WK618: One more thing - Third Sphere

WK618: One more thing

“Corporate Climate Venture has entered its Industrial Era” – Dandi Hardy, Stanford MBA Candidate, Third Sphere Fellow and author of our 2025 Corporate Climate Venture Report.

CVCs have never been more important partners for climatech founders. Over the past months, we interviewed 30 CVC investors and operators across tech, utilities, industrial giants, and insurers. The result captures how leading corporate venture teams are actually thinking, underwriting risk, and deploying capital in practice.

Here’s what’s inside:

• The New Logic – How corporate climate investing has matured from aspirational commitments into a domain of “strategic patience” and operational focus.
• Beyond Capital – Why a CVC’s greatest value is often their industry expertise and purchase orders, not their check. The critical “pilot-to-scale” funnel that turns prototypes into financeable assets.
• From Sustainability to P&L – How climate strategy has migrated from the marketing department to the business unit, where “megawatts, uptime, and cost” have replaced ESG as the primary metrics.
• Bits Need Electrons – How AI and the “capacity crunch” are forcing a complete rethink of grid modernization.
• The Efficiency Mandate – How industrial giants are turning factories into “miniature grids” where efficiency is the core operating principle.
• Investable Resilience – How traders and insurers are using weather forecasting and climate data to capture commercial upside, not just avoid risk.
• The Long Horizon – Why corporate balance sheets are the only capital patient enough to bring “long-cycle” bets like nuclear and geothermal back to the table.
• The Geopolitical Hedge – Why Europe refuses to “replace Russian gas with Chinese batteries” and how supply chain sovereignty is driving circularity investments.
• The Founder’s Playbook – 15 hard-won lessons on navigating corporate timelines and mastering techno-economics.

You can get the full report here: https://hubs.ly/Q03YfmCv0

Best.

Third Sphere Team

P.S. Know founders we should meet? The companies thriving today were not working in popular areas when we invested. Our criteria are pretty simple – great team, bad logo, working demo, no customers and the potential to have a huge impact in some area of climate (probably the one that isn’t getting much media coverage right now).