Amid Market Backlash: Pitching Climate 2026

In 2023, all 20 of the pitch decks the hosts picked at random from those sent to AENU used the word climate or carbon. In 2026, seven of 20 did. Only four of about 60 Ripple titles at The Drop contained either word. Philip Specht and Hugo Rauch set those counts against another. In the past 12 months, 50 companies in the US and 25 in Europe raised rounds of more than 100 million, even as US politics turned against climate. The storytelling has gone, one of the hosts said, but the investment remains. Their Ripple asked what founders and investors now say instead.

Cheaper electrons first

The founders who still pitch climate have changed what comes first. A founder of ultra-low-carbon cement kept the carbon claim but dropped the green premium. The pitch is now cost parity with conventional cement. A founder making printable solar in the UK said that with Reform on the rise, "the term net zero is just not used." The company talks about cheaper electricity, advanced manufacturing jobs and energy security, and even Reform, no friend of solar farms, has shown interest. The carbon it will save is a by-product.

One founder's company has a name for this, sneaky sustainability. It solves a real problem, and the customer turns out to be more sustainable too. A founder whose platform lets anyone run a library of shared items sells inventory management to co-working spaces, emissions cuts to cities and access to social-housing operators.

Investors described the same move. A fund manager who once ran a micromobility business said the environment ranks around 15th or 16th among the reasons people ride bikes, behind speed, cost and health. Businesses buy because a product fixes a profit-and-loss problem, and climate travels inside it like a Trojan horse. The founder of a narrative-marketing agency said they had repositioned at least a dozen companies in two or three years, often away from climate, which sounds like activism, towards resilience and adaptation. A GP said their fund no longer leads with climate because many founders building important things do not see themselves as climate founders. The values have not changed. One of the hosts summed it up. Climate is the why, and the what can be something more specific. Hugo, of Climate Club, said they would not do venture capital at all if not for climate.

What the money wants

The people being pitched were blunter still. A growth investor at a deep-tech fund with several verticals said its cleantech investments had trailed the others. If climate never returns money, it loses future capital as well. Founders should tell them how much money they will make, what the exit will be and what the deal will do for their career, and leave out the carbon-credit story. An investor for a single family office said the family talks of impact, pays no premium for green, and backs products that out-compete a polluting alternative. It stays away from business models built on the ETS, Europe's carbon market. One of the hosts described climate as a filter. Once a company passes it, and its impact grows with its revenue, it is just a company, and the questions are about a path to an exit and the size of the multiple.

That made a carbon-capture founder's question pointed. Part of their business case is the ETS costs their customers avoid, and some investors outside Europe call that a subsidy. To the founder it is the price of an externality. Philip said it makes the conversation harder, because AENU looks first for technologies with better unit economics than the conventional kind. The other host asked whether the business would survive if the ETS disappeared tomorrow, and liked a second source of income such as the founder's heat recovery.

Tourist capital

Whether the backlash reflects real performance divided the investors. A VC took offence at the idea that everyone invested out of idealism in 2021 and has now woken up to money. Only assumptions had changed, chiefly about the carbon market as a source of profit. The first cleantech bubble burst on dramatic underperformance, they said, and there is none now. Some climate funds are doing phenomenally well. This time the shift in perception is political.

Another investor disagreed, on gut feeling and without numbers. The 2019 to 2022 cohorts of climate funds probably trail most other sectors, they said, and the label will stick the way it has for NFTs. A third pointed to what the two booms shared. Low interest rates brought tourist capital into venture, and it coloured the disciplined funds too.

Asked to vote, about six people, roughly a fifth of those present, wanted to drop the term climate tech. The growth investor's answer to what the ecosystem could do was simple. It needs exits, and it needs to talk about successes such as Fervo's IPO the way AI companies announce their revenue. The last participant to speak found the label meaningless anyway, because "climate's not a sector, it's a theme." A company is in energy, mobility or construction, and an endowment or pension fund wants a secular trend its portfolio lacks.

This Ripple was hosted by Philip Specht (AENU) and Hugo Rauch (New Wave & Climate Club) at The Drop 2026 on 16 September.