Ask any founder or investor: fundraising is never easy. And in a market with this level of uncertainty, the difficulties are compounded.
“Everyone has to go through fundraising, and it’s a relatively challenging market right now,” Kyle Teamey, managing partner at RA Capital Planetary Health, told TechCrunch. “That’s good for a bit of empathy.”
Teamey and his colleague Brigid O’Brien, also a managing partner with the firm, know this as well as anyone. They just closed a $120 million fund, their first for RA Capital Planetary Health.
In the two years the team was fundraising, the market changed course dramatically. When they started, the ink was barely dry on the Inflation Reduction Act, and global trade was humming along. All of that changed in the past six months.
“All of this is cyclical,” O’Brien said. “Kyle and I have often talked about this, and thinking about our careers and the highs and lows of the market that we’ve gone through multiple times.”
Both have seen their share of ups and downs in the market. O’Brien started out as an investor at In-Q-Tel and BPH, the mining giant. Teamey, for his part, was a founder in the first clean tech era over a decade ago before becoming an investor at In-Q-Tel and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
Over the years, the pair have developed a rubric that helps them decide where to place their fund’s money.
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“We have three screening criteria,” O’Brien said. First on their list is time to market. How quickly can a prospective company begin generating revenue? “We saw a lot of success in companies, even seed stage companies that were able to do that,” she said. “We look for companies that can be in-market in less than five years.”
Second, they look at product market fit.
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