💸 Where US Climate VCs will Invest Next

What happens when 13 top US Climate VCs talk about where they’re placing their next bets?

A surprisingly coherent picture emerges: the next decade will be defined by energy abundance, intelligent infrastructure, and the rebuilding of the physical world.

Across dozens of conversations, we learn that:

• Supply chains are fragmenting and relocalizing

• AI is rewriting power demand and industrial workflows

• Biomanufacturing is moving production from lab to scale

• New materials are reshaping how we design and manufacture

• And the hard problems of grid reliability, mineral processing, robotics, geothermal, circularity are becoming the biggest investment opportunities.

As we catch up with leading investors, they reveal where the next frontier really is: in the collision of energy, materials, and intelligence, and in the companies turning scarcity into the next generation of abundance.

Atlas Berry at M1C

• Energy for the Intelligence Age AI doesn’t run on code - it runs on power.
  Every new data center is a mini-city, and the race for energy is the real frontier. I’m watching the builders turning energy into a programmable resource: modular reactors, geothermal baseload, microgrids, and long-duration storage. Whoever makes energy abundant and predictable will own the next industrial era. 

• Automation Leaves the Factory: Robots are breaking out.
  For decades, automation was trapped inside factories - now it’s spreading into warehouses, logistics networks, construction sites, mines, and even orbit. The next wave won’t just automate tasks, it’ll automate entire workflows. This is how we rebuild the backbone of the physical economy. 

• Rebuilding Earth’s Operating System: Critical minerals are just the start.
  Every input of the industrial world - metals, water, forests, soil - is being rewritten for a resource-limited planet. We’re watching industry and ecology merge: precision resource management, circular materials, and biomanufacturing that grows what we once mined. The next economy won’t just be cleaner - it’ll be symbiotic with the planet itself.

Craig Wilson at Collaborative Fund

• Intersection of Climate and Consumer Health: The line between sustainability and personal wellness is blurring: demand is surging for technologies that improve air quality, water quality, and healthier built environments.

• “Load Growth” Ecosystem: One certainty is rising electricity demand: driven by data centers, electrification of transport/heating, and AI workloads. Companies enabling reliable, clean power growth will be essential, as will those ensuring clean energy reaches our grid and removing infrastructure roadblocks.

• Death of the Green Premium: At Collaborative, we have always invested using the Villain Test as the core of what we do. This means the best option for consumers must also be the most economical and highest quality. For climate companies to truly change categories and create meaningful impact, the sustainable option must be the best available choice.

Sarah Applebaum at Pangaea Ventures

• Data Center Cooling Technology: As hyperscale computing, AI, and cloud services surge, next-generation cooling presents a $40B+ opportunity by 2030, directly reducing power requirements, lowering operational spend and unlocking higher-density, energy-efficient data centers at global scale.

• Materials for Next-Gen Robotics: Advanced materials that enhance tactile sensors and soft actuator technologies are opening billion-dollar markets in automation, medical devices, and consumer electronics, enabling robots to perform intricate, high-value tasks with enhanced safety, and scaling adoption across manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare.

• Circular Economy: Scaling the circular economy offers a robust pathway to economic resilience and resource security, in particular with respect to the valorization of food and agricultural waste and critical metals recovery and recycling. Market potential continues to strengthen, driven by regulatory shifts, commodity volatility, and industrial uptake across supply chains.

Nick Durham at Shadow Ventures

• Nuclear-Integrated Industrial Campuses: I am looking for platforms that treat microreactors and SMRs as thermal engines for the built world, not just power plants. The opportunity is to standardize the civil works, grid connections, and district energy systems that let cement plants, data centers, and advanced manufacturers plug into firm, low-carbon heat and power on shared campuses. The winner becomes the owner-operator of nuclear-anchored industrial parks, while reactor OEMs compete to serve its tenants.

• Distributed Industrial Heat Engines: Most industrial sites still waste enormous low and medium grade heat. I am interested in modular heat engines built from new high temperature materials that can sit on brownfield cement plants, quarries, or fabrication yards and turn waste heat into process steam and flexible power. Almost no one is productizing this for heavy construction and materials, and a scaled platform here can bolt into existing industrial sites and become a multi billion dollar infrastructure owner.

• Autonomous Deconstruction & Materials Yards: I am looking for platforms that treat building teardown as high-precision mining, not demolition. The opportunity is robotics and AI vision systems that can safely dismantle structures, sort and grade concrete, metals, and finishes, then route them into standardized reuse and recycling streams. Productizingdeconstruction as an integrated yard + software + robotics system for cities hasn't been attempted and the winner here can sit at the choke point of circular materials flows for trillions of dollars of existing building stock.

Kareem Dabbagh at VoLo Earth Ventures

• Geothermal: Time is still needed before infrastructure dollars can be put to work but the advancements of EGS/AGS have demonstrated viable technology and potentially in-market LCOEs by the end of the decade (at 2-5 km depth and 200-300 deg F temperature). Deeper and hotter than that is also heating up (pun intended) but likely will still need more development cycles. 

• Compute and AI: Given the buzz, and the intense demand needs for AI, understanding the energy requirements of this will become critical. On the demand side, solutions that can reduce the energy intensity of compute, via hardware or software, will reign supreme. On the supply side, grid operators will need to find (clean) capacity for these facilities, via DERs, batteries, geothermal, and other sources, while also automating their workflows with new native-AI platforms. 

• Onshoring and Supply Chain: Getting more interesting and exciting by the day. Globalization is still in, but owning local supply chains is becoming equally important. From timber, to critical metals, to circularity, governments and businesses need to own and control portions of their supply chains and there are myriad ways to achieve this with better tech, hardware, and software.

Jenn Burka at FTW Ventures

• AI that Solves Hard Problems in the Physical World: We have to look beyond pure software plays and the AI hype cycle to recognize that the largest climate impact opportunity lies in legacy, essential industries that haven't changed in a century. Companies bringing intelligent systems to complex operations like electrifying refrigerated trucking (i.e. our portfolio company Voltair) are redefining industrial workflows and driving systemic efficiencies at a critical scale.

• The Fundamental Convergence of Planetary and Human Health: The line between what's "climate-forward" and what's "health-forward" is blurring, and that's where the most compelling solutions live. Whether it's optimizing agricultural systems to produce healthier, more resilient ingredients, or using AI to guide personalized nutrition protocols, focusing on better for you and better for the planet is facing tailwinds at the financial, technological, AND political levels.

• Efficiency in Land Use Through Fundamental Biology: We need to move from just mitigating harm to creating abundance, and that requires maximizing the potential of every available acre. Investing in deep tech solutions like accelerated crop breeding and gene editing (as in our portfolio companies Heritable and Phytoform) and finding next-generation, efficient fertilizers and other ag inputs (e.g. herbicides, pesticides, irrigation) to create step-function changes in yield and resilience without demanding new land, making agriculture more scalable and sustainable for the long haul.

Cvic Innocent at Frankenbuild Ventures, F(v)

• Critical Minerals and Decarb'd Metallurgy: Working for NASA, reviewing statewide projects, and speaking on rare Earth elements brings this top of mind. Systems must survive when the environment gives nothing back. The reimagining of critical mineral scouting/refining embraces a smarter, more sustainable approach. Plasma-based metallurgy, electrochemical extraction, and closed-loop heat recovery are turning smelters into controlled fusion environments (an opportunity for machines to emulate the precision of spacecraft, which is also where we invest!). Welcome to a weird new age of industrial alchemy. 

• Adv Materials and Power Electronics: Want to survive a grid-scale EMPs? You need ruggedized engineering for intelligent endurance, all applied at substations and offshore converters. Today, power electronics can't just survive extreme conditions. Instead they need to own it. SiC, GaN, and composite shielding materials all enable grid and maritime systems to ride a crest of high-voltage instability without breaking. I am into semiconductor physics and resilience engineering for a new industrial sublayer: resilient electrification to handle the chaos. 

• Hybrid Marine Energy Platforms and Adv Shipbuilding Automation: That also brings me to shipbuilding, which is transforming via digital control. Last month I chatted with Maine shipbuilders and discussed hull design, propulsion, and power management, all to harmonize AI-driven feedback and RT circuit logic. Im keen on additive manufacturing and sensorized modular electrification, those smart to borrow from dual-use subsea defense tech, these hybrid platforms combine offshore wind, hydrogen, and anyone looking at fault-tolerant networks. I just love investing in those who have engineered resilience under terrible and extreme conditions.

Josh Zoffer at Clocktower Ventures

• Geothermal: Nuclear gets a lot of the attention these days (rightfully, in many ways) but we also see a real opportunity in enhanced geothermal technology. There are abundant geothermal resources in the western United States, a set of oilfield services operators with the necessary equipment that will be poised to shift away from declining gas wells, and the same energy demand growth driving nuclear's popularity that will be tailwinds for geothermal. 

• Synthetic Chemistry: We're believers in biomanufacturing broadly. But within biomanufacturing, we're quite excited about synthetic chemistry--using engineered microbes and enzymes to catalyze reactions and produce chemical compounds that can disrupt the multi-trillion dollar chemicals industry. We've been investing here for several years but believe we are just scratching the surface of what can be achieved--and these new synthetic approaches happen to be cleaner and less reliant on fossil fuels, too! 

• AI-enabled services for the industrial economy: Yeah, yeah I know...AI? How original! But the reality is that many of the services underlying the energy and industrial sectors--from supply chains to engineering and much more--are holding back the energy transition and American reindustrialization because they are stuck in the past. We see a range of opportunities to use AI and agentic tools to bring these services into the 21st century and create a rising tide that lifts all (electrified) boats.

Peter Bodenheimer at Peakbridge VC

• Delivery Time: Scientific Promise Meets Market Reality: After years of patient capital funding ambitious food tech innovations—from precision fermentation to novel proteins to regenerative agriculture systems—2026 is the year we'll see whether these technologies can actually deliver on their commercial promises. Companies that survived should be mature enough to demonstrate viable product-market fit, a path to sustainable unit economics, and the operational foundation required to scale. VCs will be watching closely to separate genuine breakthroughs from science projects that may never pencil out.

• Data as Competitive Moat: In silico capabilities, from AI-powered molecule discovery to computational biology and predictive fermentation modeling, are collapsing R&D timelines and dramatically improving hit rates for new ingredients and organisms. Companies leveraging these tools to iterate faster, reduce capital intensity, and de-risk development will pull ahead. At the same time, those still relying primarily on traditional wet lab approaches will find themselves outpaced and outspent. The winners in 2026 will be those who treat data infrastructure as core IP, not an afterthought.

• Strain on the Healthcare System Presents Opportunities for Functional Food Innovation: The compounding challenges of rising costs, limited access, and chronic disease burden in US healthcare are pushing consumers and payers toward preventive, personalized nutrition solutions that extend “healthspan”. Startups combining functional ingredients with measurable health outcomes, genuine food-as-medicine, not just wellness marketing, particularly those that integrate digital technologies to create the data infrastructure necessary to validate efficacy and demonstrate value, will separate from the pack.

Brandon Corts at Newlab

• Disaggregation of Supply Chains: Covid-19 exposed the fragility of our over-scaled supply chains made up of 300-meter vessels and 2-mile long trains. There is room to improve flexibility through smaller, disaggregated modes of transport that take advantage of the USA’s underutilized marine highways, railroads, and airspace.



• High-Performance Intermodal Nodes: Intermodal nodes like ports, terminals, and rail-yards that manage our freight and can be our worst supply chain bottlenecks are ideal constrained environments for deploying crane/vehicle autonomy, high-fidelity asset tracking, and seamless non-intrusive customs inspection. 



• Modular, Safe Energy Logistics: Fleets want to decarbonize, but getting hydrogen where it’s needed is difficult. Efficient ammonia cracking alongside safe storage methods, higher-throughput LOHC dehydrogenation, and drop-in modular hydrogen infrastructure will be powerful tools to drive clean fuel adoption.

Shashank Churukanti at Evergreen Climate Innovations

• Grid-adjacent Technologies: Increased demands on the power sector are looking to grow at a pace that is an order of magnitude larger than what we have seen for the past few decades. This brings about both the urgent need for innovation, but also the dramatic "pull" that will be happening in the market for new solutions that will either reduce costs or increase reliability for the grid. 

• Non-destructive Evaluation Technologies for Carbon-free Electricity: As more renewable capacity has gotten deployed to the grid in the past decade, the market will be facing a need for increased maintenance requirements. In order to minimize downtime and increase the amount of renewable electrons entering the grid, new investments are needed for solutions in this space. 

• Geothermal - All Aspects of it: Whether it's utility-scale, or C+I deployments to decarbonize individual buildings, we think this is an area worth investing in for the long haul.

Midori Takasaki at Change Forces

• Synthetic Biology: Synthetic biology melds biology with engineering, to reprogram living systems for climate and sustainability solutions. While synthetic biology as a field has been around for decades, recent leaps in AI and computational biology are accelerating the field, opening opportunities in areas like sustainable alternatives to petrochemicals, climate-resilient agriculture, bioremediation of pollutants, biodiversity preservation, and scalable CO2 removal. I see this as a frontier for transformative innovation with huge investment potential. 

• Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS) Agreements: ABS agreements ensure that economic value derived from nature and biodiversity is shared with local communities. Not only does this help bolster the idea of nature as an asset class with intrinsic value, but it also encourages the sustainable use and protection of nature and biodiversity. 

• Measurement & Monitoring Technologies: Robust, simple, and accurate measurement and monitoring technologies are critical for scaling biodiversity credits, ESG reporting, and transparent supply chains. We're seeing a wide array of breakthroughs in this area, from using eDNA from environmental samples to detect species presence and ecosystem health, to satellite and AI-powered analytics that map ecosystem changes in real time. These innovations are building the infrastructure that makes biodiversity measurable, investable, and accountable.

Mark Dryden at WIND Ventures

• AI Mineral Exploration: The energy transition needs hundreds of new copper and lithium mines—but today’s exploration yields just one mine in a thousand tries. AI-powered discovery is 100x more accurate, unlocking the high-probability sites that could become the multi-billion-dollar mines our transition depends on.

• Solid State Transformers: Transformers are a multi-year bottleneck holding back electrification. Solid-state transformers flip the script—software-defined, mass-manufactured, and cheaper, faster, smarter than the decades-old status quo.

• Decentralized Datacenters: Today’s 1-gigawatt hyperscale datacenters are breaking the grid—but do they need to be that big or always run at 99.999% uptime? With 20% of AI demand from interruptible training, smaller, distributed, lower-availability datacenters could flip the paradigm.

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