Green Markets Day 2025 – Founders at the Frontier: Scaling Climate Tech in Hard to Abate Sectors

In the final panel discussion of Green Markets Day 2025, moderator Lauren Faber O’Connor, Partner at Lowercarbon Capital, led a conversation featuring Gregory Constantine, CEO and Founder of AirCo, Sarah Lamaison, Co-Founder and CEO of Diocycle, Sandeep Nijhawan, CEO of Electra, and Hiro Iwanaga, CEO of TalugAg.

See below for a full transcript.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

I’m not kidding when I say this is the most exciting panel of the day. This is like the discussion of how we are realizing all the net zero goals and commitments that are represented across this room, across GMA. So I’m really excited to get us going.

Very quickly, I’m Lauren Faber O’Connor. I’m a partner at Lowercarbon Capital. You heard from Clay, our GP, earlier today. So I don’t have to explain what Lowercarbon is and what we do and who we invest in.

But I will say that for the buyers in the room, one note is I feel you. I understand your world and I empathize with you. I’m a former CSO myself, not of a large company, but of a large city. The next largest city to the city that we are in right now, just due west of here.

And I really do understand the feeling of charting out your net zero goals, understanding your scope one, two, three emissions, and then figuring out what to do. And I will tell you that 20 years in climate in my career, I have never been more optimistic about our ability to meet those commitments and meet a net zero future than I have just in the last couple of years at Lowercarbon being immersed with the entrepreneurs that are solving our problems for us. And we have to show up for them.

And so who we have represented on the panel today are honestly some of the most exciting and important entrepreneurs on the planet right now as it relates to decarbonizing these hard to decarbonize sectors.

They’re hard to decarbonize not just because of the technology, but these are very intricate supply chains and markets that we’re infiltrating. So in order to do that, we have to be really smart and savvy and develop technologies that are truly, as Clay was talking about earlier in the Lowercarbon way, better, faster, cheaper, on a path to commercialization, and what can we do to make them go faster.

And so we’re going to get going. And I’m going to start by first letting everyone kind of go across the board and tell us who you are. Tell us about your innovation, the problem that you’re solving as it relates to climate, but you’re also solving other problems too. And so feel free to talk about that in terms of why you’re so attractive to buyers. And then we’ll get into specifics of how you all are engaging in the market.

So Sarah, I’ll start with you.

SARAH LAMAISON:

Great. Well, I’m happy to be here. Thank you, GMA, for today and for everything behind today and that you’re doing. It’s super important.

I’m the CEO and co-founder of Dioxycle. And so what we are doing at Dioxycle is that we are developing a novel technology to convert carbon emissions into key chemicals, key-based chemicals that go into, for example, footwear, apparel, plastics, medical device, PVC pipes, a number of things that we touch.

And so these small primary carbon-based chemicals are like ethylene, propylene, acetic acid, formic acid. And together, they represent over 2% of the world’s emission and a $350 billion combined market.

And so just to give a bit of background, we started in January 2021, and before that, with my co-founder, while in grad school, we came across a technology that, instead of using fossil fuels to make these chemicals, could make them just using water, electricity, and captured carbon.

And you know, skeptical at first, we did start investigating. And so we stayed for five years really working on that technology. And so in the last 10 years, really this carbon electrolysis technology, which is a field, it’s not something we invented, has really got a tremendous amount of academic momentum.

But it was facing really like three big hurdles, which were, I mean, still are in some version of the technology: energy efficiency, durability, and of course, scalability.

And so what we’ve done since we started, we developed an actual new pathway that go through carbon monoxide electrolysis for like the techie of the room. And that actually can cut by nearly half the amount of energy you need to make ethylene from carbon from CO2 if you were to do the full pathway.

And then we also got the system stable by advanced engineering on the catalyst for thousands of hours versus the hundreds of hours reported in the literature, which has been very important.

And finally, we’ve scaled from an electrolyzer of a postage stamp to a car-sized electrolyzer. And you need very modular technology. And so once you have one module, you’re just stacking the same module and then paralyzing the same stack.

And so moving forward now, we are ready to do our commercial demo, which will be our next step in the next two years.

Yeah, and so with this, we’ve been super, super lucky to attract in fact, very, very ambitious clients and sign like binding off take in the, example, like cosmetics industry or consumer goods industry.

And the reason behind that is because these people really value our unique value proposition, which is like virgin-like quality, which is very important. No downgrading, like in certain recycling, because we are making the same molecule from emissions.

Of course, sustainability. You can reach the lowest carbon footprint, of course, when you’re using just electricity to convert carbon oxide into the chemical. And finally, the past parity, which is very rare, as you know, in a carbon utilization field. So yeah, that’s us.

GREGORY CONSTANTINE:

Impressive.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Right, exactly. So carbon free, recycled carbon, fossil fuel free, plastics, no big deal. So Greg, let’s talk about SAF.

GREGORY CONSTANTINE:

Greg Constantine, co-founder and CEO of AIRCO. AIRCO’s been on a mission for the last seven or eight years to commercialize an array of carbon dioxide to chemicals and fuels technologies.

Over the course of the last seven years, we’ve commercialized a CO2 to ethanol technology, a CO2 to methanol technology. We’re on the commercial pathway towards a CO2 to aviation fuel and rocket fuel technology.

And in those sectors, we work with a bunch of different customers across both the public and the private sector as well. So I know there’s a lot of potential customers in the audience tonight. So excited to talk through a little bit about that.

I think the reason in which we’ve gone after a lot of the sectors that we have is it’s where the impact is the greatest, but also it’s some of the largest chem industries in the world, obviously similar to some of the chemicals you’ve done.

We’re very much focused on the, almost a Daft Punk saying there, we’ve harder, better, faster, stronger. I think you said faster, better, and cheaper.

I think that’s just the core of what we do is how fast can you continue to move in a rapidly changing environment? How can you continue to build a business that generates near-term revenues and long-term revenues as well? And how can you continue to wade through all the ups and downs and the changes that happen throughout, obviously, the US, but also globally as well?

So we’ve got an incredibly bright team that’s underpinning all the work that’s being done as well. But yeah, happy to dig into a lot of the work that’s happening.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Awesome, which we will. All right, Sandeep.

SANDEEP NIJHAWAN:

Thanks. Sandeep Nijhawan. I am the co-founder and CEO of Electra. We are a clean iron company.

Iron is, believe it or not, everywhere. We live on the planet made out of iron. But it’s a key element of steel. And 98% of steel is actually iron. And steel is an industry, as we’re all aware, that’s massive carbon footprint, roughly 3.6 gigaton. And if that industry was a country, it would be ranked third in its emissions globally. And 90% of those emissions actually come from refining iron, from the ore that we dig out of the ground.

So from the problem statement perspective, of course, it’s an emission-related thing. But there is a second part of this problem statement that we don’t talk about, which is the sustainability of the entire value chain, which starts with mining. And we actually leave a lot of mined, but resources like the ores that cannot be used in any of the iron making process today or what we are thinking of in future.

So roughly for every ton of iron that gets iron ore that gets shipped to go mix steel, some of the mines can leave a two ton behind that has already been dug out of the ground, and it’s just baking in the sun.

So as a company, we took that head on as a challenge, that how we can solve for this two-headed or two-faceted problem. And what we have is a solution that’s an electrified process combines chemistry, specifically electrochemistry and electrolysis, with hydrometallurgy, which is how every metal has been made in the world except iron to date.

And bringing that for iron making in a way that not only abates that emission, so as long as your electron is renewable, there is that emission-free product. And the end product is pure metallic iron, so we don’t feed forward any impurities.

And in fact, anything that is in the ore, and our ability to use a wide, broad range of ores because we use hydrometallurgy, allows us to refine those, what’s in the impurities as byproducts and co-products as well, and which by their very nature, hence, are also green minerals, that can feed into adjacent markets and industry.

And I would say, I mean, we are in the same situation as some of the folks on the panel said that the other problem we are all trying to solve for is how do you take what we have and scale that? And it’s like, feels like moving a mountain. Everything from contracted offtakes to how do you build together a financial model that allows these technologies to scale as rapidly as possible.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

We’re going to attack that mountain in a moment. So Hiro, over to you.

HIRO IWANAGA:

Oh, thank you. So ammonia is the second most produced chemical in the world, 80% of which is used as fertilizer. Half of the nitrogen in your body started as ammonia. And so it is this raw material that’s critical for global food security.

But there are two problems. One is it is 1.5%, 2% of global carbon emissions by itself. The more immediate problem, really the one that we started addressing from the beginning, is that we produce it in giant centralized plants. China, Russia, the United States are the largest producers, and ship it all over the world.

And that works for places with well-developed and reliable supply chains, although over the last few years I think we’ve realized that those supply chains are more brittle than we thought. It doesn’t work in many parts of the world.

And so at Talus, we build modular green ammonia systems. We are a green infrastructure company. We deploy these systems on our balance sheet, sign 10-year fixed price offtake agreements, and lower the cost of fertilizer by 20% to 50% in different markets. We guarantee availability of supply, sign long-term fixed price contracts, so guarantee price of that supply. And our systems are– a nice side effect of being green is that our systems are fully carbon free.

So we are working with a couple global food companies that are off-takers for our agricultural projects, for our environmental attributes, and then with large agricultural distributors and large commercial farms and large mining companies to deliver green ammonia to them now.

I think what differentiates us is we are, yeah, we’re deploying now and scaling now versus years from now.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Well, let’s talk about partnerships then. And so I want to throw it back to you and maybe Greg as well. We’re going to pop around. So maybe here on then, Greg, can you talk through one of those partnerships, what it kind of took to get there? And then, Greg, I’m going to ask you the same.

HIRO IWANAGA:

Yeah, absolutely. So we have $1.3 billion in LOIs and offtake agreements in the US alone. We are working with PepsiCo on environmental attributes and a couple other global food companies.

What it takes– I think there are two things. One, our attributes are priced competitively. Our fertilizer is 20% to 50% cheaper than market incumbents. And so we don’t need to charge a lot for our environmental attributes. So we use a standard market benchmark and price it off of that.

And as a result of that, I think some people ask us, why is it hard to sign long-term offtake? And I would argue it’s way easier for– most of our customers, whether it’s the product itself or the environmental attribute, are attracted to a 10-year fixed price offtake that’s 20% to 40%, 20% to 50% cheaper, depending on where you are, and so in those cases, I actually think the long-term offtake is one of our– is a feature, not a bug. And so they’re difficult agreements to sign. They just take a long time to work through large companies.

But we’ve been really grateful for the support that we’ve had from our large agricultural partners, large consumer food companies that have been instrumental in our early scaling and hopefully continue scaling.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Good. We’ll create some FOMO for others in the room that are hearing about the great deal and then they’ll want to come and do more.

HIRO IWANAGA:

Yeah.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Greg, over to you.

GREGORY CONSTANTINE:

Yeah, I think, you know, so we’ve done, we’ve had commercial arrangements across the gamut of our business. I think there’s a couple, there’s a couple of key throughputs that sit within them all.

And one of the examples I’ll give is that we do a lot of work with the US Department of Defense for our aviation fuel. And some of the things that rang true in that technology along with the others are transparency. So whether you’re doing well or not, well, always being upfront with a partner, especially in the developmental stage of a contract, even in the actual commercial stage of a contract as well.

And then at the end of the day, results, right? If you’re saying you’re going to deliver something, you do everything in your power to deliver that. And then that will, at least for us, have led to subsequent contracts there on after. We’ve won multiple contracts with the USDOD through different vehicles.

But it’s all come down to saying we’re going to do something, delivering on that something, and then doing that again the next time. And then that continues to grow and develop trust with those partners as well. And being transparent along that whole journey is really, really important, has led to some of the contracts that we’re continually winning as well.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

And it’s an interesting point, because, as we know, the U.S. government isn’t doing, and particularly when it comes to anything that the defense sector is doing, they’re not doing it to be green they’re doing it because this is a key part of their defense strategy, so… there’s a lot of reasons to commercialize these technologies and being able to move faster through the larger buyers agreements, advanced market alliances make a big difference.

So I want to turn to Sarah and to Sandeep because while this is true of, in some ways, everybody– I feel like on the plastics, the chemicals, and the steel side, you are deep in a supply chain. This can be true of everyone, but let’s pick on you guys. You’re deep in a supply chain. You’re in some cases like an input to an input to the product, and then you’re trying to work with the downstream brand, or maybe it’s the upstream, you know, chemical provider, and so what does it look like to engage with those different upstream and downstream partners and what can they be doing to facilitate that engagement?

SARAH LAMAISON:

To downstream and upstream partners?

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Yeah, how like the partners that you’re working with how can they make it easier for you to help them? Like, help me help you.

SARAH LAMAISON:

Okay yeah. I have a great advisor who always tell me it’s easier to pull a string than to push a rope. So based on this, I was like, okay, we have to start downstream and really working with partners who are facing consumers. They have taken, they have committed to do things for, whether it’s like reducing their amount of virgin fossil plastics in the final product.

So yeah, our strategy has been to go downstream initially, and so really find these customers who value the features of our offering, which, as I said, was really on the virgin-like drop-in quality, while also having the sustainability and the cost competitive of it. So that has been a big work.

But of course, you also need to make sure you assemble the value chain there, because they are, I mean, the next question they have is how are you gonna make that happen? And so, I mean, when you look at how we’ve structured our business team, actually, there is one person in charge of downstream, one person in charge of upstream polymerization partners.

And so the idea for us is really to go downstream, get these offtakes agreements, and then have a, whether it’s soft tolling agreement or things like this, to make sure we also retain the value and don’t get completely crushed. I mean, our value doesn’t get shrinked in the transaction. So that has been a first thing.

One specific example I can cite where we see really the complexity of the value chain is, for example, footwear. So, you know, ethylene, acetic acid, these are things that are used in footwear, for example, in shoe soles and things like this. And that’s a very, very complex supply chain because a lot of the production, I mean, the production of the base chemical, of course, happens in the US, in Europe, in a number, in Asia, pretty much everywhere. But then when it comes to actually making the, I mean, the intermediate to the final product, like the shoe sole, then everything is happening in Asia.

So that’s where I think, typically, environmental attributes would be an amazing thing. So hopefully, GMA is going to continue pushing that effort because you now have a disruption between the final customer, so the footwear brand, and the supply chain. You’re not going to make ethylene in the US and polymerize that and then ship the pellets somewhere else and then ship back the meat sole of your shoe to the US. It doesn’t make sense from an environmental standpoint, from an economic standpoint.

So that has been the difficulty we have seen on implementing, once you have the contract, on implementing the thing.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Interesting. So in some ways, can the EAC, the book and claim work decouple some of that so that you can overcome some of those supply chain issues?

SARAH LAMAISON:

Yep.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Sandeep.

SANDEEP NIJHAWAN:

So in steel industry, I mean, the supply chain, first of all, is as entrenched as it can be. Today, the way it exists is that it is four miners in the world that produce 90% of the ore that the world uses. And 70% of that actually goes to China. So highly entrenched on the ore side.

And then it goes into what’s called integrated iron and steelmaking. That part of the value chain is not broken. It is together. They make first what’s called pig iron, then they go make steel. And then it goes to the end users, whether it’s going into automotive, let’s say, part or in this building. So that’s what is existing today.

And the way we think about it and the way we have built the company from the day number one is you have to really lift the value chain from what you’re trying to do from end to end. And one of the key things that is going to happen through this transition is that steel is going to break into iron as a separate aspect of the value chain, and then steel that converts iron into steelmaking for a various number of reasons. And what we have been trying to do is align our value proposition from what we believe is an end-to-end solution across the value chain.

So let’s just take that and unpack it. So when we have a discussion with the ore companies, because we also need the ore to convert that, the discussion there is that, look, our value proposition is we can take the ore that is sitting in the mine, baking in sun, that you cannot sell today. That means that your mine life, without digging more and developing more mines, can be extended for another 20 years, 30 years, 50 years. There’s a value to be harnessed there. Let’s work together to capture that value.

When we go having this discussion, we are the iron supplier, so we are in the next, and then we go to the steel guy. Our value proposition to them is like, look, we do not feed forward any impurity to you. Okay? We will refine it. We’ll give you pure metal that you need. And hence, that simplifies your steel making step. And so there’s value being created in terms of a better product. That creates more efficiency in your system, productivity, yield. And we quantify that to the nth degree to say, how do we capture with you that part of the value and price that product.

When we go and talk to the end user of steel, and this could be a car company, let’s say, the discussion is, well, our product will help enable the environmental attribute you’ve been wanting for. They don’t care as such. Steel is steel is steel. At the end of the day, they are looking for that environmental attribute. There is a sustainability story to be harnessed there at that point, but it is really about not just the carbon, which we focus a lot, but also the overall sustainability of the value chain. So there the discussion could be book and claims, EACs, to either bundled or unbundled physical product that provides that premium.

And last but not least is that in this whole ecosystem, there is again circularity in this whole thing as the world is transitioning towards things that should be recycled more. So that means you can also recycle more of the extended steel. So how can a scrap and the end product that comes back into the cycle of the value chain, how we can enable that as well to make it more circular at the end of the day.

So it’s really about aligning that value chain and the supply chain. And in fact, crafting different parts of the story to the audience that is sitting across from you.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

And to your point, when you said, at the end of the day, the car companies just want steel, steel is steel is steel. They want the environmental attributes, but steel. And we’ve had a bit of this over the course of the day, which is, the EAC market is seeming to provide a level of stability in terms of these long-term off-takes, bankable off-takes, but you all are developing physical products that live in the physical world that also have to make it into a market physically as a commodity.

What about that part of the equation? Is there a role for the EAC buyers to facilitate that through their supplier network, through co-development, through– how do we square that whole piece together? And anyone can jump in on that.

SANDEEP NIJHAWAN:

I can jump into it. Look, I mean, no doubt the book and claim and what the hyperscalers are trying to do is a very important piece of the puzzle. At the end of the day, that physical good has to create and get embedded into the physical world we live in, which is where we are today.

So the way we see it is this is one of the few ways we have to go about doing it. And what we find is that, let’s say we have a discussion with a book and claim type of methodology with a hyperscaler, and they’re happy to take that attribute, and then you’re selling a gray commodity back into the market.

But the minute we have the discussion with the automotive company, they said, hold on, hold on, hold on, we also want that attribute. And it creates that healthy tension in the negotiation that, look, somebody has to pay for this. And it has to be bankable.

So a car company, the procurement process, if any of you are familiar with it, it doesn’t get more difficult than that. It does not. And they are fighting for every cent, every penny, a tenth of a penny on the pricing contract with you. And it is really about putting that tension and fear of missing out, like FOMO, in the equation, that is a very important tool to make this all come together, as well as bring new parties into the equation that are willing to off-take the physical good, because it is still, in our case, even if it’s a gray iron, it is still pure metallic iron with no impurities. So there’s still value to be harnessed without that green iron attribute that they’re willing to go take.

But we take the tension out of the room that, all right, who’s going to pay for that environmental attribute? And if a hyperscaler is willing to do that, then we can connect that back into the value chain. So a hyperscaler can go into the data center, or somebody can, if it’s a logistic company, can be putting trucks and moving goods. And the trucks need steel, and the steel needs iron, and iron comes from us.

So it absolutely has to be physically connected back together. It’s a harder thing across the value chain from an accounting perspective, no doubt about it. If I could, I would just sell a bundle product any day of the week if I can.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Well, and then we’ve talked about this is– book and claim systems are maybe a means to an end and not the end itself per se. But do others have a perspective on getting the physical product into the ecosystem and if there’s a role for the EAC buyers to participate in that?

HIRO IWANAGA:

Yeah, so we think about the world differently. We sell a commodity. It needs to be price competitive or cheaper, that’s it. And it needs to be reliable.

And so when we go to an off-taker, whether that’s in Kenya, Del Monte, or Kenya Nut Company, whether that’s Ilovo or Zambia Sugar or the big US co-ops that we serve now, they only care that we can deliver a ton of ammonia reliably and cheaper than the long-term average. And so we only deploy systems where we can be cost competitive or cheaper.

And the environmental attributes represent 5% of our revenue, 7% of our revenue. So it doesn’t really drive our revenues. And so it’s helpful because we have a captive supporter. But fundamentally, if you have a commodity that’s half the price of the existing commodity, demand’s not the problem.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

We’ll be coming on to audience Q&A in just a moment. So be thinking about your question. I don’t know if there’s someone running around. Okay, so thinking about your question.

In the meantime, I would love to hear, you know, if you have kind of an anecdote of talking to a potential customer, a potential buyer about your technology, about your solution, and is there anything that sort of surprised them or kind of gotten over the hump to be talking from, going from like, tell me about this, this sounds really interesting, to let’s do something, let’s make something real happen.

GREGORY CONSTANTINE:

I’m happy to jump in. I think there’s a couple things, at least for us specifically, that have really kind of gotten us over that hump or hurdle, I would say, is the level, the time frame in which we actually have the ability to get there. I think that for at least if we just talk about the aviation fuel as an industry specifically and kind of SAF and then PTL within there, I think the perception is that the time horizons are really far out, which they are for a lot of organizations as well.

I think for us specifically, we’ve had the ability to really collapse those time frames. And I think that, as with anything, faster and speed is the core to everything. And we’ve able to come up with a lot of those solutions through just innovative business model thinking as well and finding kind of, I would say, gaps in the way that you get to there.

But also just continually pushing teams to meet those goals, meet those deadlines, essentially. But I think speed is just so integral for any new innovative technology and delivering as well, and making sure that you’re delivering is kind of quintessential or has been for our kind of moderate level of success, I would say.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Yes, we all live on these tight timelines. Agreed. Sarah?

SARAH LAMAISON:

Yeah, I think in our case, I think it’s, I mean, this time, it’s more for the intermediate players, so the source of carbon emissions, and who are very often the polymerization partner as well. I think the fact that it’s a retrofit is interesting to them, because they see this as a way to learn how to use a new technology to produce the chemicals they know how to produce, but also as a way to extend the lifetime of their asset, which is already amortized, and so just add more production, while also having this dual decarbonization, the existing emission by capturing them, converting them, and also producing this good for electricity.

So I think that has been important because then they see that because of the modularity as well of that technology, if you can piggyback all the back end of their processes, for example, separation, it’s really just adding electrolyzer, which are modular. And in that case, they see this opportunity as a way to kind of de-risk the scale up and just see first on a few modules and then have the possibility to grow.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Okay. Fantastic. Do we have any questions from the audience?

ANDREW ALCORTA:

Hi, Andrew Alcorta. So one question that I have here is, how are you all thinking about capital scarcity and availability as you scale up, and in particular I’ve already had several conversations today about the missing middle. And as a former DOEer, we were trying to step into the missing middle, and we are clearly not now. And so I’m just curious how you really think about bridging that gap as you’re getting to folk demonstration in particular. And are there particular needs that this audience or the investor community more broadly that you would highlight in that space?

GREGORY CONSTANTINE:

I’m happy to go again. No, I think we would do it as capital availability. I think there’s plenty of dry powder out there for businesses that are actually delivering on what it is they are saying they’re doing. I think it’s definitely a challenging environment for a lot of organizations. But if you have a clear strategy and you’re executing on that, and you have a clear pathway forward to not just revenue, but even potential profitability in the future, there will be funders out there for that.

I think the last point I would make is, you’ve got to get creative with it as well, right? It’s not just going to, it may not just all come from one source of capital.

And so from our business perspective, we obviously do a lot of work with the US government that is bringing in not only sources of non-dilutive capital across grants, but also revenue as well. And then working in the commercial sector, bringing in revenues as well as contractual obligations with large organizations as well.

Bankable off-take agreements is obviously like an underpinning for a lot of the customers that you have. So I think that we view it as availability, but it’s just being creative with what’s out there as well.

Yeah, go ahead.

SANDEEP NIJHAWAN:

I’ll add one more color to this discussion. So I think the challenge, I think a lot of what we do sort of fits into the first of the kind risk that is underlying to a lot of stuff we do. And what happens at the end of the way the math works is against you is that given the capital intensity, you need to put in the capital stack together and the risk that remains, you try to size the project smaller and smaller in some way, which goes against the economics, unit economics that you’re trying to drive. And very soon, as your unit economics goes up, to be then financeable, you’re trying to drive price higher and to get back the IRR that you need to match the capital.

So it’s just a difficult math that you’re trying– that’s what you’re up against. So there is one source of capital that I just want to put it out there that we have been very successful is that does not look at IRR as a metric for financing. It’s called the strategics.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Strategics.

SANDEEP NIJHAWAN:

Strategics are there for a strategy. They’re here for a reason. And as long as that value proposition exists, they can come in and they can help you take that risk and sort of help you go through that piece where the typical financial sources of money, whether, of course, equity always takes more risk, but other parts of the capital stack, like debt, and that you need to lower the cost of the capital, it doesn’t take a risk.

And the name of the game is how are you de-risking this? So in that sense, having a solution in today’s world that is highly modular makes a lot of, helps you a lot, because in our case, we want to build, let’s say, 100x plant, like let’s call 100 units it wants to produce, but we can roll out the first train of 10 units, okay? And let that be equity financed predominantly. And then the next 10 and the 20 and the 30th, you’re basically now sliding down on that capital stack and helping drive your unit economics down. You are reducing the risk down and hence you’re able to build that capital stack.

So there is, I mean, obviously, it’s a very hard math that you are trying to attack. So I don’t want to, by any means, say it’s easy. But that’s what we have been using.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

It’s a little bit like what we were hearing on the two panels ago, the finance panel, with what Jigar was saying about the role of strategics, and with Brandon at Microsoft talking about the multiple roles that they have played in terms of investment and off-take and direct purchases. Yeah, so see here.

I know we’re coming to time. I do in the spirit of action, I want to take a chance for everyone to go down the line and just tell us, coming out of today, people have spent the day here, you’re spending your lives developing these solutions that we all need and want to see in the market, what can we do here today? What do you here today want to have happen before, while we go off and have drinks shortly?

SARAH LAMAISON:

Well, there was like some Lego executive who was supposed to attend, and I think he’s not here. So if someone knows him, I’d love to talk to that.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

They use a lot of plastic.

SARAH LAMAISON:

Because toys are great!

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Toys!

SARAH LAMAISON:

They make life more fun.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

I have a seven-year-old, and it’s like stressful the amount of plastic in my household. I get it. OK. All right. Plastics.

GREGORY CONSTANTINE:

I think getting in early is really important. You mentioned strategics, I think, crucial to the success of probably all of us up here on stage and many, many more. You’re not going to win them all. You might not win any, but you may take a winner or two along the way.

But I think it’s very, very important for people to try to come along that journey and place some of those bets, whether strategics or otherwise, on companies that are out there trying to do this sort of stuff because it’s not easy stuff, but there will be companies that persevere and prevail. So I’d say get in early and be involved.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Get in the game. All right.

SANDEEP NIJHAWAN:

Lauren, it’s late. Can you repeat the question? I’m spacing out.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Before you go, what do you want to have happen in this room to help scale?

SANDEEP NIJHAWAN:

Oh, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, very easy. Buy, buy, buy. If you can buy the product, everything will come together. If people can off-take the product, that is what creates the pull. And every piece of the puzzle will fall into place, in my opinion.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

All right, Hiro. Close us out.

HIRO IWANAGA:

I think I will go back to the question I was asking from the audience. We’re raising our $200 million project finance facility, which we aim to close early next year. I think it’ll be fine. But–

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Off-take helps. Off-take helps.

HIRO IWANAGA:

Yeah, and we have 150 of it secured now. So I think we’ll get there. But it’s not there until it hits your bank. So it is fundamentally, we have the off-takes. We have our demonstration systems in place. As we look forward over the next six, twelve months, we still have incredible capital and execution risk. So the good thing is a lot of that’s on us. And so it’s less about what we need from the world, more—

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Things in your control.

HIRO IWANAGA:

Yeah, I mean, we’re probably 10 months behind schedule of our original plan, but at least now—

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Transparency as we were talking about there, Greg.

HIRO IWANAGA:

Most of it is within our control going forward.

SANDEEP NIJHAWAN:

Well, if you’re not, there’s something wrong.

HIRO IWANAGA:

Yeah.

LAUREN FABER O’CONNOR:

Well, this is fantastic. Thank you guys so much. Please give all of them a round of applause.

Just hang on here for a quick second. I’m going to take a second just to close us out. And thank you so much to Kim and Kari and the GMA team for an amazing day today.

My kind of conclusion that I want to leave you all with is that as we were just discussing up here, we have all of those important, key, crucial ecosystem partners literally here today. And so GMA has done that. We have together brought in the entire piece of the how to make all systems go between the buyers, the sellers, the investors, and other pieces of the supply chain. So please use this moment.

For buyers, you, and I know in a lot of cases, tons of people who are in this room probably speaking to the choir, but not necessarily across the board, you really are the master of your destiny here. Being part of these alliances does help you reach scale so much faster. And so just implore you to take these opportunities seriously.

And to the entrepreneurs, the innovators, the investors, this event is a testament to the fact that there is a market. There is a market for these products, and we know that we can get there if we all step in. We heard JP Morgan say, we all were a little bit outside of our comfort zone, and that’s what made it go. And that’s what we have to continue to do. Everyone has to just move a little bit outside of, doesn’t have to be a comfort zone, just things we haven’t done before. It’s only discomfort because we are just getting started. But we’re all here to do that, and that’s the ecosystem that we’re building.

And so thank you to GMA. Lowercarbon is really proud to be a part of this as well. And let’s go make things happen over drinks and small bites in the other room. Thank you all.