Octopus Investments has launched a £40 million deep tech fund to back pre-seed startups in the UK and Europe.

The fund will invest in technologies that aim to create a sustainable planet, including artificial intelligence, agtech, advanced materials and photonics.

Octopus Investments, which is part of the energy firm Octopus Group, said that deep tech founders will be given the capital and support to take breakthrough technologies to market.

The fund will act as lead investor, raising capital from a range of national and international institutional investors including family offices, corporates and local government pension schemes.

Zoe Reich and Rubina Singh are the general partners for the fund.

Singh said that in order to tackle the climate crisis, greater diversity of thought is needed.

“For a recent customer discovery programme we ran for deep tech start-ups, nearly 50 per cent of the applications we received were from teams with a female founding member and more than 60 per cent had a founding member from an ethnic minority background,” Singh said. “Our ambition with this fund is to tackle both the funding gap faced by deep tech businesses and support diverse founders to create a truly inclusive net-zero future.”

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