Tailwind Futures Fund I - Climate Resilience Tech Venture Fund

The fund aims to address three gaps in the market for adaptation and resilience (A&R) solutions: The innovation gap, the capital gap, and the demand gap.

1.      Innovation Gap: Recent industry and policy publications emphasize the importance of innovation for climate adaptation. Yet our experience shows that most buyers rely on incumbent, traditional engineering solutions. We believe technological and scientific innovation, used wisely, can help accelerate adaptation and resilience goals, and as a fund, we are on a mission to harness entrepreneurship and innovation to advance global climate resilience.

2.     Funding Gap: As evidenced by our research in the Playbook, A&R startups secure far less funding than their mitigation peers (3% of the climate tech funding for 12% of the startups). Early-stage is particularly challenging for startups who are just beginning to get commercial traction in an emerging market. Our focus on seed-stage enables us to support startups at a critical stage in their journey.

3.     Demand Gap: Corporations have billions of dollars at risk due to the impacts of climate change, but most have not deployed commensurate means to protect their assets, value chain and workforce. Our research indicates that corporate leaders in the space spend on average $200M on A&R, indicating latent demand from a much larger set of potential buyers of A&R solutions. Our focus on corporations as strategic investors aims to convert a small cohort of corporations into sophisticated buyers of A&R technologies, while also providing a set of target customers / partners / acquirers for our portfolio companies looking to expand their footprint into the corporate customer segment.

To address these gaps, we designed our fund as a ‘strategic’ fund focused on bringing large corporations as LPs to create a pre-competitive space where early movers help finance innovations that are broadly needed on the market and in the economy.

Our investment process focuses on startups with solutions that address critical pain points for corporations. Our goal is to curate a vetted and de-risked portfolio of solutions that our corporate LPs will be positioned to pilot, purchase, co-develop and/or distribute, helping accelerate the growth of startups in our portfolio. Through our due diligence process, we screen for companies with technologies that are most likely to have direct or indirect benefits, not only for corporate users, but also for a broader range of users critical to improving community resilience – local government, transportation agencies, etc.

Our North star for adaptation impact is the UN Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), for which a full set of metrics will be released at COP30 in November 2025. Considering the localized, varied nature of A&R solutions across sectors and technologies, we plan to identify custom impact metrics for each company we invest in, and map those to the broader Global Goal on Adaptation. We will select metrics as part of our due diligence process or shortly after the investment jointly with founders to ensure alignment with their own priorities and their ability to provide us with the relevant data.

At the fund level, we measure our impact through the lenses of these three market gaps we strive to address:

• Capital Flows: We measure our impact through the successful execution and financial performance of the fund, as well as our ability to help crowd-in additional private investors in the market.

• Strategic Value-Add: We will measure our strategic value-add for corporations through metrics that demonstrate alignment, corporate A&R spend in our portfolio solutions, and joint value creation.

• Innovation Acceleration: Metrics demonstrate that portfolio companies bring technological advancements to support A&R outcomes.