Amazon on Thursday announced two efforts to support women who are leading climate tech companies:
- The Seattle-based tech giant is a founding partner of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s new Climate Gender Equity Fund, which is supporting female climate tech entrepreneurs. Amazon is contributing $3 million to the effort; USAID is matching its gift. Amazon is also encouraging fellow co-signers of its Climate Pledge to likewise back the fund.
- Amazon committed to invest $50 million from its Climate Pledge Fund to women-founded and women-led climate tech companies.
Climate tech — which includes wide-ranging companies innovating ways to reduce carbon emissions in transportation, energy, buildings, agriculture and manufacturing — has drawn record-setting levels of investments in recent years.
In 2021, the sector attracted $34.5 billion in venture capital funding in the U.S. alone, according to PitchBook. But if climate tech follows overall investment patterns, little of that cash went to female founders.
U.S. companies founded solely by women raised only 2.4% of total capital invested last year — a percentage that hasn’t grown in recent years despite rising awareness of gender inequity in VC.
Amazon is taking additional steps to bolster climate innovation in general, including the 2021 launch of the AWS Clean Energy Accelerator and the company’s support of Greentown Labs in Massachusetts, which is the largest U.S. climate tech startup incubator.
“As an important step in solving climate change, we must address the gender inequalities that persist in climate finance, and ensure female entrepreneurs have an equal seat at the table and access to the funding, networks and technical support they need to scale climate solutions,” said Kara Hurst, vice president of Worldwide Sustainability at Amazon, in a statement.
Amazon’s $50 million commitment represents 3% of its $2 billion Climate Pledge Fund.
Through the fund, the company invested in 13 companies by the end of last year. It launched the venture fund in 2020 to support businesses developing technology that could help Amazon and others reduce their carbon emissions. Amazon has showed continued growth in its carbon footprint since 2019.
