Structure 01

Charitable capital as low-cost, unsecured debt

Early-stage climate companies often have something valuable that conventional lenders can't easily read: a working model without the operating history to prove it. Traditional debt requires collateral or credit history — neither of which a new company has in quantity. The result is that early financing is either equity, which is expensive and dilutive, or unavailable.

Charitable capital — from individual donor-advised funds, community foundations, or private philanthropies — can move where banks can't, absorbing risks that commercial lenders aren't positioned to price.

The mechanic is straightforward: the philanthropic piece isn't a grant, it's a loan — subordinated, patient, and priced as though the company has an established credit history. It doesn't disappear into the company; it recycles. Done right, it makes the next, larger capital cheaper and returns the charitable capital to be deployed again.

Structure 02

Bridge financing for unit costs that decrease with scale

Some businesses have unit economics that work — but only at scale. The cost of the first is high. The tenth is lower. The hundredth is lower still. But a cost curve heading in the right direction does not necessarily mean a lender today sees a viable business.

The structural challenge is bridging the company from current unit costs to the point where conventional financing makes sense. That bridge has to be sized and priced to reflect the trajectory — not just today's snapshot — and structured so that as costs fall, it can transition to something permanent.

This kind of financing is most defensible when the cost reduction is driven by volume, not by technical breakthroughs that haven't happened yet. Predictable learning curves are financeable. Hoped-for ones aren't. The job of the bridge is to make it possible to prove which kind you have.

Structure 03

Asset-backed financing

When a climate company owns or controls an asset that generates predictable cash flows — a piece of equipment, a service contract, a long-term lease — that asset can be the financing. Capital isn't betting on the company's credit; they're underwriting the asset's performance. That's a different conversation.

Asset-backed structures unlock cheaper capital because the collateral is specific and recoverable. And the right structure is also tax-efficient for investors, with return dynamics completely independent of company performance.

Climate is a physical industry, and a lot of companies sit on assets that could support this kind of financing but haven't organized them in a way that makes it legible — documented, contracted, and structured. The work is often less about finding capital than about making what you already have readable to the capital that's already looking for it.