London Climate Action Week opened this year with less appetite for pledges and more demand for proof. Patience has run out for announcements that never become deployments, exposing an uncomfortable truth: the field’s real bottleneck is no longer invention.
For years we poured money into a worthy task: building technologies to cut emissions and lift livelihoods. It worked. Solar-powered cold storage keeps a smallholder’s harvest from rotting; electric two- and three-wheelers cost less to run than petrol ones. In many cases, the hard engineering is behind us.
And yet almost none of it has reached the millions it was built for. The honest measure of the past decade is not how many technologies we proved, but how few crossed from pilot to mass market.
The odds are stark: in the United States, where seed funding is most abundant, about one in three startups that raise a seed or pre-seed round goes on to raise a Series A. In Africa the funnel narrows dramatically: recent analysis found that fewer than one in twenty seed-funded companies reaches Series A — in one tracked 2022 cohort, just 5 of 105 had closed a Series A within three years. We have backed climate ventures for over two decades. The number that have reached a million customers? We can count them on one hand. A working prototype and a business serving a million people are separated by a chasm that swallows good technology whole.
That gap is not an engineering problem. It is a problem of distribution, cost, and financing — and closing it demands as much innovation as the technology itself. This is the second form of innovation, and the one that is now underfunded.
Distribution first. A climate-smart product is worthless if it cannot reach the people who need it. That reach has to be built on purpose: last-mile channels, service networks, and value chains. It is why we work with Indian delivery platforms Zomato and Swiggy — with 500,000 riders each — to put electricity-free cooling vests for delivery riders across 14 cities. Through ClimaFii, our alliance with Accion, we leverage the customer relationships of microfinance institutions that reach millions of vendors and small farmers. The test was never the technology. It was whether the logistics could reach each rider, vendor, and farm.
Then cost. Plenty of climate technology works but sits on the shelf, too expensive for those who need it most. The fix can be a better business model. Take electric mobility in India: the vehicles are sound but the upfront price shuts out the drivers who would gain most. The innovation that changed the math was not a new motor. It was separating the battery from the purchase price, so a driver pays for energy as they earn. Through battery-swapping models pioneered by companies such as Kinetic Green and Sun Mobility, that single move can halve the entry cost of an electric three-wheeler. The same logic applies to the farm: S4S Technologies, an Earthshot Prize winner, leverages collective ownership by women micro-entrepreneurs to run solar drying units that preserve produce, turning waste into revenue.
And financing. Even when a technology works and the price falls, the customer often needs credit to buy and the company needs capital to grow. This is where promising ventures die: too proven for grants, too risky for mainstream investors. Closing that gap takes capital willing to price risk differently. Through vehicles like the Mirova Gigaton Fund and a green-credit facility with India’s SIDBI, catalytic capital absorbs the first losses and pulls far larger commercial commitments in behind it. The aim is never to replace private investment. It is to make private investment possible.
This is also where philanthropy flinches, and honesty demands saying so. It cannot grant its way to an inclusive transition and should not try. Its job is to take the early risks commercial capital won’t, and to accept that if the bet pays off, someone makes real money. At Shell Foundation we have spent twenty-five years learning that lesson. When it works, everyone wins: investors earn returns, companies reach new markets, and customers earn a better, more sustainable living. Income at each point is not mission drift — it is the mission fulfilled.
The approach is not theoretical. We have leveraged over £10 billion in capital and improved the lives of more than 288 million people. In 2024 alone, our portfolio mobilized more than $300 million — over 80% of it from private sources that would not have moved without someone willing to take the early risk.
The market left to its own devices will service the easy customer first. The communities most exposed to climate change — smallholder farmers, informal workers, women — are the ones markets and finance reach last. This is another critical role philanthropy plays in the transition: fostering deliberate design to serve the billions who have purchasing power but are otherwise missed.
Keep funding technological innovation — we will need breakthroughs for decades. But fund the other innovation just as hard: the financing, distribution, and business model innovations. Those are the ones that will put proven products into the hands of millions.
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