Actuate Climate joins forces with Prime Coalition

Actuate Climate will become Prime’s Early Climate Infrastructure (ECI) program, enabling systems innovation for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in time and at scale

Dear Friends,

We’re thrilled to announce that Prime Coalition (Prime), a nonprofit that steers and influences capital to support scalable solutions to climate change, and Actuate Climate, which runs large-scale experimental programs to accelerate societal-scale climate solutions, are joining forces. As of today, Actuate Climate has spun its program, resources, and people into Prime. Lara Pierpoint, former CEO of Actuate Climate, is now Director at Prime of the Early Climate Infrastructure (ECI) program. She’s joined by Actuate Climate’s Emily Lewis O’Brien, who’s now Senior Lead of the ECI program.

Mergers, spin-ins, and acquisitions in the nonprofit space are not very common, but we determined together that moving Actuate Climate to its new home at Prime presents a singular opportunity to blend two complementary efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in time and at scale.

Since 2014, Prime has partnered with over 200 philanthropic organizations to mobilize over $300MM in catalytic capital for market-driven climate solutions. Prime’s investments support companies and projects that have the potential to achieve massive impact and would otherwise be overlooked by traditional investors. With over a decade of learning about the financial landscape, what’s needed to support climate solutions, and how to assess forward impact and additionality of investments, the ECI program aims to address gaps in infrastructure project funding that Prime identified and substantiated in 2022 based on extensive field research, including over 140 interviews with project financiers and other stakeholders.

Since 2019, Actuate Climate has worked to design large-scale experimental programs that tackle emissions reduction across sectors. Actuate Climate programs experiment on — and demonstrate new approaches to — the market, policy, technology, and social contexts each solution needs to scale to meet the most critical GHG reduction targets. The Actuate team’s focus isn’t to scale a single technology or a single company, but rather to improve the playing field so that whole classes of GHG-reducing solutions can achieve a scale the planet notices many times sooner than it would otherwise. 

The new ECI team will blend the experiences of Actuate Climate and Prime Coalition to pursue a portfolio of early infrastructure projects and systems innovation interventions focused on scaling solutions for climate change. We are filled with gratitude to have found such deep alignment between our teams and look forward to working together to accelerate our work.  

Please reach out to Lara Pierpoint (impact@primecoalition.org) with any questions about Actuate Climate or the ECI program. 

Sincerely, 

Lara Pierpoint, Director, Early Climate Infrastructure 

Sarah Kearney, Executive Director, Prime Coalition