Guarantees for climate resilience

Startups that work on climate resilience face capital crunch while they build market infrastructure, awareness and customer trust for adoption. After initial grants, there are no capital pathways, especially as equity investments have dropped. Debt has not played a part in the capital stack, especially if philanthropy can underwrite the perceived risks.

We share a first-loss default guarantee model that has been successful in catalyzing loans in India and will discuss how it can be a scalable model in other geographies.

Speaker Bios

Maggie Flanagan is the Senior Program Officer on the Invention & Entrepreneurship team at jThe Lemelson Foundation. A seasoned entrepreneur with international development experience, she works to strengthen regional innovation ecosystems in India and Kenya. She has served as an advisor to Kenya’s National Innovation Agency and to the Catalytic Capital Consortium. Earlier, she served as a Vice President for Business Development in the Kenya office of Village Industrial Power — a social enterprise startup dedicated to providing clean and cost-effective energy sources for farmers in developing countries.

Dimitry Gershenson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Enduring Planet, which provides working capital and financial advisory services to climate startups and SMBs. Earlier, he led M&A and served as COO for Rango Wireless, an Enduring Ventures portfolio company. Before that he co-designed and co-led Meta’s Energy Access program, a $15M+ investing initiative that enabled energy access for 3M people and unlocked nearly $500M in additional capital in underserved markets like Kenya and India., He also led Meta’s development of multiple predictive ML products in the cleantech space and built corporate accelerator programs for impact startups in India and Puerto Rico.

Srinivas Ramanujam is passionate about scaling innovative solutions that solve systemic challenges which affect people and the planet. As CEO of Villgro Innovation Foundation, he enables social enterprises in agriculture, climate, health, and circularity to reach sustainability and scale. Earlier, he was an agri-tech entrepreneur and worked in leadership roles in various sectors including banking.

Meera Siva is the co-founder and CEO of Inkludo Impact Foundation, a US non-profit. Inkludo's aim is to address systemic gaps that stifle innovative market-based enterprises that solve urgent and important problems in a fair and sustainable way. Earlier, she worked with and invested in global social enterprises in the affordable housing segment at Habitat for Humanity International. In her other lives, she was a Silicon Valley chip designer, financial journalist and investment banker for early-stage startups.