Elemental Impact — the Honolulu-based nonprofit formerly known as Elemental Excelerator — has received a $100 million slug of funds from the Coalition for Green Capital, the network of green banks that was awarded $5 billion from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF.
Elemental, a sub-awardee of the coalition, will channel the funds towards place-based climate tech deployments involving clean energy, water, sustainable agriculture and industrial applications.
“We’re really excited to be building this bridge between public dollars and private sector mobilization,” Elemental’s Avra van der Zee told ImpactAlpha. The GGRF fund, she added, “is the first fund that we will be announcing under the Elemental Impact platform.”
The news arrives as recipients of the GGRF grants, managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, gear up to begin distributing the funds to green projects across the country. The program aims to set up a distributed green lending architecture that can leverage public and private capital to bring climate resilience and other benefits to low-income and historically marginalized communities.
Expanding portfolio
Elemental’s name change, said van der Zee, reflects the expanding scope of the nonprofit’s work.
Elemental Excelerator was founded in 2012 by Dawn Lippert to provide hands-on mentoring and funding to promising but unproven climate tech ventures, at a time when there were few such programs for climate tech entrepreneurs.
Since then, it has raised some $210 million in grants and public funding to scale its impact, from funders as varied as the US Office of Naval Research, Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, and The Rockefeller Foundation.
In 2021, Elemental launched a venture fund, the $94 million venture fund Earthshot Ventures, which has backed climate tech startups including sustainable lithium company Lilac Ventures and electric ride sharing and rental service Halo.
Last year, Elemental teamed up with the Coalition for Green Capital as a sub-awardee for the GGRF’s National Clean Investment Fund to help deploy the catalytic federal funds in communities across the country. The $100 million fund is a slice of the $5 billion that the CGC was awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Van der Zee said it the funds would be invested in 10-15 projects in low and moderate income communities. The nonprofit is also working with other NCIF awardees Community United and Power Forward Communities.
“We’ve grown into a broader investing platform,” said van der Zee. “We are a family of funds.”
Earlier this year, Elemental debuted the Development-SAFE, a twist on the “simple agreement for equity” widely used in Silicon Valley. Developed with Wilson Sonsini, the D-SAFE to address the specific needs of climate tech startups developing their first pilot plants or commercial facilities.
“We’re laser focused on the scale gap,” said van der Zee, referring to the “valley of death” faced by climate tech startups looking to launch their first pilot projects, customer deployments and then large-scale plants. A study by Elemental and consulting firm BCG estimated the financing gap for climate tech ventures in the scaling phase at some $150 billion.
