Shell Foundation CEO: climate tech works. Getting it to a billion people who need it is the hard part

London Climate Action Week opened this year with less appetite for pledges and more demand for proof. Patience has run out for announcements that never become deployments, exposing an uncomfortable truth: the field’s real bottleneck is no longer invention. For years we poured money into a worthy task: building technologies to cut emissions and lift livelihoods. It worked. Solar-powered cold storage keeps a smallholder’s harvest from rotting; electric two- and three-wheelers cost less to run than petrol ones. In many cases, the hard engineering is behind us. And yet almost none of it has reached the millions it was built for. The honest measure of the past decade is not how many technologies we proved, but how few crossed from pilot to mass market. The odds are stark: in the United States, where seed funding is most abundant, about one in three startups that raise a seed or pre-seed round goes on to raise a Series A. In Africa the funnel narrows dramatically: recent analysis found that fewer than one in twenty seed-funded companies reaches Series A — in one tracked 2022 cohort, just 5 of 105 had closed a Series A within three years. We have backed climate ventures for over two decades. The number that have reached a million customers? We can count them on one hand. A working prototype and a business serving a million people are separated by a chasm that swallows good technology whole. That gap is not an engineering problem. It is a problem of distribution, cost, and financing — and closing it demands as much innovation as the technology itself. This is the second form of innovation, and the one that is now underfunded. Distribution first. A climate-smart product is worthless if it cannot reach the people who need it. That reach has to be built on purpose: last-mile channels, service networks, and value chains. It is why we work with Indian delivery platforms Zomato and Swiggy — with 500,000 riders each — to put electricity-free cooling vests for delivery