Marta Sjögren does not fear macroeconomic downturns. Unlike most of us, Sjögren welcomes harsh changes, embraces the fall, and shines.
Sjögren is the co-founder and co-CEO of Paebbl – a carbon mineralization firm that uses CO2 captured from the air to create a carbon-storing construction materials funded by 2050. She started the company alongside ex-Slush CEO Andreas Saari, famed Swedish tech investor Jane Walerud, and carbon mineralization expert Pol Knops in October 2021. By the time the group of founders assembled and closed their first round of funding in February 2022, Russia had just invaded Ukraine, energy prices had skyrocketed, and the rumblings of a recession had begun.
But Sjögren, no stranger to confronting economic changes, did not express any dismay.
Sjögren spent her infant years in Baghdad, Iraq and when she turned four, she moved to the native country of Yugoslavia and started school. “In the first week, we learned the alphabet. In the second week, we learned what a war was,” she jokes. Reminiscing on this time, Sjögren says that she learned from a young age not to keep all her money in one bank. “Learning the basic principles of math and the same time as those of hyperinflation, was very fun.”
After studying international relations at the London School of Economics, she graduated in 2006 and went on to do her Masters at ESCP-EAP. During her post-graduate studies, Sjögren was hired by the former shadow cabinet minister of the U.K., George Osborne, on a research project to uncover the hurdles to entrepreneurship, which introduced her to the world of venture capital.
With the scars from living in war-torn Iraq and Yugoslavia, Sjögren developed a deep interest in the causes and consequences of war, and initially thought that she would go into a career in international relations to work on conflict resolution and mediation. But the more she worked with the U.K. government on the entrepreneurship-related research project, the more she found herself attracted to the role of technology in changes happening in the world at the time. So in 2007, she joined the venture capital firm DN Capital, just in time for the global financial crisis to sink its teeth into the economy. Sjögren saw this as a blessing.
“I consider myself incredibly lucky to have started my career back in 2008. The kind of stuff you got to see as a junior, with zero experience, what entrepreneurship is and isn’t,” Sjögren says.
After a couple of years, Sjögren joined Northzone, an early-stage VC company, where she spent nine years, rising from investment manager to partner. Over this time, she oversaw the massive growth in venture capital investing, where the global investment into start ups increased 1000%, according to Dealroom.
But while some of her peers may have welcomed the seemingly never-ending liquidity party, the overwhelming pace at which money flowed into the market got under Sjögren’s skin and made her anxious about what kind of companies were getting these investments. “The more I grew in my own career, the more frustrated I got with just not really standing for anything but jumping onto trends that were happening anyhow,” Sjögren says.
So when the COVID-19 pandemic began and the boom in venture investment went into overdrive, Sjögren, at the time diagnoes with burnout, stepped back from Northzone and began researching planet positive solutions to ease her mind. This is when Jane Walerud, a long time acquaintance, convinced her not to start a climate-aligned VC, but instead go down the entrepreneurship route. Starkly committed to finding a solution to what to do with the excess carbon dioxide emitted into the air, Sjögren convinced Pol Knops to be the technical co-founder, and agreed with Andrea Saari to run the business with her as co-CEO.
When starting the company, Sjögren knew Paebbl would have to fulfill three criteria: The company had to have scientific buy-in that the technology is not greenwashing, it had to be scalable, and it needed to be profitable. Within these confines, Paebbl was born.
Paebbl, a Nordic-Dutch company, uses the natural carbon cycle to draw CO2 out of the air and bring it back to its most common reservoir: rock formation. Silicate rocks, the largest and most important class of minerals, naturally draw out carbon dioxide out of the air in a process called carbon mineralization. This cycle, called the carbonate-silicate cycle, takes centuries to occur naturally and is completely dependent on how much of the surface area of the rocks is exposed to the air.
The solution is simple – grind up the rocks, exposing more of it to the air, so more carbon can be drawn out. Paebbl’s technology, which would use ground up magnesium-iron silicate, or olivine, is modularly designed and will be possible to integrate into any carbon capture system, to absorb the carbon and use the chemically stable and insoluble carbonate/amorphous silica output to be used in number of different applications.
“Paebbl helps nature scale itself,” Sjögren says. In numbers, Paebbl’s technology cuts the carbon mineralization time down from hundreds or thousands of years to just 60 minutes.
One of Paebbl’s founding principles was to become pan-European in mindset and base itself where the relevant talent hubs are. The company’s research and development center is in Rotterdam which also houses an enormous pool of process engineering talent due to the oil and gas industry. Bringing talent and capital together, Paebbl is focusing on taking people who work in the oil and gas industry to use their skillset for good.
But if the task of creating a new company wasn’t daunting enough, the macroeconomic climate, hiked interest rates, bank collapses, on top of a looming climate catastrophe doesn’t make things easier. Sjögren is not deterred.
Sjögren sees the next few quarters as a welcome filtering process, where many companies will go out of business, but resilient business models will shine. “I think we need a huge washing out. We’re due that, ”Sjögren grimly notes. But after this wash out, Sjögren believes only companies that are planet positive will remain.
And Sjögren is able to stay so hopeful because she thinks there is a lot of money to be made. As the world is forced to fundamentally rethink almost every facet of our society and built environment away from fossil fuels, a huge opportunity is presented.
“I believe the climate crisis is the biggest economic opportunity of the past century,” Sjögren says, staying hopeful as the world prepares for the worst.
