Helping promising climate solutions cross ‘the second Valley of Death’

By Karine Khatcherian and Sarah Kearney

To meet the urgency of climate change, we need to develop and implement nascent and transformational solutions developed by startup companies that don’t have the budgets or balance sheets to deploy capital-intensive infrastructure. 

Scaling early-stage solutions to widespread commercial adoption has historically taken decades (e.g., solar photovoltaics), but our planet no longer has time to wait. We need to find our way to decarbonization faster than ever, and with solutions at all stages of technological development.

Prime Coalition was founded in 2014 with the mission of bringing catalytic capital to climate solutions. We started by focusing on the acute capital gap founders face during early-stage company formation. We started there not only because of the severity of the gap in 2014, when the tide was all the way out on traditional venture capital to climate tech, but also because we could address it with a small but mighty (and now rapidly growing) community of philanthropic partners.

Eight years later, the world has changed. Venture capital has swung back around toward climate innovation and reshaped our view of the capital gaps facing early-stage innovators. In our own portfolio and in those of many other climate venture investors, there are now many hatchling companies that could dramatically reduce emissions if they can achieve commercial scale.

But financing transformative infrastructure is as much of a challenge today as it was eight years ago. Venture capital can’t, and shouldn’t, cover those capital needs alone. Meanwhile, traditional project finance tends to focus on widely adopted projects. 

In many climate innovation stories, the commercialization of promising solutions has ultimately gone unfunded in a second “valley of death.”

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