Necessary Ventures

Climate tech is facing a harder reset than some founders might realize. Based on PitchBook data: 🔷 So far in 2025, carbon and emissions tech is on pace to decline 10% YoY in dollars raised and 41% in deal count. 🔷 From the 2023 peak, funding is down 87%, and rounds are down 49%. “I’m saving the planet” might not be the most interesting pitch anymore. The line between climate tech and defense tech is blurring: 🔷 Battery startups are pivoting from EVs to military drones. 🔷 Metals and cement founders (like we’ve seen with Magrathea Metals and Brimstone) are reframing as supply-chain security plays. 🔷 Compliance and resilience tools are pitching national security instead of eco impact. What breaks through in 2025 may not be climate-tech at all. Instead, it’s dual-use. Founders who can credibly sell both resilience + decarbonization are the ones still getting funded.

AI wrappers are out, embedding into workflows is in. Last week at pre-seed: 7 deals, $4.1M raised. Two stood out to us 👇 EcoPulse – $180K from ATX Venture Partners and Sputnik ATX 🧪 Forever chemicals (PFAS) are in everything from packaging to clothing, and regulators are cracking down hard. EcoPulse built a platform that scans supply chains for chemical risks, automates compliance, and cuts risk-assessment work by 2,500 hours/year. Spike AI – $1.9M led by Sorin Investments 📊 Marketing has too many tools with little transparency. Spike AI is building MAGI, a marketing OS that runs campaigns end-to-end and optimizes across channels. No guesswork. ‼️ What recent deals are you seeing that caught your attention?

There's no data in pre-seed investing ⁉️ It's all vibes ❗ That's the common sentiment at least. Pre-seed may be the least data-driven stage of investing, but at Necessary Ventures, we're using data to evaluate specific opportunities and for insights into financing trends and norms. Our team has been crunching financing data to see if it matches the vibes, and I’m excited to share what we've found. 🧊 Pre-seed activity last year was still cold, in the same post-2022 slump, matching the cautiously optimistic vibe. 📈 H1 2025 is telling a different story, matching the current sense of a hot market, especially for AI. Reported in the first half of 2025: 🔷 855 pre-seed deals - the lowest deal count since 2021 and down 73% YoY 🔷 $731M invested, on pace to beat both 2021 and 2024 🔷 $980K avg round size in Q2 - a multi-year high 🔷 Fintech is catching up to AI & Data in capital raised 🧠 Even though deal count was down, the checks and rounds are getting bigger. As with previous analyses, there are hundreds of deals that we can confirm having closed but haven't yet been reported. We're starting to add these in as we begin forecasting with an internal regression model trained on growing underreporting. If you're raising right now, we'd love to hear what you're seeing. What’s exciting? What’s weird? What’s broken? ‼️ Want the full report including the top pre-seed rounds in 2025 and sector-by-sector breakdowns? Drop a comment, and we’ll DM it to you. Know a pre-seed founder raising? Tag them or share this post so they know the latest trends. #PreSeed #Fundraising #EarlyStageVC #VentureCapital Kaley Ubellacker

The best signal for what VCs are excited about right now isn’t what they say on podcasts. It’s what they actually fund. Last week: 12 pre-seed deals, $15.9M total. Two startups stood out 👇 Olto ✦ ($5.1M from Nexus Venture Partners and The General Partnership) AI demo engineers that auto-generate personalized product walkthroughs, no sales team or solution engineer needed. A direct strike at the B2B demo bottleneck. Nexxa.ai ($4.4M from a16z speedrun) AI copilots for legacy industrial software. Engineers can now query clunky tools like they would ChatGPT. No rip-and-replace required. 🧠 The common thread: not just AI hype; products solving urgent, overlooked problems with clear ROI. We break down pre-seed dealflow like this every week. Link in the comments. #PreSeed #StartupFunding #AI #VentureCapital