Solutions / Technology & Performance Risk
When the Technology Is the Reason No One Will Lend.
For first-of-a-kind and second-of-a-kind projects, the science is proven but the scale isn’t — and lenders won’t underwrite what they haven’t seen run. We transfer that risk to rated carriers, so a working technology can finally be financed.
The Financing Gap
Venture capital funds the lab. Infrastructure debt funds the tenth plant. The first and second get stuck in between.
Between a successful pilot and a bankable commercial project lies the hardest money in climate — often called the “missing middle.” A first-of-a-kind (FOAK) plant has proven its technology at demonstration scale, but a lender’s core question is unanswerable on paper: will it produce what the model says at commercial volume? Without that answer, senior debt either walks away or demands so much equity and coverage that the economics collapse. The second-of-a-kind (SOAK) project faces a milder version of the same wall.
This isn’t a failure of the technology. It’s a failure of underwritability — and underwritability is something we can engineer.
Our Solutions
What we structure.
Technology Performance Insurance
Coverage that indemnifies against a project’s failure to meet defined performance thresholds — output, yield, efficiency, availability — placed with rated carriers. It converts an open-ended technology risk into a bounded, insured one a lender can accept.
Performance Wraps & Efficacy Guarantees
Structures that stand behind a technology’s contracted performance, effectively lending a carrier’s balance sheet to the developer’s promise — so the lender underwrites the carrier, not the unproven plant.
Specialty Risk Transfer for FOAK/SOAK
Bespoke deconstruction of a project’s technology risk into components — mechanical, process, scale-up, degradation — each placed with the market best suited to bear it, rather than presented to a single lender as one impossible bet.
The Effect on Your Financing
A rated carrier behind the performance changes the entire conversation with lenders.
Once technology risk is transferred to an insurer a lender trusts, the project’s risk profile begins to resemble a conventional infrastructure deal. That can widen the pool of willing lenders, reduce the equity cushion demanded, and lower the cost of the debt itself. The plant hasn’t changed. The way the risk is held has.
A first-of-a-kind clean-fuels facility, a roughly $300M project, had proven its process at demonstration scale but couldn’t get lenders to underwrite commercial-scale performance.
We transferred the scale-up performance risk to a rated carrier through a technology performance structure, converting an open-ended risk into a bounded, insured one.
The technology risk moved off the lenders’ desk onto a rated balance sheet, and the project advanced into senior-debt structuring that had previously been out of reach.
Is your technology the thing standing between a working plant and a closed financing?
That’s exactly the problem we take apart.