About this episode

Frank O’Sullivan discusses the challenges and opportunities in financing climate tech startups that fall into the 'missing middle' of the investment landscape.

If you’re building a consumer software startup, your investors may expect you to project hockey stick-style growth. But if you’re building the physical infrastructure of the clean energy transition, you’re likely in a very different position. Frank O’Sullivan, Managing Director at S2G Investments, argues that the climate finance ecosystem is suffering from a structural mismatch. While there is plenty of capital for early-stage innovation and mature infrastructure projects, there is a "missing middle" — a gap where hard tech startups are generating revenue but aren’t yet bankable enough for infrastructure investors. In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Frank about why we’ve been trying to finance infrastructure companies like they’re software startups, the concentration risks in venture capital, and why large infrastructure allocators should be stepping into this growth-stage gap to seed their own pipeline. Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced and edited by Ross Kenyon and Anne Bailey. Technical direction by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple…

People in this episode

Host: Lara Pierpoint

Guest: Frank O’Sullivan

Topics covered

• climate tech
• investment
• clean energy
• startup funding
• infrastructure
• venture capital

Keywords

• climate finance
• hard tech startups
• infrastructure investment
• venture capital risks
• growth-stage funding

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: S2G Investments, Latitude Media, Trellis Climate

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