We’re proud to share the successful exit of our portfolio company Swiftly, following a strategic investment led by Cove Hill Partners in late May. This new chapter will enable Swiftly to accelerate its product roadmap and further strengthen its position as a leader in helping transit agencies and operators in the US and around the world deliver better public transportation services. 

The company will continue to be led by Co-founder and CEO Jonny Simkin, along with the current leadership team. 

We first partnered with Swiftly in April 2019, co-leading their $10 million Series A round. At that time, the company served just 50 agencies with a simple tool focused on transit time data and operational insights. The vision, however, was clear: build the operating system for public transportation. 

Six years later, following a Series B round in late 2020 joined by JMI Equity, as well as the acquisition of Hopthru in mid-2024, Swiftly has grown into a global data platform. Today it serves over 190 transit agencies across 12 countries, including more than half of the 25 largest US agencies by bus ridership. Its platform supports over 11,000 transit professionals in improving service for 2.4 billion passenger journeys each year. 

While the current success is evident, it has been no less than a rollercoaster. During the COVID period, with public transport usage collapsing, it wasn’t clear how or when recovery would come. Later, as normal life and mobility needs resumed, the broader tech market was in turmoil. It is a credit to Jonny and the rest of the team that, through difficult decisions made in late 2022 and early 2023, Swiftly emerged stronger, leaner, and on a clear path to profitable growth. 

We have been fortunate to be part of this journey. We supported Jonny and European Director Joaquin in successfully expanding into Europe, winning major contracts in cities like Paris and Madrid. On a more personal note, I have truly enjoyed working with Jonny, first as a board member and later through regular catch-ups, all that despite a nine-hour time difference. 

Now, after six years of partnership, Aster is fully exiting its position in Swiftly. We are proud of the progress made and thankful to have played a role in the company success. 

To Jonny and the entire team: thank you and congratulations. We wish you continued success in this exciting next phase.

📸 Aster team

By optimizing the participation of distributed and front-of-the-meter (FTM) energy assets, such as commercial and industrial (C&I) energy storage and demand response systems, as well as grid-scale storage, GridBeyond has paved the way for a more resilient and sustainable energy future.

Huge congrats to Michael Phelan and Richard O’ Loughlin. We can’t wait to witness your future successes!

From left to right: Marie Capitaine (TotalEnergies), Benoit Savattier (TotalEnergies), Antoine Delafargue (TotalEnergies), Jean-Marc Bally (Aster), Chama El Shamy (Aster)

Tailor-made support to meet the seller’s expectations

Following a competitive process, Aster was chosen by TotalEnergies to take over most of the assets of its CVC arm, TotalEnergies Ventures. The portfolio is made up of minority stakes in about twenty companies, mainly located in Europe and the United States. This deal allows Aster to notably demonstrate once again its international experience, its expertise in technologies and innovative solutions contributing to carbon neutrality, and its capacity to support start-ups in their respective growth projects.

Aster is also pleased to welcome North Sky Capital as an investor in the specially created FPCI fund (Fonds Professionnel de Capital Investissement), and endowed with a significant share to support the portfolio companies in their future financing needs. For its part, TotalEnergies will maintain a close relationship with Aster and will be interested in the future performance of the FPCI. Jean-Marc Bally, Managing Partner of Aster “this unprecedented operation testifies confidence in the Aster model and in our ability to develop solutions fully tailored to the needs of our subscribers”.

This announcement is a concrete step towards the building of a broader approach to support players interested in transferring and monitoring their venture capital investments.

The ambition to develop a secondary activity

With this solid first experience, Aster positions itself as a new entrant in the private equity secondary market. Aster can offer several liquidity and/or support solutions tailored to a smooth transition, and above all aligned with the evolving needs of the strategy and positioning of venture capital players, including in particular industrial corporates looking for liquidity or a new balance for their CVC activities and investment portfolios.

According to Fabio Lancellotti, Partner at Aster, “the economic context, combined with the cyclicality of venture capital investments, create opportunities to take over minority positions held directly by players wishing to reposition themselves on their core activities. We want to energize the secondary market with a constructive, tailor-made approach adapted to the strategic changes of large corporates, particularly industrial ones”.

Beyond the secondary buyout of assets, Aster is able to articulate multiple and varied approaches to come to a proposal adapted to each context, and to each team. Whether it is an on-the-spot audit, the takeover of management -directly or via a service provider role-, or even the sale, the options are numerous to best serve the interests of players wishing to reorient or stop their initiatives in the venture capital area.

We are proud to announce today our successful exit from Betterway, a fast-growing provider of employee mobility solutions. The exit took place as part of a new funding round of €4m with Edenred, a global leader in employee benefits.

We are extremely pleased with the growth and success that Betterway has achieved since our initial investment. We have been proud to support the company’s innovative approach to employee mobility solutions, and we are confident that their partnership with Edenred will continue to accelerate their growth and success.

Betterway’s platform enables businesses to provide their employees with seamless access to various forms of transportation, including public transit, ride-sharing, and more. This allows employees to have greater flexibility and autonomy when it comes to their daily commutes, while also helping businesses reduce their carbon footprint and transportation costs.

We believe that Betterway’s innovative approach to employee mobility is the future of the transportation industry, and we are proud to have been a part of their journey. We wish them success as they continue to revolutionize the way we think about transportation in the workplace.

At Aster Capital, we are committed to investing in innovative and disruptive companies that have the potential to transform Mobility. We will continue to seek out opportunities to invest in the most promising startups and entrepreneurs around the world, and we look forward to sharing more exciting news in the future.

We are thrilled to announce today our reinvestment in Hadean, a distributed computing startup that is revolutionizing the way the metaverse is powered.

Hadean has just closed its latest funding round, raising an impressive $30 million in capital. High profile investors including Epic Games, Tencent, Alumni Ventures alongside existing investors Molten, Entrepreneur First, ourselves and other strategic partners participated to the round.

We are incredibly excited to continue supporting Hadean and the company’s mission of building the infrastructure that will enable the next generation of online experiences. Hadean’s unique approach to distributed computing and their focus on scalability, efficiency, and flexibility make them the perfect partner for some of the markets that we serve as we look to invest in companies that are driving innovation and disrupting traditional industries.

With this new funding, Hadean is well-positioned to continue pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the metaverse. The company’s technology has the potential to unlock new levels of creativity and interactivity in online experiences, enabling users to participate in truly immersive virtual worlds.

At Aster Capital, we are proud to be a part of Hadean’s journey and look forward to seeing the company continue to grow and succeed in the years to come. We believe that Hadean has the potential to transform the way we think about computing, and we are excited to support them as they build the infrastructure of the future.

We are excited to announce today the closing of a $36m growth equity round led by ABC Impact on our portfolio company Iceotope, a deeptech company focusing on immersion liquid cooling. Other notable new investors are nVent, the US headquarters Corporate, large UK impact funds Northern Grid Stone, SDCL Energy Efficiency Income Trust, Pavilion Capital and British Patient Capital. Existing investors also participated to the round.

It has been quite a journey since the first days of our initial investment back in 2014: investing in a handful people shop proved to be challenging but we have realised over time that the initial investment thesis holds quite a bit. Increasingly the datacenter market – the initial focus for the company – represents a growing portion of the electricity consumed around the world. As the impact of CO2 emissions worsen with major meteorological disruptions across the globe, the major cloud, colo and IT players are confronted to stricter regulations to reduce both water and energy consumption to run increasingly powerful compute workloads. The arrival of crypto/blockchain, the pervasiveness of AI applications – metaverse and auto-generative conversational bots such as Chat GPT – are making the situation increasingly worse. That’s where Iceotope is playing a crucial rule, by enabling datacenter investors and operators to reduce the power efficiency of those machines (Power Usage Effectiveness is the golden standard in this industry) down to world record 1.03[1] while new born datacenters are typically 20-40% more energy eater (and legacy installations are 100-150% more).

During more than 5 years of research backed by leading research universities such as Leeds and Sheffield (UK), Iceotope has developed a leading immersion cooling solution that is protected by about a hundred patents, and it is now commercialized with some of the largest players of the cloud and datacenter industry.

According to Gartner, Immersion cooling systems can deliver better cooling efficiency than the widely used passive and forced-air cooling systems. It is also more effective than the traditional liquid cooling solutions that route liquid coolant to specific high-power components within the server. This enables high-performance compute systems to be operated in very dense configurations or environments where air-based cooling may not be viable or effective, such as edge infrastructure deployments in a non-data center environment.

With the new money raised and the support of a global set of investors who share the same commitment to enable a digital revolution that doesn’t cost the earth, Iceotope will double down on its US and Asia presence while pushing to keep ahead of competitors through continue recruitment of talent engineers both in the UK and in the US.

At Aster, we are proud to have been one of the earliest backers of Iceotope and look forward to seeing the company continue to grow and succeed in the years to come. We believe that the Company has the potential to transform the way we design and operate cooling in computing, and we are excited to support them as they can massively contribute to a digital revolution that respects our planet.

[1] Meaning for each kWh of compute power, 1.03 kWh are effectively absorbed by the grid