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Generalist tech investors now sit beside Earthshot on 90% of its climate deals
PitchBook counts fundraising by climate-specialist venture firms down nearly 40% in 2025 from 2024. On stage at Climate Week NYC, Dawn Lippert and Mike Schroepfer described energy and critical-minerals rounds filling up with generalist money.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- PitchBook data showed fundraising for climate-specialist venture firms in 2025 running nearly 40% below 2024, a decline measured in limited partner commitments to dedicated funds.
- PitchBook's John MacDonagh wrote that firm power suits data centers better than renewables but is less mature and needs substantial funding to commercialize.
- The venture rounds listed in the same Fortune newsletter were AI software and cloud companies, the largest being Snorkel AI's $350 million Series E.
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Why it matters
- constraint Smaller fund closes cap what the specialist layer can deploy across the next two vintages, so the pace of energy and grid deals depends on generalist appetite holding up.
- decision Keeping the climate name on a $250 million fund is a choice about which pool of limited partners the next raise is pitched to.
- exposure If the climate investor is the only participant asking the environmental and social questions, a cap table without one leaves nobody assigned to them.
- contradiction Schroepfer describes more money in energy and critical minerals than he has ever seen while PitchBook counts fund commitments down nearly 40%; the two readings of the same sector point in opposite directions.
The nearly 40% decline counts money going into funds, not money going into companies: PitchBook was measuring what limited partners committed to climate-specialist venture firms in 2025 against what they committed in 2024 [1]. That is about sixty cents on the 2024 dollar [1]. A firm that closes a smaller fund leads fewer rounds and reserves less for follow-ons, and the follow-on is what decides whether the specialist holds its pro-rata when a generalist prices the next round.
Dawn Lippert, who founded Elemental Impact and is a general partner at Earthshot Ventures [11], gave the co-investor mix as a number. "90% of the companies that Earthshot backs have generalist tech investors as our co-investors," she said in the session Fortune's Allie Garfinkle moderated at the Climate Week NYC campus at North Javits [2][12]. "We think it's really helpful to be a climate investor on the cap table of these companies, asking about social impact, asking about environmental impact," Lippert said. "Sometimes we're the only ones in the room asking those questions" [3].
Mike Schroepfer, founding partner of Gigascale Capital and formerly Meta's chief technology officer [11], raised $250 million for a climate-focused fund announced in June, and when he was asked to consider renaming it an AI fund he declined [4]. "It is a little bit of a tale of two cities, though. If you're in the energy space, critical minerals, anything that's supply chain, there's more money than I've ever seen from an investing standpoint to do that work," he said [5].
"AI I think is both a headwind and tailwind for the space, but more a tailwind than a headwind," said John MacDonagh, a senior research analyst at PitchBook, in an email to Fortune [7]. He wrote that data-center developers are looking for energy sources for their projects. Renewables can be fast to deploy and relatively low-cost, he wrote, but face intermittency that storage can address. "Firm power sources are potentially better suited to datacenter applications, but are less mature, and require substantial funding to develop and commercialize" [8][9].
The venture rounds listed in the same newsletter were AI software and cloud. Snorkel AI took $350 million, the Helsinki cloud provider Verda $189 million, Go.AI $85 million. Confido raised $55 million, Chamelio $26 million, and Biolevate in Paris a 30 million euro Series A [10]. The five dollar-denominated rounds come to $705 million [2].
So the reframing is real at the company level and has not yet shown up at the fund level. I would read the 40% as a change in who collects the management fee on climate exposure. The counter-thesis is that generalist money in energy and critical minerals is underwritten against AI infrastructure returns. A slowdown in data-center capex reprices those rounds, and no freshly raised specialist fund is standing by to bridge them. MacDonagh's own sentence calls AI a headwind as well as a tailwind [7]. What would settle it is deal value rather than fund commitments, and the newsletter does not include a 2025 climate deal-value figure [1].
What to watch
- PitchBook's 2026 climate-specialist fundraising figure against the 2025 base: a rebound would make the near-40% drop a vintage-timing gap instead of a move of capital to generalists.
- Whether Gigascale's next fund keeps the climate name or markets itself to AI-infrastructure LPs.
- Whether the firm-power companies MacDonagh calls less mature start pulling generalist-led rounds, which is where the data-center demand would show up in deal data.