German startup Maya Climate closes €1.2m pre-seed funding round to accelerate growth

Maya Climate, a Berlin-based global project financing platform for natural capital projects, announced a pre-seed funding of €1.2m led by Germany’s High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), one of Europe’s leading seed investors. HTGF was joined by Antler, one of the world’s leading day-zero investors, the Berlin Angel Fund, and further technology founders and carbon market veterans.

The funding will allow Maya Climate to enter a market set to experience rapid growth over the next decade. As Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are increasingly recognised as one of the most effective and scalable solutions to avoid and remove carbon from the atmosphere, research suggests that the investment market for NbS will accelerate to $100bn per year by 2030.

Till Tornieporth, Co-founder, Maya Climate: “Carbon & biodiversity markets are seeing great interest from professional investors, as well as large emitters that increasingly pursue direct investments in early-stage project stages to ensure highest quality of their portfolios. But access to this fragmented & complex market remains a challenge. We are here to enable investors to build best in class nature capital portfolios.” 

Despite the critical importance of launching NbS projects around the world, project developers often face prohibitively high capital costs at launch. There is an urgent requirement for capital solutions to bridge the gap between project start and first carbon credit issuance.  Maya Climate is focused on removing the bottleneck of early-stage project funding to ensure that developers are able to start the NbS projects the world so desperately needs. 

Since its soft launch a few months ago, Maya Climate has on-boarded a series of large-scale projects, collectively raising more than $100m in project financing. Agreements are in place with a significant number of investors that use their platform to originate, diligence and invest in those projects. 

Daniela Bach, Senior Investment Manager, HTGF: “Nature-based solutions play a key role in tackling the climate crisis and with the Maya Climate platform projects can be launched faster and more easily.  We are impressed by the speed of the founding team gaining great momentum in a fast growing market.”

Maya Climate was co-founded in 2022 by Christian-Hauke Poensgen and Till Tornieporth. The two German entrepreneurs - both in their mid-20s - were previously building legal tech software and consulting corporates on carbon procurement. They left their previous jobs to launch their global digital platform for NbS project financing. 

Maya Climate will use the funding to grow its team in Germany, specifically looking at hires for technologists and natural capital experts. 

Christoph Klink, Partner, Antler: “We are very grateful to have been with Till, Christian-Hauke and the entire Maya Climate team right from inception. The team is tackling a tremendous challenge for the planet and we are excited to back such a strong and mission-driven team.”

www.maya-climate.com