BlackRock has raised $4.5bn (£3.97bn) to create an investment fund focusing on climate infrastructure firms, following critiques against the asset manager’s fossil fuel investments.
The new Global Infrastructure Fund IV will look to invest in companies across the low-carbon power, energy, transport and logistics, regulated utilities, and digital infrastructure sectors.
The firm has previously been involved in investments in clean tech companies such as Source Global, Clean Capital, and FreeWire Technologies.
BlackRock received some backlash earlier this month after it told a UK parliamentary committee it had no intention of stopping its investments in coal, oil, and gas, stating it was not its place to “engineer a specific decarbonisation outcome in the real economy”.
Despite being a signatory of the United Nations Net Zero Asset Managers alliance, Blackrock told the committee that it would not support a decarbonisation scenario that would require “no new investments” for “coal, oil, and gas”.
Based in New York, BlackRock is among the world’s largest asset managers, with around $8.5tn in total assets globally, as of Q2 2022.
It has managed investments into a number of high-profile UK-founded startups, including Wagestream, which raised £135m in a Series C round in April, SumUp, which raised £507m in June, and Snyk, which despite a number of hefty investments, recently announced it is cutting 200 jobs.