Capital in the Age of Limits
In VC, every generation of investors believe they are inventing the future. First came the “internet” decade, then the “software eats the world” decade, then the AI expansion of the past few years… and now we’re entering something harder to name. Not a new sector, but a new lens, an era where value creation means something way bigger than only growth or technological breakthrough.
And you can feel this shift in day-to-day convos. Founders don’t only talk about addressable markets
and recurring revenues anymore, they talk about resilience, energy efficiency, carbon footprints, and
sustainability. Limited partners, too, are asking new questions, not just about exits, but about
purpose, durability, and long-term relevance.
What we call impact investing is no longer a moral accessory, or a way for a fund to brand itself. It’s
becoming a competitive necessity, a new way to think about risk, and to price resilience across every
sector.
From ESG to inevitability
For a long time, impact was a sort of checkbox, a paragraph at the end of a deck about “positive
externalities.” But the true goal of each business was still the same: let’s make money, and then we’ll
justify it.
But climate change is slowly inverting that logic. Ecological risk now means economic risk. The
companies ignoring this will lose margins, supply chains, and whole markets eventually.
That’s why the « smartest » investors are no longer asking questions like “Is this company
sustainable?” (as if they had to check a box during their due dil) but more like “Will this company still
make sense in ten years?”
And that’s what ecological venture capital really is: not a moral movement, simply what’s becoming
the new reality.
The logic of the living
The more you observe nature, the more you realize it’s an example of extreme efficiency.
No waste, no permanent growth, no straight lines. Everything circulates, transforms and adapts.
And for now, our economy works the opposite way: it is linear, extractive and disposable.
That’s exactly why eco-innovation isn’t just about making carbon emissions drop; it’s about building
models that can actually integrate into this logic and fit within this system.
The next industrial revolution will probably not be about producing more, but being able to produce
within the limits that we have.
And this is, spot on, where VC has to evolve. It has to go from betting on scale and growth, to betting
on something less tangible, on systems that can survive.
The real challenge: changing the timeline
The hardest part of this big shift isn’t too much to identify these great companies.
The hardest part relies in the entire modification of our relation to time.
Traditional VC lives on ten-year cycles. And hypergrowth paired with short-duration funding shapes the
wrong behaviors: you hire fast, you pick suppliers for speed instead of durability, you optimise for the
cheapest path to short-term traction. There’s very little room left for building resilience.
And yet ecology (with its constraints on resources, regulation, supply chains) moves at its own pace.
Trees, materials, and ecosystems are slow. And companies that want to endure inside those limits
need that same slowness to make good decisions.
In order to make real « impact investing » work, funds will need to extend their investment horizons.
Not necessarily for smaller exits, but for later ones, built on healthier foundations. The consequence
might be a lower IRR on paper, but the upside is that resilient companies don’t collapse to zero the
moment a regulation shifts.
Contribution from Anaïs Van Wynsbergh: When Environmental Risk Becomes Financial Risk
« Because venture capital is built on maximizing the return-to-risk ration, considering the environmental context as a source of risk is not an act of activism, it is a rational strategy. It involves treating a company’s resilience as a core investment criterion.
This, however, often conflicts with the demands of hypergrowth, which encourages short-term
decisions: rushing toward the easiest market, selecting the cheapest suppliers, prioritizing speed over
structure.
Combined with short fund horizons, these pressures actively undermine a company’s ability to achieve solid resilience.
To back firms that can truly endure, we must rethink our relationship with time and accept that
long-term performance is inseparable from long-term robustness. »
Why this matters for founders
If you’re a founder today, ecology isn’t just another topic that should be added to your strategic plan
or your pitch deck. It’s the new infrastructure of innovation.
Whether you build in AI, logistics, or retail, you’ll be forced to deal with energy, materials, or
regulation. The best founders are the ones who don’t treat this as an obligation or a limitation, but as
a design principle.
And that’s what investors, like Anaïs Van Wynsbergh at Spacefounders, are really looking for: founders
who are obsessed with respect, efficiency, and durability.
A new definition of performance
Impact VC isn’t replacing traditional VC at all; it’s expanding it. It’s asking a question that’s harder:
can you scale something that makes the world stronger, not weaker?
For years, venture capitalists loved to talk about exponential growth. The next decade will reward
those who know how to make resilience scale.
A quiet revolution is modifying the flow of capital: away from what expands quickly, toward what
endures quietly.
And it’s not charity disguised as venture capital. It’s simply what smart and patient investing now
looks like.