The position
Almost every climate initiative that failed commercially had technology that worked.
What was misjudged was not feasibility. It was whether capital, regulation and buyer urgency would arrive at the same time.
Being early
Not a soft failure mode.
Being early is not a soft failure mode. The company runs out of financial or market runway while its thesis is still correct, and the position gets written down anyway.
The practice assesses for compulsion rather than for feasibility. Who has to buy this. What forces them to act. Whether that force arrives inside the horizon the capital actually has.
When the answer is that nobody is compelled yet, the position is a timing bet. Timing bets are legitimate. They should be sized as timing bets.
Both halves, at once
Bought from different providers, never reconciled.
Whether the technology genuinely works, and whether anyone is compelled to buy it, are usually assessed by different people, bought from different providers, delivered at different times, and never reconciled against each other.
The decision requires both held simultaneously by people who have been on both sides of it.
Where we work
Six sectors, one screen.
Industrial decarbonization and resource efficiency
Waste-to-value, materials, process heat, emissions reduction with a cost case that survives without subsidy.
Water
Infrastructure, treatment, remediation, allocation. The least substitutable and most under-priced risk in the stack.
Food and agriculture
Regenerative practice, soil and water integrity, small-hold economics, supply chain continuity.
Energy generation, storage and grid
Including the load growth the compute build-out has created.
Real assets and the built environment
Retrofit, urban systems, land use.
The software layer
AI, data infrastructure and the applications that make the rest of it measurable.
How we engage
Three counterparties.
- With capital
- Technical and commercial diligence, thesis formation, portfolio support, and an executive bench.
- With companies
- Through the fund that backed them, or directly where the mandate warrants it.
- With developers
- Project-level assessment and first-of-a-kind capital structuring, where climate technology most often stalls.
The screen
A duration argument, not a values statement.
We work on initiatives and with people we want our names attached to in twenty years. In practice that rules out two situations: teams for whom financial return is the primary variable in the model, and businesses that treat environmental and human cost as an externality for somebody else to pay for later.
That is a duration argument, not a values statement. Costs carried off the books early are costs repriced later, and the repricing runs on a longer clock than a fund life. Which is precisely why most people misprice it.
On the technology we use
Machine-assisted assessment. Human judgment.
We use AI throughout the analytical work: market and patent landscapes, financial modeling, document review, pattern analysis across portfolios and cohorts. We build it too — the platform behind our cohort programs is our own.
None of it makes the call. The assessment is machine-assisted. The judgment is not, and the relationship never will be.
Values
Four, and the screen is one of them.
- Impact-driven
- Measured by what gets built and what it displaces, not by activity.
- Purpose-led
- The screen above is the practice, not a page on the website.
- Global
- The bench is international, and the deal flow follows the capital. Europe has been allocating a materially larger share of its venture capital into climate than the United States.
- Direct
- We will tell you when we think you are wrong, and we will tell you when we are.
Stay in touch
We will only send what you asked for.