The State of the Transition

For me, there’s a little bit of déjà vu. It reminds me of the early 2000s when I made the transition from Microsoft to my second career in global health philanthropy. At the time, more than ten million children were dying every year. It was heartbreaking—and also infuriating.

Most of the deaths were in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and were preventable. In many cases, the vaccines or medicine that would’ve saved children’s lives already existed. They were often on the pharmacy shelf in rich countries. But in poorer nations, they were extremely difficult to find.

That changed around the millennium when the world responded, building a global health network that manufactured, paid for, and delivered lifesaving vaccines and medicines to children. Within 20 years, the child mortality rate fell by 50%. That progress came from both scaling existing innovations and inventing new ones. Researchers developed revolutionary methods for preventing HIV and malaria, for example.

This ecosystem of investors and innovators has achieved a lot already. We’ve developed technologies that are extremely effective at reducing humanity’s greenhouse gas footprint, and we are still developing more.

The next challenge is deployment—scaling these technologies across the economy. This is something large corporations are very good at. But for the past few decades, they’ve been wary about investing large sums in clean technologies because they’ve viewed them as mostly emissions reducers that help our environment, not as innovations that can help their businesses.

This started to change in 2024. At Breakthrough Energy, we noticed a subtle, but important, perspective shift from both the investors and corporations we engage with. Major global investors—including endowments, sovereign wealth funds, and infrastructure investors—are finally getting off the sidelines and engaging in climate tech opportunities in meaningful ways. Meanwhile, corporate leaders increasingly understand that climate tech is not just about shrinking their carbon footprint. It’s also about strengthening their businesses and deploying their capital more efficiently.

Take Siemens, for example. They’re one of the world’s biggest providers of industrial technology and have a massive real estate footprint with 1,300 buildings around the world, both offices and factories.

Siemens wants to decarbonize its entire business by 2030, and one way is with windows—specifically, new vacuum-insulated windows invented by a company named LuxWall.*

The math makes the purchase a no-brainer. Siemens’ investment will pay itself back within 5-8 years and this cost isn't offset in any way by additional benefits from government tax incentives or subsidies.

Other corporations are investing because they want to get in at the ground floor of new industries that, one day, will be crucial to the survival of their businesses.

They’re partnering with Breakthrough across our entire platform. They’re working with our team focused on contrails, which account for as much as half of aviation-related emissions. They’ve also invested in many Breakthrough-backed companies including Graphyte (carbon removal), ZeroAvia (building hydrogen-electric engines for planes) and Infinium (sustainable aviation fuel).

Infinium makes ultra-low carbon eFuels—including a new type of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF)—by combining captured CO2 with clean hydrogen. The resulting fuel can cut aviation’s greenhouse gas emissions by about 90%.

A few years ago, most airlines would’ve dismissed a major investment in SAF as too expensive or risky. But in my experience, the smartest companies take a more serious look at new technologies. They don’t just calculate the cost of investing. They also calculate the cost of missing out on a potentially revolutionary new breakthrough for their industry.

In American Airlines’ case, securing their own SAF production early means they can position themselves as industry leaders in sustainability and also safeguard their fuel supply chain. Sometimes, people use the term “future-proofing your business” to describe these investments. But they’re more than “future-proofing”—they’re “future-seizing.”

At Breakthrough, we see American Airlines as a standout corporate partner because they understand that deploying climate tech isn’t one dimensional. They see the landscape the way we do at Breakthrough—that it requires engagement at every stage of the climate tech lifecycle, from early pilot projects to scaling these technologies across their business.

The opportunities aren’t limited to aviation. The Clean Industrial Revolution spans every corner of the global economy. In manufacturing, there’s green steel and net-zero cement. In agriculture, researchers have found ways to replace synthetic nitrogen fertilizer with microbes that convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form plants can use.

These innovations are ready for prime time. They’re not science projects—they’re science products. They work. They’re commercially viable. And with some investment, they can be produced on the scale that large companies need.

More and more companies and investors are gaining a toehold in new global industries.