The conditions in which climate ventures must now operate are more challenging than they were even two years ago. Capital is tighter, criteria are more demanding, and the policy backdrop in many jurisdictions has become less predictable. Yet the investment required for Canada and the world to meet climate goals continues to grow, and so does the urgency of getting promising technologies from the lab into commercial-scale deployment.
The 2025-26 cohort of the Global Climate Finance Accelerator Fellows spent the year working on a question that sits at the heart of this challenge: why is it still so hard to finance climate technology at the scale the energy transition requires? A few themes emerged consistently from that work. Funding a first-of-a-kind project takes a far wider range of skills, perspectives, and counterparties than most ventures plan for, and the technology is rarely the hardest part. Translating unit economics into an investor-ready financial model is one of the highest-leverage things a founder can do, and one of the most consistently underdeveloped. And there are fundamental building blocks such as offtake structures, execution certainty, counterparty quality, and insurability that every venture must address to de-risk its projects and unlock the next pool of capital.
This paper, From Proof-of-Concept to Proof-of-Profit: Bridging the Risk-Expectation Gap in Climate Tech Scaling, brings those themes together into a framework the research team calls the Risk Pivot. Whether it shifts how founders, investors, and policymakers approach this transition remains to be seen. What is clear is that by working together with practitioners across the ecosystem to identify and address these bottlenecks, the GCFA has given another group of Canada’s future leaders the tools to accelerate progress against society’s pressing climate goals.
Kenneth S. Corts
Academic Director, Rotman Sustainability Initiative
Academic Lead, Policy and Sustainable Finance, Lawson Climate Institute
Marcel Desautels Chair in Entrepreneurship
Rotman School of Management
105 St. George Street, Toronto, Canada M5S 3E6
www.rotman.utoronto.ca
