On an unseasonably warm Friday afternoon, Daniel Weiss and Yaniv Tepper gathered in a temporary Beverly Hills office. They instantly began reminiscing, walking through their years in a comfortable cadence – even ending each other’s sentences.

The two founders kicked off the chat by discussing their days as college roommates, heading out on separate yet similar career paths, and then reuniting in 2001 to launch and build one of the first clean-energy and climate-focused venture capital and growth equity investment firms: the Angeleno Group. 

Together, it’s a journey that still surprises them even today.  

“It’s been extraordinary,” said Weiss, co-founder and managing partner. “From what was really kind of a non-institutional area of investing 20-plus years ago, this has become one of the largest and fastest growing areas of venture investing in the world today.”

And “we’re kind of the oldest, deepest, most experienced firm in the space,” Tepper, co-founder and managing partner, chimed in – not as a boast but as a reminder of what time can do: crystallize a conviction.

Angeleno Group, founded in what they call “the white space” of clean-energy investing, is today a pillar of climate financing. In more than two decades, Tepper and Weiss’ firm has invested in nearly 40 companies and has led or co-led funding totaling about $3 billion. Angeleno Group currently has 12 active investments across three funds within its portfolio. 

For Tepper and Weiss, this is just the tip of the iceberg. 

The green investment boom continues to soar, driven by global urgency and trillions of dollars targeting decarbonization. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that global investment in renewable energy reached a record $386 billion in the first half of this year, up 10% from the previous first half of 2024.

That demand comes amid growing political challenges to climate change policy – including the U.S.’ withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, which celebrated its 10th year since enactment in 2015. At the start of the year, President Donald Trump signed executive orders altering energy production regulations. Then, he followed up with a new tax law – under his One Big Beautiful Bill Act – that rolled back many clean energy tax credits and imposed new restrictions.    

Even with the brewing political headwinds, Weiss and Tepper remain optimistic about the market for clean energy and climate solutions. Achieving net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 alone will require significant investment to address the economic and social shifts. Citing 2022 estimates from McKinsey, global investment may reach $9.2 trillion over the upcoming decades.

“The climate clock is ticking loudly,” Tepper said. “Given the fires that we’ve had, the unexpected economic rise post (the Covid-19 pandemic), a little bit of retrenchment that’s been happening, we don’t have 15 years to get it right,” Tepper said.

He added that the outlook to reach net-zero emissions in the next 25 years is a great objective to have in place – “But really, the next five years are the most critical in the history of climate (and renewable energy) investing.” 

‘The white space’

Tepper and Weiss know firsthand the importance of timing within an evolving market. 

Two decades ago, Angeleno Group was an idea born in the shadows of one crisis after another: the dot-com bust, 9/11 and California’s electricity meltdown, which became so severe that it led to the recall of Gov. Gray Davis. Enron Corp. had collapsed. Oil was trading at an average of above $20 a barrel. And the phrase “clean energy” was barely in the investment lexicon.

Most would’ve walked the other way. Weiss and Tepper – whose careers were steeped in energy, policy and finance – chose to walk straight into the fray. 

“Energy and technology,” Tepper said, “probably didn’t exist together much.”

Energy was still the realm of utilities, refineries and pipelines, while technology was dedicated to dot-com startups – no one connected combustion with computing.

And no one saw the opportunity in the disarray – well, no one except for Weiss and Tepper.

“We really ought to have our heads examined,” quipped Weiss, laughing lightly at the memory of those early days.

But he swiftly acknowledged the seriousness of the early 2000s. The energy crisis had exposed the fragility of the grid; climate science was mounting; decades of innovations in computing and sensors were suddenly colliding with a century-old energy system.

He explained that on one end of the investing spectrum, private equity players were buying up hard assets such as power plants, drilling rigs, pipelines and the like. On the other end, hedge funds were “investing in commodity price arbitrage, in oil and natural gas.”

That middle inflection point – the so-called “white space” of that barbell – was the key spot that sparked their interest.

It “(was) the future of the sector … innovation technology, what was then called alternative energy,” Weiss said. “Who was going to invest in the future of transforming this important part of our global economy?”

Weiss said that they saw an opportunity and believed that investing in “sustainability could be good business. … so we set out to found a firm to invest against that white space, to invest in the next generation of sustainable technology companies that touch and help foster climate solutions.”

L.A. by design 

Choosing Los Angeles as home for their investment firm was just as intentional. Aside from the fact that both were native Angelenos, thus the firm’s name. 

“We were starting an investment firm in a city that was not known for its (venture capital) ecosystem,” Weiss said.

However, the two added that L.A. had something that Silicon Valley didn’t have – a convergence of engineering talent, aerospace know-how, global trade infrastructure through its two ports, its manufacturing footprint, and a deep understanding of solar and wind systems. 

“L.A. is kind of natural, frankly, to have an industrial clean-energy practice come out of it,” said Tepper.

In the beginning, as investors, they considered themselves “more stage-agnostic” – investing in everything from early-stage venture capital to buyout deals.

Over the two decades, they honed their focus on “growth equity” and on companies ready to scale. These are ventures with proven technologies and early revenue – a company, in short, that’s at a turning point, with commercial breakthroughs, national expansions, strategic acquisitions and global partnerships. 

“We’re in the scaling business,” said Tepper.

Their early discipline – sticking to industrial, clear energy and climate solutions – became their edge as the market matured and soon accelerated. The economics of the industry soon became a turning point, catching up to their hypotheses.  

Solar costs collapsed by more than 90%. Wind fell by over 70%. Batteries followed similar cost curves.

“The costs came down by orders of magnitude,” Tepper said. “Demand inflected up.”   

Climate tech venture investment alone soared between 2010 and 2022 – dramatically rising from nearly $2 billion to a peak of more than $70 billion by the end of 2022, according to HolonIQ, a New York-based data marketing intelligence platform. 

Three key business traits

Angeleno Group now has seven focus areas: “clean energy transitions,” “next generation energy storage,” “resource efficiency,” “critical infrastructure and resiliency,” “industrial energy efficiency and digital manufacturing,” “carbon mitigation and climate adaptation,” and “sustainable mobility and smart cities.”   

Weiss said they’ve built and defined their firm via three key traits in those early years and even today – “intellectual curiosity, humility and collaboration.”       

John Payne, chief executive at Phoenix, Arizona-based Kinematics Manufacturing Inc., echoed that sentiment.

“Words like partnership and collaboration get thrown about a lot in industries … but with Angeleno, it genuinely does feel like a partnership,” said Payne. “I feel like I am standing shoulder to shoulder with these guys and we are 100% aligned on what we’re trying to do.” 

Angeleno has owned a stake in Kinematics since 2014. With that backing, the developer and manufacturer of intelligent motion control systems for mission-critical applications has been able to strategically expand its business, Payne said. 

That includes executing its first acquisition last year, when it purchased P4Q, a Spanish company specializing in electronics manufacturing for solar tracking controllers. Kinematics closed the deal in February.

“It was a big step forward for all of us,” Payne said. “But I think it epitomizes the way Angeleno thinks – they’re prepared to take calculated risks to really grow, (and) they’re looking at building sustainable, long-term value.” 

Heavyweight network

Since its inception, Angeleno Group estimates that its portfolio companies have increased in value by $10 billion under its ownership. And they’ve generated $22 billion in cumulative revenues.

The firm also estimates that its portfolio companies have displaced 3 billion metric tons of carbon and added about 17,500 green-collar jobs. It also notes that five of their companies have won the Nobel Prize and that their portfolio companies have received about 1,000 patents.

Angeleno Group is “exceedingly good at what they do,” said Sir Andrew Steer, a prominent climate expert and economist who was knighted for his contributions to sustainable development. “They’ve got a track record … and they invest in a way that combines sort of looking at the long term but also recognizing the near-term issues …they’re deeply analytical, but they’re bold in the best sense of the word.” 

Steer, who most recently served as the founding president and chief executive of the Bezos Earth Fund, is the most recent addition to the firm’s cadre of policy experts and thinkers on Angeleno Group’s board of advisers.

He joined a star roster including former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen; former Secretary of Energy and M.I.T. physicist Ernest Moniz; Nobel laureate and Alphabet Inc. board member Frances Arnold; and Laura Tyson, economist and former dean at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

All of those on the board are looking to the future of renewable energy and finding attainable solutions. Steer, who currently serves as a distinguished professor at Georgetown University and the London School of Economics, sees this as an excellent opportunity for clean energy and climate tech investment, even amid political disruptions. 

“It’s paradoxically a very good time to invest,” as valuations of companies decline, Steer said, especially “given the abolition of some of the subsidies that (former President Joe Biden) put in place.”

A long road

Tepper and Weiss couldn’t agree more: this is a pivotal moment for their firm and the industry as a whole. The advisory board and the “combined perspectives underscore the seriousness of the work and the scale of the moment,” Tepper said. 

But as they’ve done for two decades, they will continue to focus on the future – especially given the ongoing growth of the renewable energy market globally, coupled with the advent of rapidly emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.

The economic case for renewable energy once again outweighs the geopolitical conflicts. 

Weiss noted that to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, “a number of third-party analysts put the capital spend at around $250 trillion … we will need to mobilize a massive amount of climate finance to get anywhere close to that number.”

What’s more, over the last 10 years, the two noted that there’s “a garden of innovation” in clean energy and climate-related companies – many of which Tepper said “have gone into the growth stage” right now.

“Deal flow is up, valuations are down,” Weiss added. “That is an attractive recipe for investors, and we’re seeing that today on an unprecedented scale.”