VantagePoint Capital Partners
VantagePoint Capital Partners is a San Bruno, California cleantech venture firm founded in 1996, an early Tesla backer. In water, Leviathan tracks a single bet: Ostara, which recovers phosphorus from wastewater and resells it as crop fertilizer. As of 2026 that is 1 water company across 2 rounds.
Compiled by Antoine Walter, (don't) Waste Water, from official filings and direct intelligence in Leviathan.
The take
VantagePoint Capital Partners spent the 2000s as a heavyweight cleantech investor, and the clearest proof is on four wheels: it was one of Tesla's largest venture backers before the carmaker's 2010 IPO. Co-founders Alan Salzman and Jim Marver started the firm in 1996 funding internet names like MySpace and the Flip camera, then pivoted hard into clean energy, eventually committing more than a billion dollars of its roughly $4.5 billion in capital to the sector.
VantagePoint's one water play that Leviathan tracks is Ostara, a nutrient-recovery company. Ostara's reactors pull phosphorus and nitrogen out of municipal wastewater, the same nutrients that otherwise feed toxic algae blooms downstream, and crystallize them into a slow-release fertilizer it sells as Crystal Green. It is a tidy circular-economy idea: clean the water, and harvest a product from what you strip out of it. VantagePoint backed Ostara across two rounds alongside the agricultural investors Wheatsheaf Group and Taurus, its last tracked cheque landing in 2019.
VantagePoint is not a water specialist, and the page says so plainly: Leviathan rates it a One-Off, 1 water company across 2 rounds, with no new water activity recorded since 2019. What it represents is a particular era, when generalist cleantech funds wrote the first real cheques into water-adjacent technology and helped prove the category was investable at all. If you are mapping who seeded resource recovery before it was fashionable, VantagePoint and its Ostara bet belong on the list.
Water Commitment Score
Compiled from official filings, third-party records, and direct intelligence from investors and founders, in Leviathan · recomputed monthly · as of Jun 2026.
Portfolio · 1 water companies
Invests alongside
Highlighted = profiled on (don't) Waste Water.
Frequently asked
- What does VantagePoint Capital Partners invest in?
- VantagePoint Capital Partners is a generalist venture firm spanning cleantech, healthcare and information technology, founded in 1996. Its best-known bets are in clean energy, including Tesla and BrightSource Energy. In water specifically, Leviathan records a single investment: Ostara, a wastewater nutrient-recovery company.
- Who runs VantagePoint Capital Partners?
- VantagePoint Capital Partners was co-founded in 1996 by Alan Salzman, its CEO, and Jim Marver. Salzman led the firm's pivot from internet investing into clean energy and sat on the board of Tesla, where VantagePoint was one of the largest venture backers before the company went public in 2010.
- Where is VantagePoint Capital Partners based?
- VantagePoint Capital Partners is based in San Bruno, California, just south of San Francisco, and has also invested internationally. The firm has raised roughly $4.5 billion in committed capital across its funds since 1996, with more than one billion dollars of that directed at clean-energy technology.
- What water companies has VantagePoint Capital Partners backed?
- In water, Leviathan tracks a single VantagePoint Capital Partners holding: Ostara, which recovers phosphorus and nitrogen from wastewater and turns them into Crystal Green fertilizer. VantagePoint invested across two rounds alongside Wheatsheaf Group and Taurus, with its last tracked deal landing in 2019.
- Is VantagePoint Capital Partners the same as Vantage Point Capital Partners?
- No. VantagePoint Capital Partners, at vpcp.com, is the San Bruno cleantech firm co-founded by Alan Salzman in 1996 and known for backing Tesla. Vantage Point Capital Partners is a separate, similarly named investor. They are unrelated beyond a near-identical name, a frequent source of confusion.