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Climate finance. Outside the investment world, the phrase might sound like a mashup of Wall Street jargon and policy pledges. But money isn’t neutral. Every dollar tells a story about the future it fuels.
Right now, the atmosphere carries 1.7 trillion tons of excess carbon. This presents a test for business leaders and investors, asking whether or not capital can evolve enough to match planetary physics, whether or not they’ll finance regeneration, rather than the status quo.
Here are four insights through a storytelling lens for business leaders to think about climate finance in practice.
1. Match the Scale of the Problem
Too many climate investments are symbolic, meaning they’re good optics, but bad math. If your solution doesn’t move at the order of magnitude the planet requires, it’s not impact; it’s performance.
Tom Chi, founding partner of At One Ventures, makes this point with a memorable contrast. Most engineered carbon removal is like sucking a planet’s worth of emissions through a soda straw. By comparison, marine ecosystems already cycle more carbon each year than humans emit. That’s why At One has invested in Gigablue, which uses microalgae to accelerate natural carbon fluxes into deep-sea sediments. By sinking algae into deep-sea sediments, Gigablue mimics a process that has regulated Earth’s climate for millennia—only faster, more reliably, and without the massive energy footprint of industrial capture machines. The bet is that biology, scaled responsibly, can do what pipes and fans cannot: move carbon at the speed and scale of nature.
For business leaders: Check your scale story. When you pitch investors, frame your innovation against the size of the problem. If you can’t show how your solution moves the needle, you’re not telling a story that will last.
2. Practice Grounded Ambition
Discipline in climate finance is the architecture that turns ambition into bankability. Too often, first-of-a-kind projects are funded through massive equity rounds that waste funds on infrastructure that could be financed with debt. The result? Companies stall out at commercialization.
Katie Hoffman, who has spent two decades at the intersection of impact investing, climate finance and entrepreneurial ecosystems, stresses that companies cross the bridge to bankability not through hype, but through grounded ambition. Throughout her time as Founding Partner at Regeneration.VC and recently General Partner at SOSV, she looked for founders pairing bold vision with step-by-step benchmarks and realistic margins, and collaborated with investors who recalibrated expectations toward durable growth over unicorn chasing.
For entrepreneurs: Protect your equity. Use it for the “secret sauce” — the novel IP or breakthrough method that can deliver outsized returns. Finance the predictable shells like facilities, hardware and supply chains with debt, blended vehicles or partnerships. That’s how you build trust and keep capital flowing.
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3. Build Scaffolding, Not Just Products
Great technology without the right structures around it often dies in the lab. That’s why scaffolding matters. Elemental Impact blends philanthropic, public and private dollars to de-risk early builds. Their investment in Nitricity — a company producing fertilizer without fossil gas — illustrates the point. With catalytic support, Nitricity proved its first plant viable and attracted mainstream capital.
But Elemental’s model extends beyond one-off bets. Their founder and CEO, Dawn Lippert, says they pair financing with policy expertise, technical support and community engagement, reducing the friction that often kills breakthrough projects. In practice, that means startups aren’t left to navigate permitting or public trust alone because the financial and social scaffolding move in tandem.
For business leaders: Think beyond your cap table. Are you surrounding your innovation with the allies, partnerships, and policy support it needs to survive? Without it, equity rounds balloon and founders burn through cash. With it, ideas are able to stand long enough to reshape entire industries.
4. Be Brave in a Contrarian Moment
Skeptics are seeing political headwinds and fearing weak returns left and right. Valuations have cooled, even as climate risks accelerate. But periods of uncertainty are often the most opportune and strategic times to invest.
Andrew Beebe, managing director of Obvious Ventures, frames today’s political landscape as a reset, not a retreat. For Obvious, climate is central to a “world positive” lens. And with the rise of artificial intelligence, generative science is accelerating extraordinary solutions — from mapping geothermal resources underground to discovering novel methods of energy storage. What looks like volatility is actually opportunity disguised. On the supply side, this means prioritizing the use of clean energy sources and building power-efficient infrastructure. On the demand side, it involves optimizing AI systems to be more energy efficient.
For investors and founders: Treat uncertainty as a narrative reset. The companies and funds that act with courage now will be remembered as bold and pioneering, versus as a group that clung to short-term safety.
The Choice Ahead
Behind each of these lessons lives a storyteller archetype shaping how we can think about finance:
• The Physicist Storyteller, reminding us that finance must align with planetary physics.
• The Pragmatist Storyteller, showing that grounded ambition builds trust and bankability.
• The Architect Storyteller, proving that strong foundations — policy, partnerships, blended capital — keep ideas alive.
• The Courageous Storyteller, urging us to see opportunity in contrarian moments and use AI to accelerate discovery.
Together, they remind us that money is never just numbers. It’s narrative in action. And it’s time for a plot twist.
