The hydrogen plateau and IRA funding crutch with Toyota Ventures' Lisa Coca

Equity

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4.2 • 365 Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2024

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today on Equity, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Lisa Coca from Toyota Ventures during Climate Week NYC to discuss a key part of Toyota Ventures' $800 million portfolio - their Climate Fund. The fund's $300 million is laser-focused on climate innovation, but Coca says it casts a wide net beyond just mobility, backing startups from seed to Series A. So far, they’ve invested in companies like AM Batteries, which is cutting battery manufacturing costs by 40%, and Ecoletro, pioneers in green hydrogen production using hydropower. Together, Bellan and Coca are shedding light on the significant challenges in hydrogen, direct air capture, and methane reduction, and emphasizing that startups need to achieve cost parity with fossil fuels to drive real change. As always, Equity will be back with a news roundup on Friday. If you like what you hear, don't forget to leave us a review!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to Equity, Tech Crunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.
0:16.0	I'm Rebecca Ballon and this is our Wednesday episode where we home in on a trend in the
0:20.7	tech world and dive deep.
0:22.5	It's climate week here in New York City,
0:24.4	so today we're speaking with Lisa Koca,
0:26.6	a partner at Toyota Ventures
0:28.0	where she leads the firm's Climate Fund.
0:29.9	Before joining Toyota Ventures,
0:31.4	Lisa was at Intel's Emerging Growth and Incubations Division
0:34.6	and was also a founding member of GE Ventures.
0:37.6	Lisa, thanks so much for joining us on the Equity Podcast.
0:40.6	Oh, Rebecca, I was so happy to be here.
0:42.3	Thanks for having me. Now before we kind of dive in I wanted to get a little bit of a rundown on Toyota Ventures and the Climate Fund. So could you just give us a bit of a backgrounder about how much money and assets under management Toyota
0:54.4	Ventures has and the Climate Fund as well.
0:56.5	Yeah, sure.
0:57.5	So Toyota Ventures began its journey investing early stage startups in 2017.
1:05.0	There is in total approximately 800 million in assets a little north of 800 million in assets under management across six funds, two legacy funds that
1:16.1	were initially focused on AI.
1:18.7	And then in 2021, the group was rebranded from Toyota
1:24.4	AI Ventures to Toyota Ventures and that's when the next generation
1:29.7	of funds was launched and so the AI funds pivoted to what we call our frontier
1:35.7	tech funds so they've got a much sort of broader mandate where they're investing
	...

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