2.1 New partnership with santander to launch climate tech investment vehicle and advisory services

At The Business Booster 2022 in Lisbon, Portugal, Santander Asset Management (Santander AM) and EIT InnoEnergy announced a collaboration to accelerate the energy transition and address Europe’s energy security and price crisis by funnelling venture capital into the Europe’s most promising climate tech start-ups from EIT InnoEnergy’s portfolio.

The new climate tech fund will provide private banking and institutional investors with the means to invest in early-stage companies making a tangible impact on the energy trilemma – making energy affordable, available and sustainable. The investees will primarily be drawn from EIT InnoEnergy’s existing portfolio of companies spanning sectors as diverse as the circular economy, renewable energies, energy storage and efficiency, transport and mobility, smart buildings, cities and grid, and hydrogen.

Santander AM will be the portfolio manager of the fund. Banco Santander is expected to be an anchor investor, and EIT InnoEnergy is expected to co-invest in the new rounds of the start-ups and will continue bringing them added value services to de-risk and accelerate the business cases, leveraging its trusted innovation ecosystem.

This announcement follows an agreement in April 2022 between EIT InnoEnergy and Banco Santander, the world’s leading provider of renewable energy project finance, to help accelerate the development of the EIT InnoEnergy portfolio of start-ups by encouraging investment, reducing the industry skills gap, and driving the development of creative solutions to support sustainable innovations.

Santander offers the full suite of financial services required by such companies. The bank has identified six technologies in which it aims to become a world-class advisor and financier to drive the energy transition, including green hydrogen, energy storage, clean fuels and renewable energy. It also has proven corporate and retail banking expertise in the industrial and energy sectors, having mobilised €69 billion in green assets between 2019 and the first quarter of2022.

Innovation is critical to helping achieve net zero by 2050. With this initiative we aim to provide additional capital to many of the start-ups with the greatest emissions.

EIT InnoEnergy, which has three unicorns within its portfolio, has an aggregated need for €160 billion in extra financing over the next five years. In fact, four of the 300 companies in EIT InnoEnergy’s portfolio have already worked successfully with Santander to accelerate their business cases by attracting strategic investors and obtaining financial resources for accelerated growth.

José M. Linares, senior executive vice-president Banco Santander and global head of Santander Corporate & Investment Banking (Santander CIB), stated: “We are delighted to collaborate with EIT InnoEnergy. Supporting innovation is critical if we are to meet our collective net zero targets, and Santander CIB is committed to playing our part. We’ve equipped ourselves to understand the technologies that will help us transition to net zero in order to deliver the advisory and capital markets solutions that energy transition companies need to grow and become industry leaders.”

This new fund will complement and strengthen our existing innovation ecosystem and it will facilitate the rapid allocation of capital to accelerate time to market for game-changing climate tech innovations.