargo-specific emissions data to enable accurate systemic decarbonization from the ground up.
Together, these investments underscore Voyager’s conviction that climate is not a niche — but the defining economic transformation of the coming decades.
Lead image: Freepik.
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