The Project
The Prime Coalition partners with philanthropists to invest catalytic capital in extraordinary companies that combat climate change. In this project, the Prime team focused on why catalytic capital is essential to ensure that high-risk, socially meaningful areas of science and engineering innovation are scaled to solve large social challenges, starting with climate but highlighting additional sectors. This project developed a framework to help private foundations, donor-advised funds, corporate giving programs, and individuals/households/trusts understand when they should utilize catalytic capital to help fill specific capital gaps in the absence of market-rate investment.
Value and Outcomes
Prime has mobilized over $100 million from more than 170 catalytic capital investors for 23 different early-stage ventures that will help mitigate carbon emissions. This project was designed to surface learnings from Prime’s past work in a way that will enable similar work in additional sectors, with the goal of spurring similar deployment and impact.
Prime collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on this effort, producing articles summarizing the data and enumerating the need for intermediation. Prime and MIT have also worked together to develop a professional education course related to the findings, issue case studies analyzing successful and unsuccessful catalytic capital efforts, and create a framework for evaluating the viability for intermediation for specific science and engineering capital gaps.
*Note – The Prime Impact Fund is also one of a small portfolio of investments committed by the MacArthur Foundation to advance the goals of the Catalytic Capital Consortium by supporting powerful demonstrations of the use of catalytic capital across diverse sectors and geographies. Learn more about that investment and the Prime Impact Fund here.
For more information on Prime Coalition, visit their website.