With the catchy moniker Deep Decarbonization Frontier Fund, Energy Impact Partners has captured $200 million of commitments for its $350 million fund, doubling down on its commitments to transition the world toward a sustainable future. The fund targets early-stage technologies that accelerate the transition to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.
The Frontier Fund is built on two principles; the new wave of interest from investors to help solve the world’s challenges in decarbonization, and the increasing demand for zero-carbon energy, products and goods.
“We are looking for audacious entrepreneurs taking big swings at big problems in climate tech,” said Shayle Kann, partner in the EIP Frontier Fund. “Over the last six years we have built an ecosystem and process to drive innovation in massive, mature and technically complex industries; nowhere is this skillset needed more than the drive toward deep decarbonization.”
The Frontier Fund has started deploying funds already, with a number of investments into startups focused on decarbonizing everything from power generation to fertilizer production. Examples the firm shared with me include Form Energy, which is making multi-day energy storage cheaper; Electric Hydrogen, which is pushing industrial-scale, renewable-powered hydrogen production; Nitricity, which is making a zero-emissions nitrogen fertilizer; and Sublime Systems, which is a zero-carbon cement.
“We’ve been investing in climate tech since EIP was founded in 2016 — before it was called climate tech. This was the wilderness period; post-clean tech, pre-climate tech. We were calling it a bunch of different things,” says Kann. “There is a massive wave of innovation that is arriving on the market right now, ranging from new technologies, new services, new business models, all oriented around ways to decarbonize the various sectors of the economy that needs to be decarbonized. Climate tech is both so overwhelming and so exciting: It’s an overarching challenge that crosses sectors. The first core part of the thesis is that there is a wave of innovation coming. The second is that there will be an acceleration of market adoption of these solutions, driven by the fact that there is a growing recognition of the need to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century or earlier and that there is a long path to go from where we are today to that end goal. That is pulling in demand for all sorts of new solutions, from corporates, consumers, investors, advocates and all the stakeholders in the game. And so those two things make us bullish on the trajectory for climate tech.”