The Green Bet

A handful of investors are reshaping the climate-tech landscape-backing hard infrastructure, long-haul founders and patient capital to build the rails of a greener economy

- Sridhar Raman and Himanshu Ojha

Arjun Bajwa didn't set out to save the planet; he was simply fascinated by microbes.

During his PhD, while running routine lab tests, he observed some strains naturally produced vivid pigments. That piqued his curiosity: could nature's palette replace petroleum-based dyes? This spawned an idea that eventually became KBCols Sciences, a startup that makes nontoxic, microbial-based dyes.

However, taking that idea to market, Bajwa realised, was less about chemistry and more about capital and investor conviction. Among the first to offer both was Sudhir Sethi, founder and chairman of Bangalore-based venture-capital (VC) firm Chiratae Ventures, who backed KBCols when few others were willing to take the leap.

What made early investors like Sethi lean in when most looked away wasn't a secret playbook or clairvoyance. It was something more elemental: conviction that the world was shifting beneath their feet.

Dinesh Pai, vice-president at Zerodha, a financial-services company, and who coordinates investments at the nonprofit, Rainmatter, puts it bluntly: To him and a handful of others, the idea of not investing in climate tech felt riskier than stepping into uncharted territory.

That mental flip, from climate as a liability to climate as an inevitability, changed everything. “At KBCols we saw strong scientific depth and founders with visionary zeal, aligned with fundamental shifts in market needs and our philosophy of long-term value creation,” says Sethi.

Backing to Build

Early bets like these weren't moonshots or abstract visions of the future. What drew investors in were real-world problems, grounded in infrastructure, that someone had decided to solve.