Some retired CEOs are going to space. Others move to Hawaii. But Unity co-founder David Helgason selected a different path after 12 years at the helm of the game engine company that went public in 2020, valued at $13.7 billion.
After leaving his position as CEO in 2014Helgason continues to serve on the board of the publicly traded company he co-founded in Copenhagen in 2004; but he devotes most of his time Transitional projectsan early-stage enterprise capital company he founded in 2021 to focus on climate.
You can see that the fund is called “transition” and not, say, “apocalypse.” This is partly because Helgason believes that legacy industries – normally environmentally harmful – will eventually be overtaken by more sustainable solutions, and partly because of his personality. “My friends describe me as a ‘glass full till ten’ optimist,” he told TechCrunch.
In an interview from his home outside Reykjavík, the entrepreneur-turned-VC shared his thoughts on his ventures and the journey that took him from Unity to climate tech, a homecoming of sorts. “It’s kind of embarrassing how much fun it is to work on the climate crisis,” he said.
Long way home
Unity’s public debut turned Helgason into billionaireat least on paper. Since then, the market capitalization has dropped, but the point stays the same: he made a lot of cash from the company, and that capital became more and more liquid for years.
As a result, he became a prolific angel investor, thus fulfilling his natural inclination to spend time with entrepreneurs. But his climate concerns would have to attend: as a self-proclaimed programmer, he had no clear entry.
This modified when one of his siblings, Ingvar, began a laboratory leather company. VitroLabs Inc. This led Helgason to get involved in the startup and synthetic biology more broadly. This eventually led him to climate-focused deep tech startups.
In addition to his angel investments, Helgason also became a limited partner in a variety of climate funds. “I have argued for a while that I am probably the most invested LP in climate,” he said.
Both activities gave him the education he wanted. “I always wanted to become a scientist,” he recalls. However, in his current state, he realized that he had more value so as to add as an early-stage investor. Thus, Transition Ventures was born as a enterprise firm. Helgason already had (and has) a family office Foobar. Transition Ventures is a different beast, and not only because of its climate mandate.
An honest fund
It can be a mistake to think of Transition Ventures as a family affair. Sure, Helgason and Ingvar’s brother Ari is one of the 4 partners, but Ari’s resume speaks for itself. His startup, Fabriche participated in the Winter 2010 edition of Y Combinator before becoming an investor in Dawn Capital and Index Ventures.
The third partner, Kristian Branaes, an Atomico graduate from London, was on board from day one, and the trio soon hired Mona Alsubaei from New York, who had learned the ropes of VC at Union Square Ventures and its climate fund. The investment team also includes director Clara Ricard, who recently made the investment Forbes’ Europe 2024 30 under 30 list..
Although Helgason’s wealth enabled Transition to instantly begin investing, the partners also decided to look for limited partners. “We never really considered doing it as a proper commercial venture fund,” he said. This meant joining the ranks of other climate funds akin to Climate Capital and “Low Carbon Capital” by Chris Sacca. While Transition has an LP, it does not disclose its set fund size or how much it has invested so far and plans to speculate.
Even though Helgason was in a position to anchor the fund himself, raising money wasn’t easy. By the time the documents were ready, market conditions had modified.
“Before we started actually raising funds, there was a war [in Ukraine] started and after a while we went from the hottest market I can remember to the coldest in a long time, so it took a lot of work,” he said.
After raising funds, Transition Ventures created a mixture of LPs that Helgason considers quite healthy: some mission-driven backers, but also some more financially motivated ones without a climate mandate. In other words, they care about profits, which is the commitment of every industrial enterprise capital fund.
Owning LPs means you have to generate profits inside a limited timeframe, but Helgason has no problem with that.
“We are quite disciplined in terms of focusing on schedules, but the climate crisis also requires this of us,” he said. “We don’t have time to wander around alone and explore. … We look for companies that are ready to go… and then we help them accelerate significantly.”
Project portfolio
Because Transition Ventures sees climate as a topic, not a sector, 12 corporations are participating file are quite diverse:
- Electricity mapsthat calculates the carbon intensity of electricity consumption to optimize large-scale use.
- FabricNanowhich goals to cut back the costs of cell-free bioproduction and increase its efficiency on a large scale.
- Geek heatwhich provides independent installers with the support they should speed up the introduction of warmth pumps.
- Odysseyonline trading platform and software platform connecting investors with renewable energy project developers.
- Biolab Phasesynthetic biology startup that upcycles CO2 in ethanol and other chemicals.
- Rolla renewable energy provider that enables corporations to buy power purchase agreements.
- Revoyreplaceable batteries and a charging network enabling the transformation of trucks into hybrid and electric vehicles.
- Running tidewhich removes carbon by growing seaweed in hatcheries and sinking it into the depths of the ocean.
- Safiformerly often called TrueCircle, a B2B recyclables trading platform.
- Upmaking electric bikes cheaper through refurbishment and recycling.
- Water planwho participated in Y Combinator’s summer 2021 batch and helps corporations manage water risk.
- Watershedwhich helps corporations decarbonize their operations.
Unlike Helgason, neither of those corporations is Icelandic, but “there was never a plan to do so,” he said. However, Running Tide uses Iceland as research and development base, with support from an external team that Helgason helped establish. Now called Transition labshelps climate technology corporations benefit from Iceland and its natural and social features to hurry up their scaling.
Shortly after starting Transition Labs, Helgason returned to his home country.
“I always wanted to live here,” he said. After spending most of his life abroad, he now lives in one of Iceland the costliest real estate; although this price is far from out of sight in the Bay Area. The house itself is quite modest; its most striking feature is the picturesque view of the ocean.
For someone who spends time worrying about global warming, the ocean likely serves as a powerful reminder to take motion.
“But even to people who say climate change isn’t real, I say, well, it almost matters because it’s accompanied by such serious crises,” he said. Whether it’s biodiversity or ocean health, Helgason is impressed by the caliber of founders tackling these issues. “The talent is amazing,” he added.
Although Helgason not considers himself an entrepreneur, he also has a latest project, Fair playwhose mission is to “make gaming part of the solution to the climate crisis.”
The project is currently shrouded in mystery, details will likely be announced at a press conference Dice Europe conference in September, but we already know that Richard Hilleman, a video game enthusiast, and Benedikt Franke, CEO of Planetly, a startup dealing with carbon dioxide emissions management, are involved in the game acquired by OneTrust in 2021
Helgason seems well-suited to combining gaming with climate impact investing, but at once his heart is firmly in the latter.
“A few years ago I decided that from now on I would only work on climate,” he said. Transition Ventures still has a lot to work on; is “about halfway through” deploying its capital in the search for an answer to the query on many investors’ lips: which climate solutions are best suited to scale?