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Our investment in Trellis
Climate innovation is not failing for lack of technical ideas. Across energy, industry, agriculture, mobility, and carbon removal, breakthrough technologies are emerging with the potential to reduce emissions at gigaton scale.
What is failing is the bridge to deployment.
Many climate tech startups reach a critical inflection point: the technology works, early customers are interested, and the path to impact is clear. But they need capital to build their first-of-a-kind (FOAK) commercial projects—facilities that prove performance at scale, unlock follow-on financing, and move solutions from promise to practice.
Too often, that capital doesn’t materialize. Traditional venture investors hesitate at infrastructure risk. Project finance requires proven cash flows. Government funding is limited and slow-moving. This “commercial valley of death” is one of the greatest bottlenecks to scaling climate solutions.
Without intervention, transformative technologies stall just before impact begins.
Why Trellis Climate?
The Autodesk Foundation is proud to welcome Trellis Climate, an impact-first catalytic investing program of Prime Coalition, to our Energy & Materials portfolio.
Trellis was created to unlock first-of-a-kind climate infrastructure by deploying pooled, risk-tolerant capital precisely where it is most needed. Their model is designed to be flexible, catalytic, and deeply aligned with impact.
Trellis deploys capital across five priority areas with high emissions reduction potential:
- Electricity and heat
- Industrial decarbonization
- Agriculture, forest, and land use
- Mobility and buildings
- Carbon dioxide removal
Their approach is to provide targeted capital for derisking early projects. Investments to date have focused on three complementary strategies:
- Development capital to help companies conduct critical engineering and feasibility studies.
- Construction capital to build early projects and crowd in other market rate capital.
- Insurance and risk-transfer solutions, in partnership with GreenieRE, to help emerging climate companies reduce balance sheet liabilities by guaranteeing payment or performance.
Each investment is evaluated through three lenses: impact, additionality, and a clear “bridge to somewhere” to ensure projects meaningfully de-risk future deployment and crowd in additional capital.
Unlocking scale
Building and operating first commercial facilities is essential to climate impact at scale. FOAK projects validate performance, demonstrate reliability, and give later-stage financiers the confidence to participate.
Trellis helps companies complete funding for early infrastructure projects and unlock blended follow-on capital across equity, debt, and project finance.
In a market where 57% of U.S. climate tech startups are projected to need capital within 12 months, and late-stage investors have declined sharply, this catalytic capital is urgently needed.
Since inception, Trellis has raised over $11 million in catalytic capital and mobilized over $65 million in follow-on funding. With additional support, they aim to formalize and scale this model.
Our collaboration
Through our partnership, Trellis will continue to deploy catalytic capital into high-impact FOAK projects while building the systems needed to scale.
Autodesk technology and expertise can help accelerate this work by supporting visualization of early infrastructure facilities, strengthening data analytics, and enhancing impact tracking across Trellis’ portfolio.
By combining catalytic capital with technical and ecosystem support, we aim to help close the commercialization gap between breakthrough climate innovation and real-world decarbonization.
“We’re thrilled to partner with the Autodesk Foundation. Not only will our portfolio benefit from Autodesk’s products and support, but we are gaining a partner with a deeply experienced climate team that will help us advance our GHG reduction mission.”
– Lara Pierpoint, Managing Director, Trellis Climate
Climate solutions cannot reach gigaton impact without first crossing the valley between invention and infrastructure. Trellis exists to build that bridge. With the right capital at the right moment, the technologies that define our decarbonized future can move from prototype to proof, and from proof to scale.
Learn more about Trellis Climate.