Prime Coalition

The Prime Coalition is a nonprofit organization that seeks to catalyze or deepen solutions that will materially reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Prime Coalition’s work focuses on steering capital, which includes the sponsoring and launching of two Foundation-supported catalytic capital climate funds—the Prime Impact Fund and Azolla Ventures. In addition, Prime seeks to influence capital through efforts like a) its Early Climate Infrastructure (ECI) Program that aims to remove systemic barriers for climate solutions that are that are fully commercial but need additional support to move to massive scale, b) the Foundation-supported CRANE tool, which is a freely available online data source to help philanthropists, impact investors, and others assess the potential future emissions reductions of new or early-stage climate solutions, c) Project Frame, which is a collaboration of investors and experts working to build frameworks and tools to assess the potential impact today’s climate investments will have on greenhouse gas emissions in the future, and d) strengthening the evidence base around how catalytic capital can be used to support high risk, deep impact science, and engineering innovation and deployment. The combination of all these workstreams makes the Prime Coalition an essential organization working at the intersection of climate and catalytic capital that is building the ecosystem for impact-first climate investment.

PRIME Coalition addresses two capital gaps within the clean energy technology commercialization lifecycle: 1) the period between research grants and private sector investment, and 2) the period between technology validation and deployment. Through its PRIME Investment Funnel, the organization sources, screens and vets promising enterprises for impact investors. The Aligned Intermediary, which PRIME is incubating in partnership with leading experts in climate-related policy, institutional investing and finance at Stanford University, helps large, long-term investors (sovereign funds, pension funds, endowments, insurance companies, family offices, and foundations) who seek to commit significant amounts of capital into a broad spectrum of environmental investment opportunities. These two efforts, which encompass the core activities of the PRIME Coalition and to which MacArthur will provide general operating support, improve connections between investors and promising technology-based businesses that are impeded by critical development and deployment hurdles.