New name. More impact.

When was the last time you were in a kindergarten classroom? For me, it was this week. At my daughter’s open house, her teacher unveiled the theme for the year: Growth Over Time. “The important thing isn’t where you start or where you end up,” she told us. “What’s important is that you grow every day.” 

In this same spirit of growth, I’m excited to share two milestones today:

1. We are renaming to Elemental Impact to mark our 15 year anniversary and our expansion to a broader investing platform, and
2. We are launching a $100M funding program and opening applications for entrepreneurs to access capital from the US EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

1. Our New Name 

• • Why the new name? We outgrew the category of “accelerator.” When I started Elemental in 2009 with funding from U.S. Department of Energy, there were few early stage investors and no accelerators for energy or climate. As more money has gone into the early stages and our portfolio companies have matured, our entrepreneurs have hit new roadblocks and now need different types of capital, like project finance for their first few commercial facilities. As our portfolio has grown, so have we.
  • We’ve grown into a broader investing platform with a family of funds working in concert to mobilize capital from philanthropy, government, and private investors. The platform is anchored by a non-profit supported by more than $210M in philanthropy and public funding to date. Our family of funds also includes the $94M venture fund Earthshot Ventures, which we launched in 2021.

2. Our New $100m Funding Program

• • We are expanding our nonprofit investing with an initial $100M from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF). We will support entrepreneurs and climate technologies that are ready for commercial scale and poised to deliver greenhouse gas emissions reductions with local community benefits. We invite companies to submit proposals for projects ranging from $3M to $10M at elementalimpact.com.
  • We are partnering across the ecosystem to help ensure the success of GGRF. As a subawardee of the Coalition for Green Capital, we will deploy $100M into climate projects across energy, transportation, water, agriculture, and industry – through equity and debt investments. Our team will continue to convene investors and play a supportive role in the deployment of GGRF across multiple coalitions.
  • The best part? One of the reasons we are so excited about GGRF is that the EPA’s program objectives align with our own mission and approach: investing in community-centered climate projects, mobilizing private capital, and recycling returns into future impact.

Through more than a hundred projects that went well – and some that didn’t – we have learned that there are three essential ingredients to building climate projects successfully. These will continue to be cornerstones of our work as we scale:

1. 1. Catalytic capital: Deploying projects makes us better investors. Working close to the ground reveals overlooked investment opportunities, and helped us characterize a $150B gap in funding that keeps technologies from scaling to their potential. Everything we do is designed to address this gap. 
   2. Project expertise: Entrepreneurs need much more than funding to succeed. The 900 hours of expert coaching we delivered in 2023 significantly accelerated companies’ ability to build projects and partnerships, like solar for low-income communities in Florida, recycled nickel and cobalt in Ohio, and infrastructure for electric trucks to move goods throughout California.
   3. Community partnership: As Jason Salfi, CEO of our portfolio company Dimensional Energy, reflected this week: “It’s only through local partnership that we are able to build a sustainable aviation fuel facility in upstate New York. Community partners bring expertise and resources that help projects actually get built.”

At a recent gathering with our team, now 60 strong, we reviewed our Five Year Strategy and took stock of how it has unfolded so far. How are we tracking? We are delivering on everything we had set out to do. For example, we had planned to launch a new fund (which we did: Earthshot Ventures), to design government vehicles that unlock debt for scaling (announcing today! and building on years of support from DOD and DOE), and to convene investors in creative ways to accelerate progress (like Elemental Interactive: our next one is April 22, 2025… save the date).

What’s Next? Join us on this journey. 

We are acutely aware that innovation in technology is now outpacing innovation in finance. Tech isn’t slowing down anytime soon, so funders and investors need to innovate faster. What can unlock speed and creativity?

• • Philanthropic risk appetite and dollars, enabling us to be nimble, take risks, and bridge gaps. Philanthropy and government also provide the support for wrap-around services that make or break projects on the ground – and unlock lasting community benefit. We are grateful for audacious funders who provide this fuel, and we hope to work with many more in our next chapter.
  • Aligned investors who are passionate about addressing the most vexing gap for scaling climate technology. We are designing additional strategies and funds to expand our first-of-a-kind and early-of-a-kind project investing – and to prepare projects for GGRF. If this is something you are excited about solving, we’d love to talk with you.

I am so grateful to our team members, partners, and teachers (kindergarten and beyond!). One of my greatest teachers, the late Pono Shim, wrote me a note a few years ago about learning and the practice of aloha. He said: aloha and leadership aren’t something to know but rather something to struggle with. It is like a martial art: we learn a move and practice, learn a new move and practice, and practice and practice and practice until one day there are no more moves, only movement.

This is our definition of Growth Over Time.

In gratitude, growth, and aloha,
Dawn and the Elemental team