OPINION

Venture capital was built to chase unicorns. Then markets reward them once they emerge. But unicorns alone can’t stop climate shocks. They can’t regenerate soils, and they can’t redistribute power to communities living on the frontlines of crisis. If we keep funding climate innovation as if we are hunting for the next hot tech company, we will keep getting isolated wins, instead of the systems change we need to meet the climate challenge. 

The climate crisis demands something different. Something more holistic. Something more interconnected. It demands entrepreneurship that works like a forest, not like the quest to find a unicorn. 

That means funding ecosystems. It means supporting the connective tissue between entrepreneurs, communities, investors, and governments. It means treating trust, relationships, and collective learning as legitimate outcomes, not as “soft” by-products. Because resilience doesn’t emerge in isolation from stand-alone ventures. It grows when ventures are linked up inside living systems. 

Moving beyond single ventures 
For the past decade, climate entrepreneurship has largely borrowed the tools of traditional venture capital. The focus has been on single businesses, evaluated on individual milestones: revenue, patents, avoided CO2 or jobs created. These measures are important, but they don’t add up to resilience on their own. As a result, too often venture capital rewards short-term outputs that look good in a report but do little to transform the structures that hold economies and communities in place. 

This narrow model is especially ill-suited for the climate challenges. Early-stage financing rewards speed and scale, not collaboration and endurance. It prioritises commercial returns above social and environmental ones. And it leaves entrepreneurs competing for resources rather than collaborating to build shared capacities. 

At Climate KIC, we know this tension well. We have used these tools while also critiquing their limits. What we have learned is clear: the climate crisis cannot be tackled venture by venture. The systemic nature of the problem demands a systemic model of entrepreneurship. 

What systemic entrepreneurship looks like 
Systemic entrepreneurship does not replace venture building; it reimagines the context around it. Instead of backing ad hoc projects, funders support networks of entrepreneurs. Instead of chasing individual “heroes,” we nurture collective heroism. Instead of short bursts of output, we build capacities and relationships that endure. 

At its heart, the shift is from transactional to transformational thinking: from isolated deals to ecosystem dynamics. It is about financing portfolios that blend commercial innovation with social impact, circularity, and resilience, and about weaving together the fragmented efforts of start-ups, entrepreneur support organisations, public authorities, and investors into something that behaves like a living system: adaptive, connected, and resilient.  

Just as forests draw their resilience from the root systems beneath them, the strength of systemic entrepreneurship lies in the trust, relationships, and shared capacities that anchor ventures and allow them to weather shocks. 

The story on the ground 
Consider Nairobi. Through our Innovation Cluster, ten start-ups piloted upstream solutions in partnership with informal waste workers. Gjenge Makers is turning plastic waste into durable, low-cost bricks for housing. LeafyLife is converting used cooking oil into affordable clean fuel. Ecomak Recyclers is scaling circular plastics solutions while integrating female waste pickers into their operations. Collectively, these start-ups supported 792 informal workers in 2024 and cut emissions by an estimated 15 kilo tonnes CO₂eq: the annual equivalent of four large wind turbines. 

In Bengaluru, our Innovation Cluster supported ventures such as PadCare Labs, which has pioneered sanitary waste recycling technology, and AmplePac, which is building refill-and-return packaging systems for consumer goods. Alongside five other ventures, they supported 135 informal workers and adopted measurable strategies to strengthen social inclusion and gender equity. 

The ventures highlighted represent just a fraction of each cluster’s work. In both Nairobi and Bengaluru, the clusters not only fostered collaboration between ventures, but also focused on market shaping, government partnerships, behaviour change, understanding financial and policy barriers, and building capacity to strengthen the broader ecosystem. 

This approach works beyond circular economy ventures. In Tanzania, our Adaptation Innovation Cluster brought seven youth-led organisations together in Arusha for training on climate policy, negotiation, and storytelling, using CARE International’s Toolkit for Youth on Adaptation & Leadership. The outcome was not a single product launch, but a cohort of leaders equipped to influence national climate adaptation strategies and mobilise their communities. 

As part of our work on sustainable mobility in Slovenia, start-ups collaborated with city authorities to pilot solutions for decarbonising transport systems. These included shared e-mobility platforms and digital tools to optimise public transit. Here, entrepreneurship was embedded into policy experimentation, giving ventures a chance to shape systemic transitions rather than operate on the margins. 

And in Ireland, start-ups such as Agrolinera and SpaceCrop connected their solutions to challenges identified across the country's agrifood system. This showed how portfolios of interventions can be precisely matched to the local climate priorities defined by governments and communities. 

These are not isolated success stories. Across our portfolio, Climate KIC connects more than 10,000 ventures, 400 partners, mentors, and investors in over 80 countries. Programmes like Climathon, ClimateLaunchpad, and ClimAccelerator have scaled thousands of climate solutions while also creating a knowledge base of tools, mentorship, and impact metrics. When pieced together, these assets - and those of partners - form something closer to a dynamic network rather than a collection of projects. Like a mycelium, they weave individual nodes into an ecosystem capable of adaptation, resilience, and scale. 

Why funders matter now 
These examples are only the beginning. They are seeds. To grow them into forests, funders must operate differently to create real impact: 

• Look beyond mere quick wins that are nice on paper but don’t have lasting impact. 
  • Urgently start backing more of the thoughtful, meaningful, patient work of building  
     relationships, trust,  and long-term capacity. 
  • Fund boldly in overlooked communities. 
  • Treat uncertainty and collective learning as legitimate outcomes. 
  • Pair care with urgency by supporting innovations today that show real potential to  
     shift systems. 

There are signs of readiness. Mission-driven philanthropies and progressive public funders are already experimenting with portfolio approaches, blended finance, and ecosystem-building. They see that lasting resilience will not come from stand-alone wins but from ecosystems of ventures and communities working together. 

The choice in front of us 
Systemic entrepreneurship is coming, whether funders embrace it or not. The only question is whether we act early enough to shape it. If we do, the funding landscape in ten years could look very different. Capital could flow into interconnected initiatives that regenerate ecosystems, redistribute power, and create the conditions for communities to thrive in the face of climate shocks. 

But if we hesitate, if we keep treating resilience as a line item in a business plan rather than a property of whole systems, we risk watching promising solutions wither in isolation. Resilience is not built on unicorns. It is built like a forest: slowly, collectively, and with deep roots. The sooner we finance it that way, the sooner communities can stand strong against the storms to come. 

The good news is that we are not alone in this thinking - others are thinking along the same lines and taking action, and we need everyone’s participation. This is not about competition, but a growing groundswell of support to reimagine how we do entrepreneurship in service of climate action. 
 
The climate crisis gives us no time for hesitation. Funders who act now will shape the future. Those who don’t will be left behind. 

Chris Roe, Entrepreneurship, Solutions & Ventures Orchestrator at Climate KIC