Accelerating ideas to solve the ocean plastic crisis

What we’re looking for

The plastic value chain is broken. We need to use less plastic and recycle more. We are looking for bold ideas with the potential to scale up and drive behaviour change for millions of people across the world.

We invest in:

• Material innovation: Innovations across the entire plastics value chain, from material innovation to end-of-life
• Responsible consumption: Solutions that inspire responsible consumption by consumers and businesses, through technology
• Circular economy: Improvements in the recycling, clean-up and treatment of waste plastics, to create a more circular economy.

Our objectives come from two UN Sustainable Development Goals: UNSDG 12 Sustainable and Responsible Consumption and UNSDG 14 Life Below Water.

What we offer

We’re fostering a unique innovation ecosystem with our partners, to invest in and nurture ambitious new ideas.

We invest from pre-seed through to Series A. So we can help with anything from proof of concept through to scaling an idea to reach millions of new customers. We’re happy to invest on our own, or with other investors.

We can call on expert volunteers from our 30,000 colleagues across Europe to help you solve your toughest problems in strategy, product, marketing, operations, finance and more.

Through our Innovators in Residence programme, you can trial your products with thousands of people at our Sky campus in West London.

Once your product is ready for the mass market, we can use our voice to raise awareness amongst our 120 million viewers, to help you succeed.

Got a solution that can change the way we use and reuse plastic? Please apply for funding.

About Sky Ocean Ventures

We launched the Sky Ocean Rescue campaign in 2016, to make people aware of plastic pollution and to give everyone easy ways to take action, every day. We use the power of our voice to report from the frontline, showing millions of people across Europe the environmental destruction and loss of marine life caused by plastic in the sea. Back in 2016, not many people were aware of the problem. Now millions of people care and they’re taking action to cut back on plastic.

Sky Ocean Ventures, our impact investment fund, is searching for solutions to end the flow of plastic into the ocean. We’re investing £25 million over five years in ingenious ideas that millions of people across the world can embrace, enabling them to cut back on plastic and recycle more.

So far, we have an exciting portfolio of 16 high-potential innovators and startups. We invest at an early stage, from pre-seed through to Series A. We nurture promising new solutions with our expertise in brand-building, our network of partners and the opportunity to test new ideas with our 31,000 colleagues and ultimately, our 24 million customers.

Sky Ocean Ventures is the first non-strategic fund launched by a FTSE 30 plc to tackle an environmental issue.