The Climate Fund That Wants Green Tech to Be the Cheap Option

The easiest way to explain At One Ventures is to begin with what it does not want. It does not want a cleaner product that asks customers to pay extra for virtue. It does not want a carbon spreadsheet pasted onto an ordinary business. And it does not want a clever laboratory result whose costs collapse the moment someone tries to build a factory. The San Francisco venture firm is looking for a harsher kind of advantage: deep technology that makes the environmentally better option so economical that an incumbent buyer has a plain business reason to switch.

That premise sounds tidy. The portfolio does not. It contains a vaccine for honeybees, autonomous electric tractors, low-carbon cement, waterless textile dyeing, sodium-iron batteries, electric boat motors, robotic ecosystem restoration and a company that proposes making ammonia by using iron-rich rock beneath the ground as part of the reactor. At One's work is less a single market than a tour through the physical systems that keep modern life running - and leave the largest footprints behind.

Founded in 2020 by Tom Chi, Laurie Menoud and Helen Lin, the firm manages $525 million across two funds. Fund I closed at $150 million in 2021. An oversubscribed $375 million Fund II followed in 2023, backed by limited partners including GenZero, World Wildlife Fund, the MacArthur Foundation, CalSTRS and the New Mexico State Investment Council. At the time of the second close, At One said 35 companies had entered the portfolio in three years and 11 were already recording product sales.

The purchase order is the climate policy

At One sits in a busy climate-capital market alongside firms such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Congruent Ventures, DCVC and Prime Movers Lab. Its distinction is not that it alone funds science or hardware. It is the way the firm joins economics and ecology at the screening stage. The product should offer a step change in cost or performance, while its scale should restore or protect natural systems. Impact is designed into the transaction, not donated after it.

“We’re not touching green premiums with a 50-foot pole.”Tom Chi, on At One's investment logic

Chi's argument is that parity is often too weak. A factory owner does not scrap usable equipment because a new machine is marginally cleaner at the same price. Capital expenditures have inertia; procurement teams have risk limits; supply chains have habits. The challenger needs enough economic force to overcome all three. On its team page, At One offers a deliberately blunt illustration: it searches for products that might cost three times less and be 50 percent better for the environment.

This is also a hedge against fashion and policy whiplash. Subsidies can accelerate a good product, but a company that survives only while the incentive remains is exposed. At One's preferred businesses should still have a reason to exist when the political weather changes. The idea is not anti-policy. It is pro-durability.

A portfolio with muddy boots

The portfolio is organized around agriculture and food, manufacturing, buildings, energy efficiency, energy generation, energy storage, transportation and ecosystem restoration. That breadth follows the footprint rather than a fashionable technology label. Buildings demand heating and cooling. Heavy industry needs high-temperature heat. Food consumes land and freshwater. Renewable grids need storage. Degraded forests and soils need tools that can measure and repair them at scale.

The customers are therefore mostly not “climate consumers.” They are farmers, manufacturers, utilities, construction companies, property insurers, logistics operators and other organizations purchasing equipment, materials, data or energy. At One also serves two direct groups of its own: founders who need early capital and help navigating commercialization, and limited partners seeking venture returns tied to measurable environmental outcomes.

Consider Near Space Labs. Its autonomous Swifts fly beneath satellites and above conventional aircraft, gathering imagery at seven centimeters per pixel or better. At One's investment note argues that the system can deploy much faster than satellites and operate at a fraction of the cost of comparable aerial imaging. An insurer can use that imagery to inspect properties, assess storm damage and move claims. Climate resilience arrives as a better information product.

Or consider Addis Energy, announced in late 2025. Conventional ammonia depends on the energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process. Addis injects engineered fluids into iron-rich rock, then adds nitrogen to trigger a reaction that yields ammonia. The underground environment supplies pressure, temperature and reducing agents that industry usually has to create above ground. The company says the method uses 85 percent less energy. The environmental argument is substantial, but the commercial hook is a lower and less volatile cost of production.

Built for the awkward middle

Venture capital knows how to fund a prototype. Infrastructure capital knows how to finance a mature asset. Climate hardware often gets stranded between them, when a first commercial plant must be commissioned before predictable project finance is available. At One calls attention to this gap, especially the need for creative capital around first-of-a-kind manufacturing facilities.

Its answer is partly organizational. The investment team includes backgrounds in physics, chemistry, biology, engineering and finance. A separate platform brings specialists in talent, marketing, intellectual property, patents, manufacturing, operations and fundraising. These are not decorative services for a company trying to make cement, commission a chemical process or redesign an automotive supply chain. A patent decision can shape financing. A manufacturing yield can decide gross margin. One delayed piece of equipment can consume a startup's runway.

1. Test the physics. Does the invention create a real technical discontinuity rather than a nicer wrapper around the incumbent process?
2. Model the cost curve. Can manufacturing, installation and operation plausibly produce a decisive customer advantage?
3. Trace the ecology. At scale, does adoption improve air, water, soil or biodiversity, and can that effect be measured?
4. Build the company around reality. Hiring, patents, pilots, production and commercial contracts must arrive in the right sequence.

The lead-investor posture matters here. In a 2024 interview with the National Venture Capital Association, At One said it led 90 percent of its first placements. Leading can give a firm more influence over terms, governance and the construction of a round. It also places more responsibility on the original technical judgment. When a startup's next milestone is a pilot plant rather than a software release, conviction is expensive.

Carbon is not the whole weather report

Many climate funds begin with avoided emissions. At One uses a wider ecological frame: air, water, soil and biodiversity. That is why its portfolio can include both energy technologies and Dalan's bee vaccine, Colossal Biosciences' conservation tools, Puna Bio's extremophile microbes for soil and TEMO's quiet electric motors for small boats. A motor that reduces coastal noise can matter to marine life even when the easiest spreadsheet begins with fuel.

This breadth carries a trade-off. Cross-disciplinary investing is demanding, and claims of planetary benefit can become vague unless every company is assessed with specific baselines and system boundaries. At One's answer is technical diligence and the concept of “invention catalysts” - products whose effects ripple into how an entire system is produced or used. The proof, however, must come from deployment. A beautiful model is still only a model until customers buy, factories yield and ecosystems respond.

“Unlike other climate venture funds, we do not consider carbon emissions as our only impact metric.”Tom Chi, National Venture Capital Association interview, 2024

The firm's culture follows the same long lens. It describes its goal as helping humanity from two to 500 years out and says it is prepared for a journey longer than any present team member's lifetime. That language could float away as mission copy, except that it sits beside an insistence on unit costs, manufacturing and commercial deals. The distant horizon is paired with a near-term question: who writes the next purchase order?

Where At One fits

At One is an early-stage specialist for companies that are too physical for conventional software investors and too young for infrastructure funds. It competes for scientists and founders with climate funds, deep-tech firms, corporate venture arms and accelerators. Its offer combines checks, a willingness to lead and operating help built around the unglamorous problems of physical scale.

For founders, the useful lesson is portable: do not make impact a surcharge. Find the physical or biological insight that improves the product, map every cost between the prototype and the customer, and make the ecological benefit grow with revenue. For industrial customers, At One's portfolio is a catalog of emerging alternatives in energy, materials, agriculture, transport and risk data. For investors, it is a concentrated experiment in whether climate venture returns can be generated by changing the economics of the old economy itself.

The experiment is far from settled. Deep-tech companies take years to commercialize, and early technical promise can be lost in permitting, procurement, scale-up or capital markets. But the central observation is hard to dismiss: the greenest product does not automatically become the default. The default changes when buyers can see better performance, lower costs and manageable risk. At One Ventures has placed $525 million behind founders trying to make those three conditions coincide.