Build to 2030

Today, we are releasing a new strategy with a clear ambition: be the most catalytic nonprofit in climate.

Over the past five years, the climate capital stack has widened and matured, with more than $255 billion invested since 2020. We have made extraordinary progress inventing the tools the world needs to make our energy, food, water, and industrial systems more efficient, resilient, healthy, and affordable. This should be a time when we feel the wind in our sails.

Instead, entrepreneurs are navigating policy uncertainty, shifting markets, and a challenging funding environment, just as many climate technologies reach a critical stage of commercialization.

The defining challenge of this next era is not innovation alone, but implementation: building the market confidence, partnerships, and proof points needed to move promising technologies to scale. The capital gap for climate technologies is estimated to be at least $150 billion—we see it every year in our own pipeline and portfolio.

This is a gap that philanthropy is uniquely positioned to fill. As one gear in a much larger system, when philanthropy moves at the right moment, it can help set the entire system in motion—unlocking investment, accelerating deployment, and creating the conditions for new industries, infrastructure, and workforces to emerge.

Our goal is not only to back exceptional entrepreneurs, but to build a more engaged innovation ecosystem around them—one capable of bringing the most important climate technologies to market and into communities at the speed this moment requires.

This strategy will guide our work through the end of the decade, when Elemental marks its 20th anniversary. We invite you to dig in and join us.

Voices from the crew

As we look to 2030, Elemental will build new capabilities on our strong foundation and lean further into the unique advantages of our model––one that combines the mission of a nonprofit with the discipline of an investor, and the operating posture and talent density of a high-growth startup.

We asked the Elemental team what they hope to build, learn, and make possible as we reach the end of the decade: