GSV Capital is the first publicly traded security giving growth equity investors access to the world's most dynamic, VC-backed private companies.
More about GSV Capital
Founded
2014Capital Raised
UndisclosedInvestors
GSV CapitalGSV Investment Theme
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Cloud/Big Data
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Marketplaces
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Sustainability
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Education
Overview
GSV Sustainability Partners (GSV SP) is a finance company that leverages the rapid global adoption of proven sustainable products, thereby delivering meaningful customer savings through a more effective use of energy, water, and waste. With this framework, GSV Sustainability Partners is pioneering Sustainability as a Service™ — the green tech sector’s own “SaaS”. The vast majority of building and vehicle owners do not have the budget to implement sustainable upgrades despite compelling and low-risk paybacks. GSV SP will purchase these upgrades on behalf of their clients, providing them the improvement free of charge. In exchange, the resource consumer agrees to share the measurable financial benefits of the given product for a period of time.
- GSV Thesis
- People
- Product
- Potential
- Predictability
Why We Like Sustainability Partners
GSV SP solves a global problem for institutions and entrepreneurs: How to reduce operating costs when there is neither capital budget nor ability to obtain collateralized financing for the required products. With an innovative partnership model between vendor and customer, GSV SP offers completely off-balance sheet financing, through a pure service model. Due to expected accelerated product payback, GSV SP aims to deliver to its customers – and, via sharing, also to the company and its investors — cash yield alpha, uncorrelated with the overall public market.
People
The GSV Sustainbility Partners team is led by industry veterans John Denniston and Tom Cain. Both have over a decade of sustainability investing experience, and are directly responsible for over a billion dollars in technology investments with Kleiner Perkins, EFW Partners and SAIL Capital Partners. Together, the two have a lifelong track record of founding, operating, and scaling world-class businesses.
Product
GSV SP offers their clients meaningful flexibility in potential benefits, backed by strong quality, performance, support, and satisfaction with high quality vendors. Management has built their business with customer-centric satisfaction as the number one focus. Internally, GSV Sustainability Partners performs extensive underwriting analysis of the vendor, customer, and application to yield a statistical risk assessment, which translates directly into transaction terms.
Potential
GSV SP has the potential to change the way energy and sustainability products are deployed throughout the country and world, resulting in meaningful impact on energy usage and environmental protection.
Megatrends
Population
Middle Class
Resource
Sustainability
How Big Can This Be?
GSV Sustainability Partners is pursuing a virtually untapped market. As the world population increases beyond 7 billion, technologies that extend the life or efficiently manage energy, water, and waste are destined to have very high premiums given global resource consumption.
Predictability
While the SaaS agreements tend to be structured on an annual basis, GSV Sustainability Partners believes that as the products deliver savings greater than their original costs, customers are likely to renew the relationship year after year. Given that expectation, GSV SP remains focused on products and environments where the likelihood of continued performance for many years is high. Given the compounding characteristic of the business model, singular non-renewals should not have a material impact on long-term cash flow.
Risks
In order to be successful, GSV Sustainability Partners will need to find sufficient projects capable of generating both a strong customer return on investment and with a timeframe long enough to generate a robust return for GSV SP. GSV SP will also need to find partners capable of scaling manufacturing and sales to support the implementation strategy planned by GSV SP. GSV Sustainability Partners also may face the challenges presented by increased competition.
GSVC percentage figures are based upon the fair value of each holding as of the quarter ended December 31, 2017, or the cost basis of the holding (exclusive of transaction costs) if the investment closed subsequent to December 31, 2017. In either case, these values are divided by the fair value of total portfolio investments of GSV Capital as of December 31, 2017.
