Counteract Partners

Counteract is not a water fund, and it would be the first to say so. The London firm backs one thing, carbon removal, and it was started in 2021 by Andrew Shebbeare, Andy Bonsall, and Matt Isaacs, three partners who had spent two decades building the media agency Essence before selling it and turning the same company-building instinct on the climate. Water shows up here not as a theme but as a consequence of where carbon removal actually happens.

Counteract's portfolio makes that water line hard to miss. Aquatic Labs measures alkalinity in the open ocean so marine carbon removal can be verified, CREW Carbon bolts reactors onto municipal wastewater plants to lock carbon into treated effluent, and Magrathea runs an electrolytic process on seawater and brine. Three of its companies sit exactly where the carbon cycle runs through water, which is why a carbon fund turns up in a water directory.

Counteract writes seed-stage cheques, and all three of its water-adjacent bets are early. The fund is scientist-and-engineer-first, the kind of backer that funds a Yale spinout or an ocean-chemistry team years before the revenue, on the wager that durable, measurable carbon removal becomes a market the way renewables did. The thesis is gigaton-scale removal by 2050, paid for one unglamorous seed round at a time.

Counteract is the case I point to when people assume water technology always announces itself as water. When a carbon-removal fund keeps writing cheques into oceans, brine, and sewage works, it usually means those systems are about to do double duty, treating water and storing carbon in the same pass. That is the kind of fund I want on the map before it is obvious.