Fellowship Spotlight: Streetlife Ventures

“So much of the reality of climate change is in our streets and neighborhoods,” says Co-Founder and Managing Director of Streetlife Ventures, Sonam Velani, “but so are the solutions. It’s going to take an additional $5 trillion dollars per year, every single year until 2050, to get to net zero emissions. And we are far from that.” Velani and her Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Laura Fox, are working hard to get us closer. 

Investing at the Intersection of Cities and Climate 

“At Streetlife, we focus on investing at the intersection of cities and climate. The reason for that focus,” Velani explains, “is that half of humanity lives in cities and 70% of emissions comes from cities, and unfortunately both of those numbers are going up and to the right.”

She raises the high temperatures in New York City throughout the summer of 2024 as an example of the climate impacts of growing populations and increased emissions. “We see the consequences of climate change in our streets and neighborhoods, but instead of focusing on the doom and gloom, we focus on agency and optimism. What are the solutions we can put in place to address these challenges?”

For their first fund, Streetlife is raising $30M and writing checks into pre-seed and seed-stage B2B companies across North America and Europe. Within the intersection of cities and climate, Streetlife is investing in five main verticals: buildings, energy, mobility and logistics, waste and water, and adaptation. 

The firm has identified these areas as the biggest drivers of both emissions and climate risk in cities. “In terms of both spending power and global economic activity, these industries are huge in and of themselves,” Velani points out, underscoring the potential within the Streetlife portfolio. Fox adds, “We need a lot of new technologies to help us scale profitable solutions for the places that we call home, and that’s not going to happen by chance.”

Reflecting the Diversity of the Cities We Live In

“Having our founders look like the cities we live in is a core value and principle for us,” Fox explains, “so we’re really focused on making sure the networks we’re building are as diverse as our cities.” Streetlife is committed to more than 50% of the founders in their portfolio being women and/or people of color. And their commitment goes beyond words. The firm is putting energy into establishing a robust pipeline that they can refer investors to. 

“So often we speak to investors,” Fox says, “who don’t invest in women or people of color who say, ‘Oh, I didn’t meet many,’ or, ‘I met one and I invested in one.’” In an effort to remedy the dynamic of investors claiming to not be aware of a diverse group of founders, Streetlife Ventures works to make connections. One manifestation of this work is through their Climate Tech Demo Nights, which they host in partnership with Amazon, NYU, and SOSV, showcasing a diverse group of founders with promising urban climate solutions.

Expanding the diversity of founders in the space isn’t just about a face-value shift in optics; Fox and Velani know that representation comes along with tangible impacts, too. “We really believe that for climate investing and climate work to be successful,” Fox says, “dollars can’t just go to the wealthiest parts of the city, because then we’re just continuing what we’ve long seen with infrastructure and other investments across the U.S.” 

One of the best ways to interrupt this pattern is by making sure that people who come from other parts of the city are in the position to make decisions, craft solutions, and direct capital. Second to that is closing the gap in understanding for folks whose lived experiences haven’t granted them clear insights into the challenges at hand. To this end, Fox shares, “So often it’s about helping founders understand what resources are available to them and building that whole-of-city instinct, mindset, and muscle from the beginning of their company journey.”

One founder in the Streetlife pipeline, for example, recently secured $8M of grants to deploy low-cost electric vehicle charging solutions to affordable housing units with the support of Streetlife helping them consider how to create impact in underserved communities.

Steady Track Records and Their Life's Work

“Our backgrounds are working at the intersection of cities and climate for our full careers,” Fox emphasizes, lifting up the depth and breadth of her and Velani’s shared knowledge, experience, and network in this particular space. 

Fox spent her career as an operator before launching Streetlife, giving her the clarity that results from intimately understanding what it takes to build, launch, and sustain a company. In addition to being General Manager of Citi Bike for Lyft, building it into a $100M+ ARR business and one of the largest transportation systems in the U.S., she’s also led diligence on urban climate tech companies at Sidewalk Labs; launched new mobility products at BCG with their digital ventures team; served as an urban investment strategy advisor to Bloomberg Philanthropies; and edited a book on entrepreneurial approaches to urban growth. She also teaches MBA strategy and climate investing courses at NYU Stern, and is on the board of Governors Island, which is a test bed for climate innovation in NYC.

Velani started out in project finance before spending five years working in a regulator seat in New York City. Her work during this time includes financing $10 billion of transportation, energy, and water infrastructure projects at Goldman Sachs and developing NYC’s $15 billion Green New Deal at the NYC Mayor's Office. While working at the World Bank on global infrastructure projects that can endure natural disasters, Velani had the realization that technical entities like the World Bank – no matter how much brilliance and capital they can bring together – can only make progress if their local government counterparts are on board. This understanding piqued her interest in local government and led her to work on affordable housing, economic development, and infrastructure, all with a climate lens. She began working with startups to help New York City accomplish its ambitious climate agenda, and now also sits on the boards and selection committees of Women.NYC, Scale for Climate Tech, and Activate to forge public-private partnerships and bring the right resources to founders to scale solutions in complex urban environments. 

“For both of us,” Fox says, “there’s a sense within us that this is our life’s work. We’ve developed a set of skills and capabilities that allow us to have a unique vantage point on this sector, and now is the critical moment to put ourselves behind that.”

Lived Experience Leading to Informed Passion for Change

Even before their professional experiences, Fox and Velani – who both grew up in Chicago – felt passionate about climate. Having grown up on the South Side of Chicago, Fox witnessed firsthand the ways that under resourced areas experience the impacts of structural inequities. “Because I wanted to go to a good school,” she remembers, “it took me 90 minutes and four modes of transportation to get to a good high school in a different neighborhood.” This and other experiences made her curious about how cities work and why such inequities exist, eventually seeding in her a passion for local, place-based economic development. 

While her career has spanned work with government, philanthropy, and private sector, she emphasizes, “Repeatedly, I’ve seen that the best way of creating impact and scale is through private sector business, and that’s why I’ve spent the vast majority of my career focused there. Sonam and I saw that we can unlock a lot of growth in businesses that can have a ton of financial returns and impact through the approaches and skill sets we’ve learned through our careers.”

After she was born in Mumbai, Velani and her family immigrated to the U.S., landing in Chicago. “When I was growing up,” she reflects about her early years in Chicago, “we lived next to a water plant in an apartment that often flooded. That’s where the fascination with infrastructure starts.” She recalls, “I think growing up in that environment, you very much understand the physicality of the built environment around you and how that impacts your transportation options, your housing options, your economic and social mobility.” 

Velani was also a Dreamer for many years, learning only in her teens that she and her family were undocumented. She earned a full scholarship to Harvard before securing legal status halfway into her time there. “I’ve been really lucky,” she says. “And I think one of the things that really drives us, as people who come from these backgrounds, is how we can use our knowledge, careers, and connections to pay it forward and improve lives for future generations to come.”

Stepping In to Fill the Gaps

Both Fox and Velani have served as mentors and advisors for a number of startups, leveraging their networks and knowledge in support of others, and simultaneously expanding their own connections and access to promising and innovative deals and companies. They established a camaraderie over the years, sharing what they were learning from people in the throes of building businesses. 

“We compared notes about the pain points we were hearing from a lot of the founders,” says Fox, “and we heard very consistent challenges, frustrations, and blocks that we were uniquely positioned to help them solve for.” They saw themselves filling the same specific gaps, entrepreneur after entrepreneur. “There were many instances in which we were able to help them derisk and commercialize their businesses,” Fox adds, “and there were some times when we met them too late, and it was going to be really difficult for them to turn things around.”

Both the situations in which they were able to help and those in which they weren’t motivated Fox and Velani to consider how they might formalize and grow their impact in this area, ultimately leading to the creation of Streetlife Ventures. “As we thought about the future of what we wanted to do with our careers,” Fox reflects, “we were thinking about bringing the expertise we had built to the sector to accelerate startups along certain dimensions.” The dimensions that she and Velani were adding value to were things like navigating the heavy regulatory complexity of climate work; structuring an appropriate and effective business and operations model; commercializing and deploying a product; and helping founders identify and access non-dilutive capital and build strong climate capital stacks to accelerate growth. 

Creating Access and Accelerating Businesses

The pair has built strategic partnerships that further facilitate their impact in these realms. For example, they have a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Brooklyn Navy Yard that positions them to bridge the gap between the Navy Yard’s need for climate tech solutions and companies in the pre-commercialization stage that have promising solutions but limited access to buyers.

Through their deep engagement in climate work in cities, they’ve gained a prime position in relation to commercialization partners as well – real estate developers, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), infrastructure players, and city governments. As Fox articulates, these connections support companies in the post-commercialization deployment phase to “get the right relationships so they can scale and fuel their business development.”

She goes on to share, “The thing that tipped us both over the edge in deciding to leave our operator jobs and start the fund is our access to the climate capital stack.” Their varied experiences with project finance and asset-based finance revealed to Velani and Fox a number of patterns. They saw what they refer to as founders being “force fed” equity – being led to believe that equity is the only tool in the capital toolkit; and the consistency of female and diverse founders receiving bad terms. This inspired them to do something to create more opportunities for these founders to build strong companies from the outset rather than face challenges due to these inequitable patterns. “We’ve built the fund around solving for these pain points and accelerating and scaling,” says Fox. One way they do this is by helping founders source a range of non-dilutive capital sources in addition to the equity they’re providing through Streetlife. 

Fortifying Fund Impact through Partnership

“One of the greatest things about this space is that there are a lot of people coming into it,” Velani shares, acknowledging heightened interest in climate crises over the past few years. She elevates in particular the example of the day in September of 2020 when the sky turned orange in San Francisco as an event that got many more everyday people concerned about what’s happening with climate change. “People woke up to the reality that this is happening – today and not 30 years down the road,” she says. “As two people who’ve spent our careers in this work, it’s awesome to see the excitement and energy that people are bringing from all sorts of careers and all walks of life.” 

In the context of COVID-era limitations, Velani and Fox leveraged the attention on climate change as they gathered with a small group of concerned citizens, first remotely, then carefully in person, and eventually built what’s become a 15,000-person community in eight different cities. Now the largest place-based climate tech community — and notably gender-balanced in the broader context of women receiving less than 7% of all climate tech funding — Climate Tech Cities connects professionals across industries to share knowledge and strengthen connections among those working on climate policy, technology, and solutions. “We do a lot of place-based sessions and dialogues and panels in partnership with other groups across the ecosystem,” Velani shares.

With roughly 40% of this vast community made up of founders or people who are thinking about starting climate-focused companies, and 90% working in or transitioning into the climate space, Climate Tech Cities is a strong source of deal flow for Streetlife. “We’re really able to matchmake folks with opportunities at early-stage companies,” Velani explains. “We also run a talent network and share that information with portfolio companies and other VCs in the ecosystem looking to expand their teams.”

Participating in the VC Include Fellowship

“What’s been fantastic is the diversity of funds just within our cohort,” says Velani, reflecting on the range of focus areas and communities being impacted among the funds in this year’s fellowship cohort. She also underscores the value of guest speakers and the different ways in which they’ve supported Streetlife’s growth and well-being – from lessons on productivity and time management and cold calling, to more personal stories of people’s journeys as underrepresented fund managers who’ve developed their careers against the odds. 

Fox adds that, “It’s been the most rigorous content offering of any program we’ve been a part of, really building the skill sets and mindset needed to succeed as venture managers. We’re grateful to be learning from others who’ve actively sat in an LP seat.” She points to Program Director, Rendel Solomon, as an example of someone who shares candid and invaluable insights from his experience as an allocator. “As emerging managers, we’re eager for feedback and to take on lessons, notes, and learnings, and we think really highly of the program and see that others across the industry do, too.”

We’re proud to be a part of the Streetlife Ventures journey, and look forward to the strides they’ll continue to make toward a more sustainable, equitable future at the intersection of climate and cities.