Carlström moves from ABB to Climentum Capital

Malin Carlström is leaving her role as head of ventures at ABB Electrification to become general partner at Climentum Capital, the Copenhagen-based climate-focused fund.

She one of a number of corporate investors who have recently moved to environmentally focused investment funds to work more directly on decarbonisation. Meghan Sharp, for example, moved from BP Ventures in February to head up the $600m Decarbonisation Partners fund set up by BlackRock and Singapore investment firm Temasek.

More recently Future Energy Ventures, the corporate investment and collaboration arm of E.ON, spun out from the German energy utility to scale up its climate-related investing.

Carlström will be the second woman out of five general partners at Climentum. She will focus on backing deep tech and hardware startups focused on carbon reduction.

“I am…of the firm belief that we need to allocate more capital to deep tech and hardware within this field in order to move the needle — so expect Climentum to build a portfolio consisting not least of startups and scale-ups with these features,” she said.

Carlström has a BSc in Environmental and Energy Technology and has always worked in energy technology. She is an angel investor in a number of decarbonisation-focused startups, including Qvantum Industres, a heat pump provider, and AirForestry, which reduces carbon emissions from forestry work.

During her nearly five years at ABB Electrification Carlström invested in startups such as Atom Power, a US company with technology to improve electric vehicle charging, which recently received a $100m investment from South Korean conglomerate SK Group. She was also involved in backing Brainbox AI, a Canadian startup that uses AI to make the heating and cooling systems of buildings more efficient.

ABB began making strategic investments with ABB Technology Ventures in 2010. In the past three years under unit head Kurt Kaltenegger, it built a much wider investment portfolio of 35 startups and scaleups. This includes startups such as deep learning processor company Hailo and surgical robotics company CMR Surgical, both of which had reached unicorn status with valuations of more than $1bn.