The year is 2015. You are a climate software entrepreneur focused on a sustainable technology vertical like solar, wind, batteries, energy efficiency, carbon removal or some other newfangled industry that a venture capitalist likely hasn’t heard of before. You put on a brave face, package up your pitch deck and trek down Sand Hill Road…only to return without a single venture dollar to fund your company.
Fast forward to 2022. Venture capitalists today have awoken to the potential of climate technology. More than $87 billion flowed into climate tech last year alone. The barriers investors cited several years ago – limited market size, fragmented “long-tail” customer base, crowded competitive vendor landscape, and well-funded software R&D efforts by corporate incumbents, to name a few – are now being derailed by emergent climate software companies.
