Discovery
Turning “garage innovation”
into global impact
From garages to global networks, Breakthrough Energy is fostering the next wave of climate innovators.
Perhaps no image encapsulates the magic of technological discovery more than that of the scrappy innovator tinkering away in their garage.
It’s how our founder Bill Gates got his start with Microsoft. And it’s how many of the companies we work with begin their journeys.
But how does “garage innovation” turn into global impact?In our 2023 report, we detailed the myriad ways Breakthrough supports early stage innovators, especially through our flagship Breakthrough Energy Fellows program, which offers access to grant funding, world-class curriculum, and connections to the Breakthrough Energy network of business and technical advisors.
The Fellows program allows them to connect with other first-time founders who may be facing similar challenges about how to scale and optimize their innovations.Share Quote
The Fellows Program fills a critical gap for companies that aren’t yet ready to attract commercial investment, spurring new innovation that might otherwise never get off the ground. Breakthrough’s experts serve as thought partners for the Fellows throughout their journey, helping them avoid, prepare for, or weather the inevitable speedbumps involved in scaling their technologies and bringing them to market.
Beyond funding and expertise, the program also provides the Fellows with a vibrant community of early-stage innovators. Many climate innovators are spread out across the country and around the world, with no central hub. The Fellows program allows them to connect with other first-time founders who may be facing similar challenges about how to scale and optimize their innovations.
Over the last year, we’ve continued to make remarkable progress, surpassing 100 fellows across 16 countries since launching our initial cohort in 2021. These teams have already raised nearly $250 million in follow-on funding to further support their road to market. In addition to the technical progress and capital these Fellows teams have been able to attract, we are guiding them through our curriculum and programing to help build out their technologies and become stronger leaders.
But we’re ready to do more, to fill more gaps across the early-stage ecosystem.
That’s why at this summer’s Breakthrough Energy Summit in London, we announced Breakthrough Energy Discovery, a broader set of efforts that expand our ability to support and accelerate pre-venture climate innovation.
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Ashley Grosh introduces Breakthrough Energy DiscoveryThis work will be divided across three areas.
Supporting Bold Thinkers
First, we will continue to find and support bold technical thinkers through our flagship Breakthrough Energy Fellows program. This program supports Innovators—who typically have a company and early-stage technology to commercialize, Explorers—who are working at an even earlier stage, typically still in a national lab or university setting, and Business Fellows—seasoned industry experts who serve as navigators, providing commercialization and business advisory to all of our projects.
Innovators
Typically have a company and early-stage technology to commercialize
Explorers
Working at an even earlier stage, typically still in a national lab or university setting
Business Fellows
Seasoned industry experts who serve as navigators, providing commercialization and business advisory to all of our projects
Seeding New Ideas
Second, we’ve launched Discovery Workshops, a proactive effort to go further upstream into a specific technology area and identify gaps that need further exploration. We want to take ideas, theory, and science and steer them towards new, breakthrough applications, long before they enter the lab or even a garage. These workshops convene experts from around the world to help us dig deeper into some of the most exciting technology horizons—from hydrogen carriers to superconductivity to new battery chemistry—with the ultimate goal of funding applied research in these high-impact areas. The workshops have already generated promising ideas that have earned Explorer grants and could potentially become Fellows projects.
Fostering Global Ecosystems
Third, we’re helping to stitch together global innovation ecosystems, connecting climate platforms across academia and collaborating on where our Discovery model can be replicated and expanded. Working hand-in-hand with other accelerators, incubators, national labs, and research institutions is critical to success at these early stages of climate technology development.
For example, earlier this year we announced our first Fellows hub outside of the United States. Working closely with regional partners Temasek and Enterprise Singapore, BE Fellows—Southeast Asia hopes to foster climate tech entrepreneurship throughout the Southeast Asian region.
Why Southeast Asia?The region is filled with diverse talent, strong technical universities, and access to many key industrial partners that are critical to helping new technologies get adopted into the marketplace. But like many promising markets, Southeast Asia also faces significant funding gaps, including for innovation, that need to be addressed in order to meet ambitious net-zero climate goals. Supporting regions like Southeast Asia is vitally important—not just because it will help bring global emissions down, but because much of the population is on the front lines of the extreme impacts of climate change.
Why Discovery
Our expanded efforts, and the launch of this platform, didn’t come together overnight. It’s the result of hundreds of hours of conversations with innovators, climate experts, and business leaders.
With Breakthrough Energy Discovery, we believe that innovation is infinite: it is the engine that drives forward progress. We also believe that innovation is rarely linear: it is filled with false starts, long detours, and happy accidents. However, what we can control, and replicate, are the time, space, and resources needed to foster that innovation and give it the best possible chance to succeed. That’s exactly what our platform does.
