This interview highlights Harshita Mira Venkatesh, Principal at Avesta Fund, where she has extensive experience commercializing early-stage climate technologies, with a particular focus on hard-tech and deep tech sectors. Her operational experience has also nurtured a deep empathy for the unique experiences of founders. As a Business Fellow in the inaugural cohort of the Breakthrough Energy Fellows program, she played a pivotal role in steering climate startups through critical related challenges. Harshita's contributions to startups include a wide array of early-stage business development initiatives, encompassing initial beachhead identification, fundraising (pre-seed, seed, and Series A), implementing go-to-market strategies, techno-economic modeling, among others.
Q: There's an ongoing debate about whether climate investing requires a fundamentally different model than traditional venture i.e. longer time horizons, different return profiles, more patient capital structures. Where do you land on that?
A: Climate investing is quite broad so it does require being clear about which part of climate you are underwriting. Avesta is focused on the subset of climate that fits traditional venture: asset-light, software-first, capital-efficient companies that can deliver venture-scale returns on venture timelines. We still underwrite the same fundamentals any VC would: market size, team, differentiation, customer urgency, and path to revenue.
Q: What sectors or technologies within climate are you most excited about right now that you feel the market is still underpricing or under-funding?
A: We think less in terms of what is “underfunded” and more in terms of where we can redirect spend that is already happening, toward more climate-positive outcomes. We believe this is an effective way to enable more scalable climate impact.
The AI buildout is driving massive investment into compute, power, and industrial infrastructure. Our goal is to steer that spend toward solutions that are more efficient, resilient, and sustainable without asking customers to pay a green premium. That shows up across three areas: Compute, Energy, and Industry. In Compute, we like physical and thermal infrastructure tuning, grid-aware siting, and orchestration. In Energy, we focus on grid integration, next-gen storage, energy markets, and permitting. In Industry, we are excited about inspection, maintenance, vertical robotics, and physical AI building blocks.
The common thread is that these companies win on economics first and also create better climate outcomes.
Q: How do you think about the role of policy and regulation in your investment decisions? Do you invest with or against the policy cycle? Has that calculus shifted in recent years?
A: We are policy-aware but not policy-dependent.
We track regulation closely, but we do not underwrite around a specific administration, subsidy, or mandate. We invest behind the economic case. If a company only works because of a policy tailwind, it is usually not the right fit for us. That discipline has served us well. Since we started, climate has moved from a strong policy-tailwind environment to a much choppier one, and our portfolio has held up because the core investment cases were based on ROI, customer urgency, and economic value.
Our view is that if a company makes sense today, under harder policy conditions, it should be even better positioned when policy support becomes more favorable again.
Q: What do you look for in climate founders that is distinct from what you'd look for in a founder building in something like AI, SaaS, or consumer? Is there a profile that tends to succeed here?
A: We look for real domain insight. A strong SaaS or consumer founder does not automatically translate into a strong climate founder. Climate companies often sell into regulated, physical, slow-moving sectors, so founders need to understand the customer, the market structure, and the constraints on adoption.
The best founders usually have either direct sector experience or a distinct insight into a specific problem that others have missed. We also put a lot of weight on go-to-market. In climate, a great product is not enough. Founders need a credible plan for pilots, procurement, regulation, deployment, and scale.
Q: What's your contrarian view or nonobvious insight about where climate tech is headed in the next five years?
A: From 2020-2024, we saw capital-intensive visions of climate. We think the next five years will reward narrower wedges and better execution. That does not mean the markets are small. It means the entry point needs to be specific. The companies we are most excited about start with a clear, high-ROI use case, prove value quickly, and then expand from there.
We see this in industrial AI, robotics, grid software, and infrastructure optimization. The winners are not trying to be platforms on day one. They are solving painful, concrete problems first. In a tighter funding environment, that discipline matters.
