Constructing a comprehensive platform for climate founders

Understanding the unique set of challenges that climate founders face has forced us to pose a question—what exactly is it that climate founders need to succeed? In this, acknowledging that climate entrepreneurs come in many forms, building many different types of solutions and business, requiring different support at different stages. 

As with each of our programmes, support is never one size fits all—it’s bespoke, adaptable to the needs of each founder. We've identified what we believe to be the core value drivers in climate tech and designed unique programmes to deliver maximum impact to climate ventures.

Hands-on support for commercialisation. This remains one of our standout areas of support across all businesses: helping turn innovative ideas into profitable, venture-backable businesses. With over 300 businesses in our portfolio, over 80 of which we’ve built from scratch, we’re constantly testing, reviewing, and optimising our understanding of taking a business from 0 to 1. With climate founders, this comes with a heightened focus, as we apply our commercial know-how to help founders take world-changing IP into prototypes that we help them translate into their first enterprise customers. As part of Planet Positive Lab, our cohort of science-backed entrepreneurs received one-on-one support across product, design, and growth to help them understand the path to launching their technologies out of the lab and into the real world.  

Access to a fundraising ecosystem. Given the complexity around fundraising with hardware or hybrid business models, we believe there should be a huge emphasis on providing climate founders not just with fundraising skills and competencies, but also facilitating warm introductions to our network of top tier VCs, angels, and so on. Our Investor Showcase, open to any startup in our portfolio, runs founders through several weeks of pitch training (with support on how they are telling their story in a concise manner) before placing them in front of a room of investors, many of whom have a specific climate agenda.

Access to government partnerships. For climate tech to have a real impact, entrepreneurs need the twin benefits of private capital and public sector will. Governments are a critical partner for being able to prove climate technologies, whether that’s through overcoming regulatory barriers or getting permitting to test their technology in real world environments. Once ready to scale, these government partners are instrumental for implementation and roll out.

Real world testing grounds. To scale innovation out of the laboratory, entrepreneurs need to be able prove effectiveness in a real world setting. This is easier said than done: for many climate technologies, it can be highly complex to gain access to environments to test their product. We’ve found this is particularly true for ocean-based startups—hence why with Blue Action Accelerator we’ve built a network of marine ecosystem partners in the Bahamas, as well as Monaco, Florida, and several other locations. 

Leverage of corporate network. Access to the enviable scale and reach of global corporations is central to the ‘unfair advantage’ we offer across all of our programmes. For climate tech, this may be instrumental in helping founders launch pilot projects to prove the effectiveness and scalability of their technology, as well as start to generate revenue. Moreover, as the emphasis moves from offsetting to insetting, startups and corporates will work closely together to help clean up processes across supply chains. Take Oxwash, a sustainable laundry company, who secured a partnership with CPG multinational Reckitt, partnering with their Vanish brand to tackle ‘unacceptable clothing waste’.

Analysis and reporting of climate impact. The highly data-driven process of measuring, analysing, and reporting environmental impact requires considerable expertise, often not something that an early stage climate startup will have access to. We take a stage appropriate approach to measurement aligned to best practice principles. Impact measurement should not be a burden: rather it should align with business metrics, hold the venture accountable, and help move the venture forward. With very early stage ventures in our Mission Studio, we ensure there is a clear articulation of the impact goal and how it will meaningfully contribute towards that goal. As the venture matures we introduce baselines, impact KPIs, and tracking that can inform ongoing reporting. For more, see Byway’s Impact Report.

Access to non-dilutive funding. There’s a huge range of grants and prizes available to highly innovative companies, especially those operating in the climate and sustainability space. G-Force has a dedicated grants support team, not just to identify grants but to support startups with accessing this kind of non-dilutive funding. (Metalchemy, a nanotechnology business in the G-Force portfolio, were supported in successfully applying for a £330k grant from Innovate UK).

Brand positioning and storytelling. One of the biggest challenges climate founders face is around persuasion—whether that’s persuading consumers to change their behaviour, or to persuade investors that they’re not trading off profit for purpose. We’ve identified a strong demand for support around how climate founders are telling their story, to help them clearly communicate how their product will improve on incumbents and deliver scalable impact.  Particularly around deeptech or hardware solutions, this means helping founders take complex technologies and translating them into cohesive and marketable brands.