Climate Impact Assessment for Early-Stage Ventures
Despite the importance of, and interest in, guiding investments to early-stage ventures with large potential climate impact, early-stage investors today lack a common lexicon with which to discuss the potential climate impacts of early-stage companies.
Furthermore, early-stage investors do not employ standard methodologies for assessing the potential climate impact of a new venture and the technologies, solutions, or business models they are looking to bring to market. Today’s climate impact assessment tools and services are designed exclusively to retrospectively assess the climate impact of a business as it exists today. There is a gap in the marketplace for tools that can inform investors about the potential for their investments to mitigate future emissions.
In an attempt to help fill this gap, Prime partnered with NYSERDA, New York State’s energy innovation agency, to develop a methodology for assessing the potential climate impact of early-stage ventures. The ultimate goal of this project is to help early-stage (Seed and Series A) investors allocate capital to new ventures that promise climate change mitigation at large scale. This report makes three contributions toward this goal. Specifically, it:
Highlights the need for actionable climate impact tools for early-stage investors, and introduces Emissions Reduction Potential as the metric required for early-stage investors to make better informed investment decisions based on the potential climate impact of a new venture
Defines a methodology for down selection – a process for narrowing from many companies to a smaller subset of potential investment targets – based on potential climate impact
Develops a methodology for estimating the Emissions Reduction Potential of a new venture.
To continue reading, please view the report here.