Rockstart has launched its second fund of €21 million to invest in energy startups.
The Fund was launched with the Dutch pension fund ABP, and family office De Hoge Dennen Capital as cornerstone investors, together with other prominent private-wealth and industry investors and is supported by the seed capital scheme from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO).
The Rockstart Energy Fund aims to invest in energy startups in Europe with a primary focus in the Netherlands. The Energy fund is the second fund launched by Rockstart after the 2019 launch of the Rockstart Agrifood Fund.
Rockstart, which has been active in the Energy domain since 2014, has a 75 percent follow-on funding rate from its latest Energy accelerator, with €5.2 million raised by portfolio companies within 1.5 years.
Over the years, Rockstart has built energy startups such as Sympower, Flexidao, Dexter Energy and Ammp Technologies.
The new Rockstart Energy Fund is led by Freerk Bisschop and Nick Stokman. Freerk has more than 30 years of experience in the energy sector and has been Rockstart’s Energy director since 2016, while Nick has been Investment Director at Lucros Investments and was a mentor at Rockstart prior to joining as a Fund Partner.
“Our goal is to become one of the leading accelerators-VCs in the world and we aim to reach €100 million under management by the end of 2022 which will be allocated across approximately 250 early-stage startups. Rockstart invests from €100K in the initial round and will only co-invest together with syndication partners to empower the startups to scale,” said Rune Theill, CEO of Rockstart.