AN IMPACT INVESTING FUND, MAKES AN IMPACT INVESTMENT INTO REBOUND TECHNOLOGIES
What do Walmart, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, Keurig, Goldman Sachs, have to do with impact investing and climate mitigation? These Fortune 100 and 500 firms recently invested in the Closed Loop Fund (either through their corporate foundation using a Program Related Investment (PRI) or treasury) in order to create a low-cost debt fund for municipalities to borrow to upgrade their recycling infrastructure. Such investments reduce waste, create new resources, save energy, and build a brand.
After successfully launching the Closed Loop Fund, Closed Loop Partners launched Closed Loop Ventures (CLV). CLV is an early-stage equity investment fund focused on sustainable consumer goods, advanced recycling technologies, and services that further the circular economy.
According to Project Drawdown, a climate change mitigation initiative, improving refrigeration management and reducing food waste are the number one and number three most substantive solutions to global warming, respectively. That’s one reason that Closed Loop Ventures (CLV) considered an equity investment in Denver-based Rebound Technologies an exciting and lucrative opportunity. Its team saw Rebound as ideal for one of its early impact investments – catalyzing a significant climate change mitigation impact and reducing food waste while simultaneously delivering a high potential for impressive financial return.
CLV was able to validate the supply chain opportunity and impact with its unique network of food and retail companies. “Rebound Technologies directly addresses a huge driver of waste in the food supply chaininefficiencies in the freezing process between the farm and the retailer,” says Rob Kaplan, CLV managing director. “Based on our work with retailers and consumer product companies, we believe there is a strong demand for this technology.”
Founded in 2012, Rebound’s lcePoint technology is a liquid sub-cooling product plugs into existing industrial freezer systems and provides the control to deploy bursts of high capacity cooling, ideal for speeding up blast freezing services and mitigating peak energy expenses. No other cooling technology offers this control and Rebound accomplishes it with a 40 percent efficiency gain. Facilities not only realize a boost in revenue from increased product throughput, but they also benefit from decreased energy expenses while helping support food
waste diversion.
Rebound has partnered with Lineage Logistics, one of the largest cold storage and logistics companies in the United States, to pilot lcePoint. Shipping out in November, this commercial pilot is a critical step towards optimizing lcePoint for industrial applications, a process that can lead to $275K in increased earnings per unit for Lineage along with over 2,200 tons of potential food waste diverted.
The equity investment made by CLV adds to a mix of support that also includes government grant funding from the National Science Foundation, USAID, the Department of Energy, among others. By diversifying its source of funding to include impact investments, Rebound was able to raise enough to complete research and development, pilot its product with paying customers, building its brand, and creating a strong foundation from which to scale globally.
Through additional investments like Rebound, Closed Loop Ventures and its parent investment firm anticipate helping to: eliminate 40 million tons of greenhouse gases, improve recycling for more than 18 million households, divert more than 20 million cumulative tons of waste from landfills, and save nearly $60 million for US cities.
To learn more about Rebound, go to https://rebound-tech.com. Or explore the Closed Loop Ventures portfolio of impact investments at https://www.closedlooppartners.com/closed-loop-ventures/.