The Next Wave of Climate Tech Venture: Where Resilience Outperforms Hype
Cameron Porter, Co-Founder of Steel Atlas
Intro: Why Resilience Is the Market’s Next Premium in Climate Tech
Venture capital has long rewarded speed — speed of product iteration, speed to market, speed to exit. But in a world increasingly shaped by geopolitical shocks, AI-driven energy demand, and climate-induced resource volatility, a different kind of speed is taking hold: time to stability.
Steel Atlas, a New York–based venture fund with is helping redefine climate tech investing through a lens of industrial resilience. Its portfolio includes companies tackling energy storage, freight logistics, and advanced materials — among them Transmutex, GenLogs, and Valar Atomics. Co-founded by Princeton-trained engineer Cameron Porter, the firm backs software and hardware startups that operate at the intersection of efficiency, supply chain stability, and physical infrastructure. They targeting technologies that provide resilience to volatility and uncertainty in energy, manufacturing, and logistics.
At the heart of its thesis is a belief that the most valuable technologies of the next decade won’t just scale fast — they’ll absorb shocks, de-risk climate-sensitive supply chains, and stabilize the energy systems our AI future and decarbonization goals depend on.
Net Zero Insights sat down with Porter to discuss the investment logic behind resilience, how to evaluate “industrial readiness,” and why many of today’s best climate and deep tech opportunities are being missed due to outdated venture models.
1｜Why Traditional VC Misses the Climate Hard Tech Payoff
Net Zero Insights: Steel Atlas calls itself a “resilience tech” fund. What does that mean in concrete terms?
Cameron Porter: It starts with what keeps real-world systems from functioning — and that’s volatility. Supply chain bottlenecks. Mineral price swings. Freight delays. Power outages. Labor gaps. We map where those stress points live and then look for companies that are actively reducing them.
And we’ve found that some of the most underfunded sectors in venture — like grid software, next-gen materials, and industrial controls — offer the best upside because they’re structurally uncorrelated to consumer cycles and digital churn.
Most funds are built to underwrite user growth. We’re built to underwrite system stability. And that turns out to be a surprisingly rare lens in venture.
Net Zero Insights: The common critique is that hard tech and infrastructure don’t match venture timelines. What’s your counterpoint?
Porter: The timelines aren’t that different — the structures are. If you benchmark actual exits, industrial tech companies raise around 15% of their terminal enterprise value in equity. For traditional tech, it’s about 13%. The difference is noise.
The mistake is thinking hard tech = long cycles. In reality, most of these companies don’t need to be vertically integrated manufacturers. You de-risk the IP, validate a first system, and then scale through licensing, joint ventures, or asset-level project finance. If anything, that’s more capital efficient than spending $10 million on CAC in a crowded SaaS vertical.
2｜What Industrial Readiness Really Means — and Why It’s Essential in Climate Tech
Net Zero Insights: You often use the term “industrial readiness.” What’s the difference between that and product-market fit?
Porter: Product-market fit is useful in software — when it’s about user engagement or demand validation. But in climate and infrastructure, it doesn’t matter how many people “want” your product if it fails on grid compatibility, procurement specs, or lifetime performance.
Industrial readiness is about showing a credible, milestone-based path from lab to field. That means understanding what real buyers need: “What energy density does the new battery need to hit to get an auto OEM interested?” or “What safety protocol does the new reactor need to meet to get past siting?” These aren’t academic questions — they’re commercial triggers.
We don’t fund ideas. We fund readiness models — usually 12 to 24 months to reach a bankable milestone, whether that’s pilot runtime, offtake demand, or facility financing.
Net Zero Insights:Â How does that shape your diligence process?
Porter: We reverse the stack. We often start with the buyer — a chemical company, utility, EPC firm — and say: “What spec gets this adopted?” Then we work backwards into the startup pipeline. Sometimes, we literally co-write the readiness plan with the founder — tech, commercial, policy, and scale plan all aligned from day one.
That’s different from the high-velocity model where the goal is feature velocity and customer feedback loops. Our companies often don’t need hundreds of customers — they need one pilot and one credible contract to unlock scale.
3｜Resilient Infrastructure Is the Missing Layer in Climate and AI Transformation
Net Zero Insight: Steel Atlas doesn’t pitch itself as an AI fund, yet AI seems to be one of the drivers behind your investment areas — why?
Porter: AI is reshaping demand, not just in data usage, but in physical infrastructure. Data centers are consuming enormous amounts of power. The cloud isn’t weightless anymore — it’s backed by steel, silicon, and electrons.
Everyone is trying to build large-scale compute, but no one wants to talk about the real bottlenecks: baseload energy, siting capacity, thermal stability, and power redundancy.
We’re seeing a major uptick in demand for nuclear, long-duration storage, thermal cooling, and grid-integrated microinfrastructure — not just as climate plays, but as AI enablement layers. That’s where our portfolio overlaps with the future of compute.
The irony is that most AI investors are focused on models and chips — but what happens when latency, uptime, or energy security breaks? That’s where industrial and climate venture needs to step in.
Final Word: In a Volatile Decade, Climate Capital Must Be Patient
Net Zero Insights: What’s your view on where early-stage venture is headed over the next 5 years?
Porter: I think we’re entering an era where patient capital becomes strategic capital. The market is waking up to the fact that real assets, real systems, and real moats come from time-in-field — not just code releases.
Firms that can structure around uncertainty — and move slowly when the market moves fast — will end up owning the infrastructure beneath tomorrow’s economy. That’s true for climate-linked sectors like energy, water, food, freight, compute. And it’s exactly where we want to be.
This conversation was produced by Net Zero Insights in collaboration with Greennex Global, a New York–based investment advisory and innovation intelligence platform connecting global smart infrastructure and next-generation energy ventures.
