Capital Day
Financing the Early-Growth to Growth Transition in Climate Innovation
Capital Day focuses on the decisive phase of climate innovation: the transition from early-growth to scalable deployment — where venture capital, corporate venture, FOAK projects, structured finance, and real-world market demand converge.
Arrival, Registration & Networking Coffee
Arrival and early networking among founders, investors, and corporate partners.
Opening Remarks: Selecting for a Symbiotic Civilization — How Startups and Capital Co-Evolve
Climate innovation scales when both founders and capital intentionally select for alignment with living systems. The hardest phase is not just early-growth to growth — it is the transition from promising innovation to infrastructure that coexists with ecological limits. This session reframes deployment readiness and FOAK execution as a co-design challenge between founders, allocators, and asset owners — asking: What are we selecting for? What are we systematically overlooking? And what must change in our capital models to fund what the Earth actually requires?
Four Assumptions that Shape Climate Investing
An investigation into what shapes climate investment decisions — from intuition, to AI and beyond.
Panel 1: From Venture to First Deployment: Where Capital and Strategy Break
Why venture capital alone is insufficient, how deployment readiness shapes growth, and where companies lose momentum after early traction.
Coffee Break
Panel 2: FOAK as the Bridge from Early-Growth to Growth
Designing capital and partnership pathways from first deployment to repeatable scale, and how FOAK projects become financeable.
Fireside Chat: From Capital to Deployment: How Infrastructure Actually Gets Built
A deep dive into the gap between capital intent and execution — exploring where funding breaks, what unlocks deployment, and how founders can position projects for real-world scale.
Networking Lunch
Curated networking between founders, investors, corporates, and deployment partners.
Panel 3: Corporate Venture Capital: Capital, Deployment & Market Access
How corporate venture arms enable deployment, procurement, and market access — and how startups can structure corporate partnerships to accelerate growth without constraining scale.
Panel 4: Beyond Priced Rounds: Venture Debt & Structured Capital for Growth
How venture debt, hybrid instruments, and demand-backed financing structures enable companies to scale beyond early-growth stages.
Break
Panel 5: From Growth to Bankability: What Downstream Capital Requires
How banks, insurers, and infrastructure investors evaluate climate technologies, and how early deployment decisions shape access to scale capital.
Fireside Chat: Crossing the Deployment Valley — Founder Perspective
A founder's journey from pilots to scalable deployment and the role of strategic and corporate partners.
Break
Curated Capital Matchmaking Sessions
Structured small-group rotations connecting startups with investors, corporates, and deployment partners.
Parallel Reception: Open Networking Reception
Parallel reception running alongside the matchmaking sessions — open networking for attendees not participating in curated rotations.
Closing Session: From Capital Conversations to Execution
How Imagine Next supports FOAK progression, corporate pilots, growth capital access, and Frontier deployment immersion.
The Climate Capital Salon: From Conviction to Deployment · Venue: Specter Courtroom/Classroom, 198 McAllister
Climate tech investing does not stall for lack of ambition. It stalls when promising opportunities encounter the realities of mandate design, capital allocation, institutional decision-making, and deployment risk. Hosted by Vicky Lay (Artesian Venture Partners) and Peter Lupoff (Beatrice Advisors), this curated investor salon convenes a select group of asset owners, institutional allocators, family offices, and strategic investors for a candid and rigorous discussion on where climate capital gets stuck — and what investors can do differently. Attendees will be introduced to a concise set of systems tools for climate tech investment designed to help diagnose structural friction, identify where bottlenecks truly sit, and ask better questions when promising opportunities lose momentum. Participants are encouraged to bring a live question, institutional constraint, or investment tension into the room. The session is also designed to connect investors facing similar deployment challenges, creating space to exchange practical climate tech deployment playbooks with peers operating at the same level of complexity.
Join Us for Capital Day
Be part of the conversation shaping climate tech's transition from innovation to scale.
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