From November 3 – 7, SOSV produced its fifth annual Climate Tech Summit, which convened nearly 6,000 founders, investors, researchers, corporates, policymakers, and operators for the virtual, free events. The purpose? To provide the climate tech ecosystem an opportunity to hear directly from top investors, founders, researchers and others on how they see climate evolving in these challenging times.

Replays of all 24 main-stage panels from day 1 and day 2, and 10 breakout sessions are available now. Below is a snapshot of the themes that defined the week.

A Market Too Big to Reverse

The summit opened with candid remarks from SOSV’s Managing General Partner Sean O’Sullivan, who addressed the political environment head-on: “It’s abundantly clear what the Trump administration thinks about climate tech.” But as Sean framed it, these headwinds will not derail climate tech. Powerful forces are already pushing decarbonization forward – forces driven not by subsidies or treaties, but by market forces including the hyperscalers commitments to decarbonizing energy and construction, as well the rapid market maturation of new technologies from renewables, nuclear and geothermal to green cement, eVTOLs, and linear generators. 

Like Sean, many of the Summit’s speakers framed climate tech as a force unlikely to be derailed in the long run, starting with the exceptional opening discussion, “2025 Climate Tech USA: What Just Happened?” As one of the panelists, Kim Zou, Founder and CEO of Sightline Climate, noted: “We tracked $26B of deployed capital in the U.S. this year. That’s flat from last year, which means climate tech investment isn’t actually declining.”

We also asked some of the industry’s most influential climate tech VCs, including Chris Sacca (Lowercarbon Capital), Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures), and Mike Schroepfer (Gigascale Capital), why they continue to double down on the category. Their message: we’re just getting started.

Hyperscalers Are Driving the Climate Playbook

Among the strongest forces reshaping the landscape are hyperscalers. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta have become dominant shapers of markets for steel, cement, power, cooling, transportation, and advanced materials, driven by net-zero ambitions and the explosive build-out of data centers.

As our “Data Centers Energy Race” panel made clear, hyperscalers aren’t acting out of virtue. They’re acting because their boards demand it, their customers expect it, their employees want it, and their economics require it. For founders building technologies that improve efficiency or reliability, this is a once-in-a-generation pull from the top of the value chain. Lucia Tian, Head of Advanced Energy at Microsoft, further explained: “We’re partnering aggressively with companies bringing new technology to market and modeling internally to understand what truly meets business needs.”

Market Economics Rule 

One message came through loud and clear across sessions like “Is Blue the New Green?”, “New Funds in Climate”, and “Hello Greener Cement”: Not only is the “green premium” a fantasy in the market place, the climate tech companies that thrive have to make practical trade-offs to lock in the sound economics that win contracts. 

Investors and founders have learned a vital lesson in the past five years. No matter how green or clever your technology, you still have to compete for real in the market. Customers aren’t willing to pay the infamous “green premium” for a product, and founders can’t expect to succeed if they are dependent in the long-run on tax credits, grants and other non-market supports. If decarbonization tech can’t show a compelling “risk-adjusted rate of return” to investors, it’s not going to raise money.

In other words, the industry has matured past idealism with a renewed focus on economics, durability, and deployment.

But that doesn’t mean don’t swing for the fences. As Chris Sacca said, “We have some really crazy shit [in our portfolio]. If you don’t try the crazy shit, you won’t get to the breakthroughs.”

Facing Up to China 

China still dominates many of the world’s energy-independence industries – a theme we explored in our session “What Can China’s ‘Engineering State’ Teach the West?” But there are still “open waters” where the U.S. can compete, leveraging its technology edge in areas such as Geothermal (where we held two panels), Nuclear, Fusion (a favorite for Sacca and Khosla)  and Plasma.

Closing Reflections

As the summit wrapped, it was refreshing to reflect on how climate tech isn’t slowing down…it’s evolving. And the community that gathered at SOSV’s Climate Tech Summit is building the future, one hard-won deployment at a time.

Check out the replays of all 24 main-stage panels day 1 and day 2, and 10 breakout sessions are available now.

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