East Ventures Looking for Climate and Health Startups, Create This Program

Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Throughout the past year, East Ventures looked at climate change and health issues. To handle this, venture capital has created a number of initiatives in collaboration with various parties.

For example, with Temasek, East Ventures collaborated to create the Climate Impact Innovations Challenge (CIIC). This pitching competition related to addressing climate change mitigation and ecological issues provides a total prize of IDR 10 billion.

“The goal is to help more companies move towards climate and sustainability,” said East Ventures Partner, Melisa Irene, Wednesday (21/3/2024).

Specifically for this year there will be three tracks, namely those related to the energy transition, sustainable agriculture and circular economy.

Apart from that, East Ventures also has an initiative to calculate company emissions called Ecovisea. This initiative is the result of collaboration with WRI Indonesia and Climatiq.

To access it, just go to the official website then create an account. This emission calculation can be done for free.

“The hope is that the company will report, but I'm confused about how to do it. I want to pay a consultant very expensively. It's free, just create an account and the emissions are calculated,” explained Melisa.

East Ventures also created two initiatives in the health sector in collaboration with the Ministry of Health. One of them is publishing the white paper “Genomics: Leapfrogging into the Indonesian healthcare future”.

Apart from that, there is also the BGSI or Biomedical & Genome Science Initiative initiative. East Ventures also launched a Healthcare fund, one of the funds carried out last year.

“Launched a healthcare fund of US$ 30 million, to help innovation in companies operating in the health sector. At the end of last year, BGSi supported BGSi, to build a genomic bank in Indonesia, providing donations and collaboration between the Ministry of Health and Nalagetics,” said Melisa.

Melisa explained that startups whose business is related to the impact of climate change or health require different handling from startups in other fields.

He explained that East Ventures does not provide different terms or investment terms for startups in these two fields. However, East Ventures provides more complete support, for example through an accelerator program.

The accelerator program is provided for founders startups health, science, or climate change fields better understand regulatory and business issues through discussions with policy makers or experts in certain fields.

[Gambas:Video CNBC]

(dem/dem)