Climate Investors Embrace Contrarian Bets at San Francisco Climate Week

Three climate investors took the stage aboard a boat at Heatmap House during San Francisco Climate Week—a venue housed in an old ship—to discuss their unconventional investment strategies.

Heatmap’s Katie Brigham moderated the roundtable, joined by 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 other financial players avoid.

Why Contrarian Investments Work

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

Prelude Ventures specializes in funding early-stage climate companies that are “weird, non-consensus, countercyclical, or just ahead of the curve,” Kra explained.

Case Studies: Cultivated Meat and Electric Motorbikes

Nordan highlighted his investment in Pythag Technologies, a generative AI company focused on lab-grown meat, despite skepticism about the category’s future.

“It’s actually a really interesting time to invest countercyclically in a field like that,” Nordan said.

Su echoed this approach, noting Toba Capital’s willingness to explore unconventional opportunities.

“We are very weird in that we invest across lots of different categories and lots of different stages,” Su said. One of her personal investments is in Xeno, which develops electric motorbikes for commercial drivers and operates swapping and energy networks in emerging markets, starting in East Africa.

The Reward of High-Risk Bets

The panelists emphasized that less popular investments can lead to major breakthroughs.

“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,” Kra noted, adding he intended the pun.

Nordan stressed the role venture capital plays in funding high-risk, early-stage technologies that institutional investors often overlook.

“If there are true breakthroughs out there that may not be investable by mainstream finance at the earliest stages—not because people don’t think they’re really good ideas, but because they may be crazy early-stage or kind of weird, non-consensus, countercyclical, or just ahead of the curve—it would be a real shame,” he said.