By Abby Schultz
A $115 million financing round for the geothermal exploration and development company Zanskar completed in December involved an unusual collaboration of climate funds, and wealthy families, too.
It was a deal that reveals big money still sees value in investing in climate and the transition away from fossil fuels even as public investment firms have stepped back from a focus on environmental, social and governance criteria in their investments under political and regulatory pressures, and as some venture capital funds focused on climate solutions have struggled to raise capital.
The collaboration was initiated by the All Aboard Fund, a climate-tech investment vehicle aiming to finance the "missing middle" -- that is, the large-scale funding gap that many start-up companies face when they need to test their ideas at a scale that can result in commercial development.
All Aboard's strategy is to bring together a "syndicate" of climate-investment firms that can pool enough money to fill the gap. The All Aboard Fund then co-invests alongside these firms. For the Zanskar deal, the fund -- which includes about 20 family offices including John and Laura Arnold's Arnold Ventures, co-invested $10 million.
"They don't necessarily need the All Aboard Fund money, but they need the syndicate," Stan Miranda, All-Aboard's co-founder, said in an interview of companies such as Zanskar. "No one investor could have funded this."
The strategy is common within venture investing, where firms typically syndicate deals to spread the risk, says Miranda, who founded the outsourced chief investment office Partners Capital, where he served as CEO and later chairman until 2024.
But that approach is less common for larger-ticket, private-equity transactions into fast-growing companies, known as growth equity. As a result, companies that have to build capital-intensive projects to test the commercial application of their ideas, never get a chance to build their first-of-a-kind technology at scale and as a result, fail.
"The missing middle has always been about some combination of commercial scaling risk and tech risk that growth-equity investors classically don't want to take," Miranda says. "So the way to deal with that is the same way venture capitalists deal with it."
All Aboard co-founder Chris Anderson, who led the nonprofit TED organization for 25 years, and Miranda, have recognized that the way to remake the economy around climate-friendly technologies is to scale-up the companies creating businesses beyond the proven technologies of solar, wind, and electrical vehicles.
And the way to do that was to build a community, and increase the conviction of investors "that they can make a lot of money doing this," Jason Scott, partner at Spring Lane Capital -- the lead fund investor for Zanskar's latest funding round -- said in an interview.
Spring Lane is a member of the All Aboard Coalition, of group of 16 investment funds that includes Breakthrough Energy -- the climate fund started by Bill Gates and backed by several other billionaires -- Khosla Ventures, founded by Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, and Ara Partners, a $6 billion private-equity firm.
The coalition works together to source deals and to attend quarterly meetings with the All Aboard Fund, which piggybacks off the coalition's expertise to make co-investments.
The companies All Aboard is looking to fund are developing low-carbon innovations such as large-scale geothermal power (generated from underground heat), long-duration energy storage, nuclear, and clean hydrogen that have the potential to rebuild the global economy. But first, these companies need enough funding to prove their capital-intensive technologies work.
"Some of these companies are going to grow to a massive scale -- they will be the future Fortune 500 companies," Anderson said in an interview. "If you can pool a bunch of bets on those companies, you have a chance at creating a very, very attractive fund."
Zanskar is using custom-built AI and machine learning to explore for heat, to better target their drilling, and to find wells that are deeper or adjacent to those already known. "To prove its technology, it needs to carry on drilling and realizing energy from certain depths and temperatures," Miranda says.
The company "wouldn't have raised the money from any one growth equity player because [those funds] are not going to write a $115 million check with that sort of technology risk or scale. It's really commercial scaling," he says.
The syndicate for the deal was led by Spring Lane Capital and included All Aboard coalition member Obvious Ventures. The oversubscribed deal also included Lowercarbon Capital and Union Square Ventures, which have been identified by All Aboard as co-investment partners.
Spring Lane's "long-term strategic reason" for being involved in the coalition, is that "that having All Aboard on our side will increase our ability to attract capital, sell power, build power plants, develop partnerships, and improve our technology because of the relationships and the network of the stakeholders," Scott says.
All Aboard is now looking at more than a dozen companies for potential investment. Examples include businesses developing low-carbon cement, low-carbon steel, grid technologies, and lithium extraction. To meet All Aboard's criteria for investment, companies must be able to abate 50 million tons of carbon dioxide a year by 2040.
Although there has been a slowdown in fund-raising for climate solutions, the money is there for good companies, Scott says. "There is a slowdown, but it's not as dramatic as the headlines would [make it] seem," he says. "It's going to be a little harder than it was in the short term and we're pretty sure it's going to pick back up."
In Miranda's view, there isn't "a shortage of capital for the sector."
All Aboard's family office investors "are either singularly focused on energy transition and climate, or it is one of their core themes. They've been at it for a decade or more, in some cases, several decades. The missing middle has been a problem that they've been looking to see solved."
Write to Abby Schultz at abby.schultz@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 09, 2026 11:35 ET (16:35 GMT)
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