“Our investors reach their investment goals and their climate goals at the same time.”

Ibrahim AlHusseini emerged from the Red Sea in a daze.

He was on vacation in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a seaside city he’d visited many times as a boy growing up in the Middle East. But this visit, something was different. The coral reef where he loved to scuba dive because it was teeming with colorful fish was now gray, dull, and polluted. The coral was dead. Trash had replaced the fish.

Stunned, AlHusseini, a successful entrepreneur who had already started several multimillion-dollar businesses, remembers asking himself: “What is the point of continuing to accumulate wealth and grow economies if we are killing the only planet that can sustain us?”

That thought changed his life.

“I realized that how we live is completely unsustainable,” he says. It dawned on him that all the wealth he’d accumulated would be for nothing without a stable climate and habitable planet. So AlHusseini went home to California, and founded FullCycle Climate Partners, a growth equity fund that invests in technologies that show promise mitigating the effects of the climate crisis.

What does this look like in practice? One company FullCycle invested in, Synova, found a new way to turn trash into clean energy. Another, Inpipe Energy, uses extra water pressure to generate hydro-electric power.

“I’m only interested in investing in things that are going to change the underpinnings of the systems we rely on,” he says. “Our systems for trash and electricity, for example, were designed without the thought that we could be powerful enough to destabilize our planet.”

FullCycle supports technologies that will help slow down the warming cycle we’re living in now. AlHusseini believes in bolstering mature technology and companies that are ready for a global roll-out, because, he says “that’s the race we’re in.” “We need to, as quickly as possible, replace the underpinnings of society’s systems with a new, carbon-neutral model.”

AlHusseini’s investment style is gaining popularity among other venture capitalists who not only want to invest for their own gain, but also for the gain of the planet.

“Our investors reach their investment goals and their climate goals at the same time,” he says. “We need more people to start investing as stewards of our one and only home.”

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