Charlotte D'Souza, PEI Group, and Faise Butt, Pi Labs
Charlotte D'Souza, PEI Group, and Faise Butt, Pi Labs

The real estate decarbonisation space is attracting a wave of talent to start-ups, according to Faisal Butt, the founder and managing partner of London-based VC firm Pi Labs.

Pi Labs backs property technology start-ups and has been operating since 2015. Butt visited PEI Group’s London headquarters to discuss the firm’s journey from a $1 million fund one – raised from individuals with the help of crowdfunding platform Seedrs – to a $90 million Fund III raised in 2022.

Butt estimated that around 70 percent of Pi’s portfolio companies tackle some form of sustainability challenge. “We’ve always invested in decarbonisation-related start-ups, but the trend has grown significantly,” he said.

Butt said over the last 12-18 months he had seen an increase in “the quality of founders that are entering the decarbonisation space – founders that would otherwise have been at, say, a McKinsey – [and] have decided to take a different path and go and found a start-up that is tackling a sustainability issue”.

“The calibre of founders coming into this space has dramatically improved and the volume of start-ups in this space has dramatically increased,” he continued. “So I see the trend in terms of our portfolio moving more and more in that direction.”

Examples of Pi Labs portfolio companies include Responsibly, a Danish start-up that uses AI to access supply chain ESG data, and Omnevue, a UK-based ESG data reporting tool for small and medium-sized enterprises.