Community Event: Financing Commercial Deployment in an Uncertain Market

The latest installment in our “Financing Your Climate Startup” Community Event series took aim at one of the most pressing questions facing climate founders today: how do you move from a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) project into truly repeatable commercial deployment in a market that feels like it’s shifting under your feet?

Moderated by Dimitry Gershenson and Hannah Friedman, the conversation brought together Christina Dalton of Solar Holler, Rob Day of Spring Lane Capital, Mary King of Aligned Climate Capital, and Amir Kirkwood of Justice Climate Fund. This session unpacked how capital providers are thinking about this turbulent market moment, where founders are getting tripped up, and what it takes to prepare for the future and raise smarter — not just bigger.

If you missed any of our previous events, we highly encourage you to go back and read the teardowns on the Enduring Planet Insights page.

Speakers: ​

• Dimitry Gershenson, CEO, Enduring Planet (moderator)
• Hannah Friedman, Venture Partner at Planeteer and Head of Partnerships at Mark1 ​(moderator)
• Christina Dalton, VP of Finance, Solar Holler
• Rob Day, Co-Founder, Spring Lane Capital
• Mary King, Vice President, Aligned Climate Capital
• Amir Kirkwood, CEO, Justice Climate Fund

Summary Notes

Venture ≠ FOAK ≠ Commercial Deployments

There’s a relatively hard line between venture finance, FOAK projects, and commercial deployments - even if in the last 5 years, capital markets were willing to blur the lines. Venture dollars are designed to underwrite technology risk and early operating models, not the messy complexities of building physical assets. FOAK projects, by contrast, are where technology gets proven in the real world — but they’re plagued by cost overruns, delays, and construction risk that make them a tough fit for traditional venture and equally unattractive to infrastructure investors.

Commercial deployments, however, are about repetition and execution. They aren’t about proving the tech anymore — they’re about showing you can deliver the same project again and again, on time and on budget. Investors on the panel emphasized that they look for standardization and predictability:

• Are costs where you said they’d be?
• Are offtake agreements locked down?
• Can your team execute the 5th project the same way it did the 2nd?

In short, the real inflection point comes not when technology “works,” but when deployment becomes systematic. Even then, most commercial deployments struggle in the unsexy final engineering (FEED) and construction and delivery phases. As founders, it’s imperative not to underestimate the workouts and training it takes to use a “repeatability” muscle reliably - even after the technology has been fully proven at scale. 

The Market Has Shifted: Harder, Not Impossible

A year ago, raising for deployment was difficult but feasible. Today, the consensus is that it’s meaningfully harder. Rising interest rates, policy uncertainty and the elimination of key public support mechanisms, and a cooling of the broader growth equity environment have combined to make capital scarcer and more cautious.

Rob Day pointed out that his team now sees companies far past FOAK that can’t find suitable capital because they’re too advanced for venture but not yet de-risked enough for mainstream infrastructure. Mary King echoed that while there’s still appetite, investors are scrutinizing deals more tightly and, as a result, scanning beyond crowded sectors like solar and storage into areas such as geothermal, fuel cells, waste heat, and distributed microgrids.

From the credit side, Amir Kirkwood described how lender portfolios have contracted significantly — highlighting that for one, an initial ~$9 billion pipeline in renewable energy and resilient building projects has now become ~$1 billion post-subsidy changes. But he also noted that despite this initial shock, demand from customers for proven, resilient technologies is holding strong, and banks are beginning to adapt to the new baseline. For founders, the message was clear: the money hasn’t disappeared, but the bar for accessing it has gone up. This market moment may offer other opportunities to partner more closely with demand (customers) in creative partnerships than approach capital markets alone for funding.

Part of the shift has also been for fund managers: funds are being much more slow in their deployment because they’re thinking about their own fundraising from allocators and Limited Partners. It’s harder to raise a fund, so some investors are going more deal by deal, syndicating with LPs (which takes longer and involves more complexity). For some pensions and CIOs of foundations, they had mission-related investments (MRIs), which were previously allocated to climate and clean energy, and are now having to realign their teams to new strategies and allocations. And, local lenders - especially regional governments and community lenders - are going to have to assume costs that were formerly taken on by the federal government. 

Capital Stacking: Blend and Be Purposeful

No single capital source is enough — deployment today is about layering the right kinds of equity, debt, catalytic capital, and incentives into a coherent structure. As the market evolves, the conversation is much more centered around risk management and risk transfer in the case of scenarios - no matter how outlandish those scenarios once seemed.

TopCos (sometimes called platforms) and their underlying projects (sometimes referred to as individual assets) are often like a house of cards leaning on each other. Even if projects look profitable, rarely are they funded only with debt. Typically, some form of sponsor (from the TopCo) or project equity will need to be infused into the projects. Therefore, even project lenders today are asking about the overall financial health of the TopCo platform and how long it can continue to support projects viably. Blending investors and their returns across each can be messy and sometimes overly complicated.

Amir emphasized that many projects now face a ~14% funding “gap” that has to be covered by concessionary sources. Community lenders, donor-advised funds, and family offices are stepping into that space, often taking first-loss positions to enable commercial lenders to come in behind them. For founders, blending those sources isn’t optional — it’s the only way to close a deal.

While the market may be overcorrecting to avoid government incentives, sharing straight numbers on IRR without incentives can be a productive tactic. In some cases, developer fees and other margins within the project may still be workable, even if they’re not as juicy as they once were with various incentives. Over time, for some distributed infrastructure, it’s challenging to value the underlying assets until the market is more commoditized, and knowing the value of your assets can help you blend the capital stack more productively without accepting unfavorable terms within the process of scaling the platform. 

Yet, while creativity matters, durability matters more: structures that rely on fragile or one-time-only capital are unlikely to carry a company through multiple deployments. The best stacks are flexible, repeatable, and designed to withstand the next policy or market shock.

Future-Proofing & De-Risking

With volatility the new normal, teams can build credibility by showing operational resilience, financial discipline, and a willingness to adapt. Mary pointed to the signals she looks for: founders who scenario-plan, who don’t hide from bad news, and who proactively communicate about risks earn more trust than those who pretend everything is fine. 

Christina shared Solar Holler’s experience making gritty operational tradeoffs — delaying hires, restructuring debt, even cutting project scope — in order to keep projects financeable. Managing working capital for the Top Co is paramount, and planning for it alongside a list of healthy contingencies can save a lot of headache in the long run. Overall, the lesson is that survival often requires tough calls, and investors respect teams that make them.

Standardization of your pipeline is a meaningful way to attract future infrastructure investors; they can’t back “scrappy” pipelines that are hodge-podged together. A company that can show three projects built off the same template is far more bankable than one that’s still experimenting. Repeatability reduces perceived risk, and in today’s market, perception is half the battle.

Advice for Scaling Deployment

The event closed with a one-sentence round of advice for founders trying to move from FOAK into true commercial scale. 

• Christina urged founders to protect their credibility above all else: deliver on your commitments, because credibility is the cheapest capital you can raise. 
• Amir reminded the audience not to rely on a single champion but to bring multiple investors along, so no one party holds outsized power.
• Mary advised against trying to “figure it all out alone” — spending on financial expertise can save painful mistakes down the line. 
• Rob emphasized the value of learning to speak and think like a project developer and an EPC, not just a tech founder.