Climate Investors Embrace Contrarian Bets at San Francisco Climate Week

Three climate investors walked onto a boat—not the start of a joke, but a description of a panel at Heatmap House, a day of conversations and roundtables with leading policymakers, executives, and investors during San Francisco Climate Week. The event took place at the Klamath, a venue housed in an old ship.

Heatmap’s Katie Brigham moderated the roundtable with Gabriel Kra (Managing Director of Prelude Ventures), Matthew Nordan (co-founder of Azolla Ventures), and Susan Su (Partner at Toba Capital). Their investments often target moonshot climate technologies that mainstream financial players might dismiss.

“Things that look contrarian is kind of what we do,” Kra said. “Occasionally, there’s an idea that looks bad that’s actually a good idea.”

Prelude Ventures specializes in early-stage climate companies described as “weird, non-consensus, counter-cyclical, or ahead of the curve.” Nordan, for example, backs cultivated meat, despite skepticism about its widespread adoption.

“I’m presently leading an investment in a company called Pythag Technologies,” Nordan said, referring to the generative AI firm focused on lab-grown meat. “It’s actually a really interesting time to invest counter-cyclically in a field like that.”

Su echoed this approach, emphasizing her firm’s openness to unconventional choices. “We are very weird in that we invest across lots of different categories and lots of different stages,” she said. One of her personal investments is in Xeno, an electric motorbike company serving commercial drivers in emerging markets, starting in East Africa.

The panelists argued that less popular investments can yield major breakthroughs. Kra noted, “We placed a couple of bets on fusion before this current melée occurred that sort of had everybody thinking that, you know, fusion was the next hot thing.” (He later clarified the pun.)

Nordan highlighted venture capital’s role in funding high-risk, early-stage technologies that larger institutional investors often avoid. “If there are true breakthroughs out there that just may not be investable by mainstream finance at the earliest stages,” he said, “not because people don’t think they’re really good ideas, but they may be crazy early-stage or kind of weird, or non-consensus, or counter-cyclical, or just ahead of the curve, it would be a real shame.”