Elemental Excelerator, a non-profit climate investor backed by Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, received $100 million in federal greenhouse gas reduction funding. The Honolulu-based firm, which will rename itself Elemental Impact, expects to mobilize investors and philanthropists from its network of more than 1,000 firms and individuals to distribute far more than that amount. The federal program has a goal of adding nearly seven dollars from private funds for every dollar of public monies received.
“One of the key success metrics is the ability to bring in private capital and coinvest with these dollars,” Elemental founder and CEO Dawn Lippert told Forbes. “That fits in really well with what Elemental’s strategy has been over the past 15 years.”
Since its 2009 founding, Elemental, which has received a total of $210 million in philanthropic and government funding from 40 funders including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, has invested more than $80 million in some 160 climate-tech companies with a focus on filling the gaps in funding for startups as they scale from idea to commercial. All told, these companies have received $10 billion in co-investments and follow-on funding, according to Elemental. The non-profit also offers startups technical assistance and help with community engagement.
Elemental began working with Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective in 2017. Powell Jobs now serves as Elemental Impact’s chair of the board, while Lippert is a senior climate advisor at Emerson Collective.
Powell Jobs inherited her fortune, which Forbes estimates at $14.6 billion, from her husband, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who died in 2011. With Emerson Collective and Waverley Street Foundation, she has established herself as one of the nation’s most important philanthropists and impact investors.
Elemental expects to use the funds to invest in areas that include energy, transportation, water, agriculture and industry.
Its existing portfolio includes a wide array of climate tech startups. Among them: geothermal developer Fervo Energy, which raised $244 million earlier this year; critical minerals refiner and recycler Nth Cycle; and C16 Biosciences, which is creating a sustainable and conflict-free alternative to palm oil from microbes.
A report by Elemental and Boston Consulting Group in June calculated the so-called “scale gap” – between the funds raised and those needed – at $150 billion. Headwinds that include high interest rates, inflation, capital markets volatility and global hostilities contributed to a near 40% drop in climate-related funding in 2023, according to the report.
As technologies for combating climate change have outpaced ways to fund those innovations, the scale gap has grown, Lippert said. “They [climate startups] can’t get the cost of capital they need to compete against fossil fuels,” she said. “If we don’t fix this, we will continue to lose companies that have technology that is working because they don’t have the capital they need to scale.”
The new investment is part of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, created by the Environmental Protection Agency.Part of the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, it’s intended to combat the climate crisis by mobilizing funding for projects that reduce greenhouse gases and air pollution in communities across the country.
Lippert said that Elemental is currently doing due diligence on companies that it is considering for investment, and that it hopes to be “among the first” to start doling out the GGRF funds. “Time is not on our side with climate,” she said.