The venture capital landscape is witnessing a structural shift as investors move beyond mere mitigation toward a more aggressive philosophy of industrial displacement. At One Ventures has recently closed a significant new fund dedicated to a specific and uncompromising mission: identifying and scaling startups that aim to physically replace the world’s most polluting legacy sectors. This strategic pivot marks a departure from traditional environmental, social, and governance investing by prioritizing radical technological substitution over incremental corporate improvements.
Founded on the principle that the current climate crisis requires more than just carbon offsets or efficiency gains, At One Ventures is positioning itself as a catalyst for what it calls the destruction of industries that harm the planet. This does not imply a desire for economic chaos, but rather a belief in the power of superior unit economics and hardware-based innovation to render outdated, high-emission processes obsolete. By backing founders who are building better, cheaper, and cleaner alternatives, the firm intends to force a market-driven transition away from fossil fuels, intensive animal agriculture, and unsustainable manufacturing.
Managing Partner Tom Chi, a former founding member of Google X, brings a deep-tech lens to the firm’s investment strategy. The new fund is expected to target companies operating in the physical world, focusing on breakthroughs in material science, synthetic biology, and industrial engineering. Unlike the software-heavy portfolios that dominated the last decade of venture capital, this fund is leaning into the difficult work of hardware. The goal is to find solutions that offer at least a tenfold improvement in resource efficiency while simultaneously lowering costs for the end consumer.
One of the primary sectors in the firm’s crosshairs is the global construction industry, particularly the production of cement and steel, which accounts for a massive portion of global carbon dioxide emissions. By investing in startups that utilize novel chemical processes to create carbon-negative building materials, At One Ventures seeks to make traditional, high-pollution methods commercially unviable. The firm argues that once a cleaner alternative becomes significantly more profitable than the incumbent technology, the market will naturally move to dismantle the old guard.
Agriculture and food production represent another major pillar of the new fund’s roadmap. The firm is looking for technologies that can produce high-quality protein and materials without the massive land use and methane emissions associated with traditional livestock farming. This involves everything from precision fermentation to cellular agriculture. The investment thesis suggests that if a startup can create a product that tastes better and costs less than conventional meat, the environmental benefits will follow as a byproduct of market dominance.
Critics of this aggressive investment style often point to the high capital requirements and longer time horizons associated with hard-tech startups. However, At One Ventures maintains that the sheer scale of the addressable markets makes the risk worthwhile. As global regulations tighten and carbon taxes become more prevalent in major economies, the economic moat for sustainable industrial technology only grows stronger. The firm’s approach is fundamentally a bet on the inevitability of a techno-economic transition that favors the efficient over the wasteful.
Ultimately, the success of this new fund will be measured by its ability to bridge the gap between laboratory breakthroughs and commercial scale. By providing the necessary capital to move from pilot plants to full-scale industrial production, At One Ventures is attempting to prove that the most effective way to save the environment is to build a more efficient global economy from the ground up. This involves a calculated effort to out-compete and eventually replace the very industries that have defined the modern industrial era for over a century.
