Partnering with Enduring Planet for Financial Innovation

Climate tech companies are often pushed toward expensive equity to bridge the gap between a government grant award and the cash needed to actually get a project moving. For founders building the physical infrastructure of the energy transition, that's not always the right tool, and for many, it isn't even an option. In this episode of The Green Blueprint, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Dimitry Gershenson, CEO and co-founder of Enduring Planet, about how his company underwrites government grants and provides working capital to climate startups, solving a financing friction point that often gets overlooked. They dig into the "brutal reality" of fundraising in a volatile macro environment, and why, contrary to popular belief, Gershenson argues venture debt isn't always the wrong call either. Listen now: https://lnkd.in/gUaxdvWH

If you're in climate space this conversation is worth your time. In an episode of The Green Blueprint, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Enduring Planet's Dimitry Gershenson about the forces shaping climate debt, the reality of fundraising in a volatile macro environment, and why the orgs approach to working capital is more critical than ever for the next generation of climate founders. Give it a listen: https://lnkd.in/eNFXrPKZ #climate #impactinvesting #capital #startups

Alicia Castillo Holley — Rebuilding Venture Capital for Climate A heartfelt thank you to Alicia Castillo Holley, PhD for this month’s CC Horizon contribution - genuinely one of the most inspiring pieces we’ve had the privilege of publishing. It leads with values, and that’s exactly why it speaks volumes. A standard VC fund runs ten years, charges 2% a year in fees, and needs an exit within seven or eight. Climate infrastructure does not move on that timeline. Alicia says the quiet part out loud: we are trying to fund the planet’s hardest problems with an instrument built for speed, and then acting surprised when so much capital goes in and so little climate infrastructure comes out. She arrived at this as a scientist first, in a discipline where you retest until the evidence holds however long that takes, and then found an industry that funds a large share of its own portfolio expecting it to fail. The numbers she cites are hard to sit with: 65% of VCs don’t return the capital committed after 13 years, and 20% of capital is paid out in fees with no clear incentive attached to a return. Layer SPVs on top and up to thirty cents of every dollar can leak into the wrapper before a founder ever sees it. Her answer isn’t a call for more pledges or panels restating a crisis everyone already understands - it’s a structural one, and it’s rooted in something simple: investors rolling up their sleeves and co-creating the formula with founders, rather than just picking winners from a distance. Funding the off-taker who de-risks the build, the manufacturing partner who already has capacity, the regulatory path someone has already walked. Her point: founders who understand what they actually need beyond a cheque raise less, dilute less, and survive longer. It’s a genuinely uncomfortable argument for an industry to hear from inside its own ranks - and that honesty, that willingness to say it plainly, is exactly what makes it worth reading in full. Thank you, Alicia, for bringing this thinking - and this integrity - to CC Horizon. If you’re an LP, GP or climate founder trying to make sense of why the capital isn’t landing where it needs to, follow Alicia - she’s one of the sharper, more values-led voices in climate finance right now. Read the full piece in this edition of CC Horizon: link bellow #ClimateFinance #VentureCapital #ImpactInvesting #ClimateTech #CCHorizon

Alicia Castillo Holley — Rebuilding Venture Capital for Climate A heartfelt thank you to Alicia Castillo Holley, PhD for this month’s CC Horizon contribution - genuinely one of the most inspiring pieces we’ve had the privilege of publishing. It leads with values, and that’s exactly why it speaks volumes. A standard VC fund runs ten years, charges 2% a year in fees, and needs an exit within seven or eight. Climate infrastructure does not move on that timeline. Alicia says the quiet part out loud: we are trying to fund the planet’s hardest problems with an instrument built for speed, and then acting surprised when so much capital goes in and so little climate infrastructure comes out. She arrived at this as a scientist first, in a discipline where you retest until the evidence holds however long that takes, and then found an industry that funds a large share of its own portfolio expecting it to fail. The numbers she cites are hard to sit with: 65% of VCs don’t return the capital committed after 13 years, and 20% of capital is paid out in fees with no clear incentive attached to a return. Layer SPVs on top and up to thirty cents of every dollar can leak into the wrapper before a founder ever sees it. Her answer isn’t a call for more pledges or panels restating a crisis everyone already understands - it’s a structural one, and it’s rooted in something simple: investors rolling up their sleeves and co-creating the formula with founders, rather than just picking winners from a distance. Funding the off-taker who de-risks the build, the manufacturing partner who already has capacity, the regulatory path someone has already walked. Her point: founders who understand what they actually need beyond a cheque raise less, dilute less, and survive longer. It’s a genuinely uncomfortable argument for an industry to hear from inside its own ranks - and that honesty, that willingness to say it plainly, is exactly what makes it worth reading in full. Thank you, Alicia, for bringing this thinking - and this integrity - to CC Horizon. If you’re an LP, GP or climate founder trying to make sense of why the capital isn’t landing where it needs to, follow Alicia - she’s one of the sharper, more values-led voices in climate finance right now. Read the full piece in this edition of CC Horizon: link bellow #ClimateFinance #VentureCapital #ImpactInvesting #ClimateTech #CCHorizon

Proud to be part of the team at NxLite, where we're taking on energy efficiency with windows that cut energy use and weight at the same time.   There's a lot to be excited about right now: a closed Series A, a new $3.5M facility from RSF | Regenerative Social Finance, and real momentum heading into the second half of the year.   Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/gApdaNaP

✅ NxLite's Series A goal was $10M. We closed at $13.1M. ⚡ $3.5M debt facility from RSF | Regenerative Social Finance 👋 VoLo Earth Ventures partner Erin Sawyer joins our board. Read our latest update here: https://lnkd.in/eTvJkQB6

Growth needs more than capital. It needs the right capital. 🚀 Across sectors, private markets are becoming a more central part of how companies, projects, and new growth opportunities are financed. What began as a structural shift after the Global Financial Crisis has evolved into a broader private capital era — shaped by the rise of non-bank capital, deeper institutional participation, and the growing need for more flexible financing solutions. The question is no longer only about how much capital a company needs. It is about what form of capital is right for that moment. Equity, credit, structured capital, infrastructure-linked financing, and hybrid solutions each have a role to play — depending on the business model, growth stage, and opportunity ahead. For founders, this means building a capital stack that supports ambition while preserving ownership, flexibility, and resilience. For investors, it means partnering with institutions that bring together sector understanding, underwriting discipline, governance, and long-term alignment. At Stride Ventures, we have seen this shift closely. What began with venture debt has evolved with the needs of founders and scaled businesses — into growth credit, larger structured opportunities, capital for circularity and industrial transition, and support for companies through moments of growth, change, or difficulty. The future of private capital will not be one-size-fits-all. It will be more specialised. - More structured. - More disciplined. - And more aligned to the way companies actually grow. Something new is coming soon. ✨ #StrideVentures #PrivateMarkets #PrivateCapital #PrivateCredit #VentureDebt #GrowthCredit #FounderFirst #AlternativeCapital #EntrepreneurialAmbition

In his latest piece for CapEQ, Lee Robbins maps the funding landscape founders actually face - from pre-seed through Series A, B and beyond, into private equity, corporate VC, mezzanine, and venture debt. Lee walks through what each type of capital is built for, where it tends to work, and the trade-offs founders rarely have spelled out clearly before they're sitting across the table from an investor: dilution, control, reporting demands, exit pressure, repayment structures. Some founders we meet don't lack ambition for their next stage of growth - they lack a clear framework for matching the right capital to the right moment. Series A money behaves nothing like mezzanine. Venture debt protects equity but disciplines cash flow. Impact capital opens doors that generalist VC doesn't. Worth a read if you're weighing your options for the next 12–24 months. Link in the first comment below.

Refreshing to see an investor spell this out so plainly. Momentum Global Ventures' equity-first, debt-averse approach to deeptech is exactly the discipline this sector needs - the ASML vs Northvolt contrast makes the case better than any spreadsheet could. A genuinely healthy approach, and a real breath of fresh air in an investment landscape too often chasing leverage.

100% deeptech. 0% debt. We often invest equity in deeptech companies without external debt. Enough people have asked why, so we’ll spell it out. Deeptech can build category leaders and sometimes generate the kind of returns investors dream about, but it also comes with long development cycles. There are real technical risks and commercialization timelines that can sometimes make a mockery of what was in our spreadsheet. And that doesn’t sit well next to a fixed repayment schedule. Take ASML. It’s Europe’s most valuable technology company, valued at around €600 billion, though it holds more cash than debt... It funds its own growth without using leverage to do it. Being the only company on earth (for now!) that can build EUV machines obviously helps, but balance-sheet discipline is a big part of why it could keep investing through downturns while others pulled back. Northvolt is the counter-example. On paper, it was Europe’s great battery hope, and it borrowed heavily to build gigafactories at speed. When production failed to ramp as planned and key customer commitments disappeared, there was no slack left. It filed for Chapter 11 a year after raising billions in debt financing and later went bankrupt. The lesson we keep landing on is that in DeepTech, a strong balance sheet usually beats maximum leverage. It’s less thrilling on a pitch deck and a lot more useful at 2 a.m. when a key customer in your venture cancels. We run our own shop the same way. Our DeepTech ventures, across Europe and the US, are financed with equity, topped up with grants where available and, for the more mature companies, real operating cash flow. External debt initially plays no part, soft-loans are only introduced combined with long-term income streams. That’s why we supported our portfolio company Perpetual Next with a 95% reduction of its debt, bringing its development portfolio to a debt-free position as it prepares to scale up their biomethanol blueprint globally. And we are also reducing our own overall debt ratio as we re-allocate more capital into deeptech, and we’ll keep doing so. The question we keep asking ourselves: how much debt can a DeepTech company carry before the financing stops being an accelerator and becomes the thing that potentially finishes it? Find a link to Momentum's DeepTech Investment Criteria 1-pager in the comment section. #DeepTech