Two years ago, Lowercarbon proudly put the first dollars into Crux, a startup Alfred Johnson and Allen Kramer co-founded to capitalize America’s energy and manufacturing superiority. They saw a great wedge: transferable tax credits, which went from non-existent when they incorporated to a multibillion-dollar market within months. Everything they had worked on over their careers pointed at this opportunity. Plus, Chris, Crystal, and I had the privilege of backing their last company, which turned out great for everyone involved. By definition, you have imperfect information when you back a startup, but supporting Crux was as obvious as it gets in our line of work.
Then, we did our early-stage investor thing. Helped pick a name, closed early hires, pored over web copy, introduced customers, heard out new product ideas, spent countless hours on phone calls at weird hours, batted around strategy, and introduced them to new investors. In other words, we stayed in lockstep with Alfred and Allen, supporting them as they scaled revenue, landed talent, turned profitable, and launched an increasingly ambitious series of products.
Throwing good money after good.
Now, we’re doing a decisively un-early-stage investor thing: leading their $50m Series B. Most people who know Lowercarbon know us as a fund that partners with early stage founders, but in actual practice, we’ve structured our funds to double down when the growth curve inflects to obvious. And Crux is yet another portfolio company that’s inflected to obvious.
Besides existing investors like A16z who are coming back in, we’re proud to bring Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, and OMERS Ventures into the mix — entities whose parent companies represent more than a quarter-trillion dollars of assets under management. So, what’s the team planning to do with their big new balance sheet? Expect more deals, new products, and faster evolution. Crux also has better visibility into the rest of the market and the proprietary data that some well-heeled whippersnappers could use to accelerate the cumbersome processes of underwriting, diligencing, matching, and transacting complex deal structures. So, all that AI that Crux-financed solar panels are powering? Expect this team to put plenty of it to use. Call it the new circular economy.
Unleashing America’s financial edge.
The U.S. is in the early innings of a once-in-a-hundred-year resurgence in manufacturing and infrastructure. Bold new tech, rising geopolitical urgency, federal incentives, and imminent first contact with our future AGI overlords are all driving demand inexorably up and to the right. To put things into context, Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, a guy with a front-row seat to global capital flows, recently predicted that as much as $68 trillion will pour into infrastructure — power plants, factories, ports, roads, and wires — between now and 2040.
We can wax poetic about clean energy till the methane-free cows come home, but all the geothermal steam and fusion reactions in the world mean nothing without the infrastructure to harness and deliver that energy. These projects need serious funding, often to the tune of hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. Speed is of the essence. Yet, today’s financial systems are too slow, opaque, and fragmented. Many great projects stall because the money simply doesn’t move fast enough.
The difference between American energy superiority and finishing second place is whether we can mobilize those big pools of infrastructure capital faster and more efficiently than ever before. That’s true for grid upgrades in the Midwest, lithium in Nevada, geothermal in Utah, solar/storage-powered data centers in Texas, nuclear in the southeast, and everything in between.
This is precisely the financial machinery that Crux is building. It’s the missing link between capital markets and the clean energy infrastructure of my solarpunk dreams. Their platform connects developers and manufacturers with institutional capital — banks, insurers, asset managers, and corporations — and unlocks every part of the capital stack: tax credits, debt, equity, and more.
The whole project-finance enchilada.
When we first partnered with Crux, it was because they identified a new and fast-emerging opportunity — the transferable tax credit (TTC) market. In fact, Alfred had just departed his second tour working on markets at the Treasury Department. If anyone understood the potential of transferability, it was him. Initially, Crux’s mission was deceptively straightforward: create liquidity and standardization in a market that previously didn’t exist. Suddenly, developers and manufacturers who had never been able to access tax credits could get cash up front. Large corporations found new ways to fund domestic energy and advanced manufacturing. Within twelve months, billions of dollars of tax credits flowed through their platform, transforming an opaque legalistic process into a liquid, software-driven marketplace.
They weren’t the only startup to pick up on the potential of transferability, but they were absolutely the fastest out of the gates. In startups, speed can be deterministic. Traditional tax equity is an $18-25b market dominated by a small number of large banks that do a small number of large deals with a small number of large developers. Even as someone who’s seen Alfred and Allen succeed before, what surprised me wasn’t just how they onboarded billions of credits encompassing every market segment. Or how they established trust with corporate and financial buyers who were new to tax credits. (They’ve facilitated more than 70 deals, ranging in size from tens of thousands to the hundreds of millions.) What caught me off guard was how quickly they incubated and launched new products, even as transferability was taking off.
Their first debt deal nearly wrote itself. Now, their debt marketplace — launched publicly in the last month — is already humming. More than a hundred developers and manufacturers have already identified capital needs via Crux. On the other side of the table, an equally large group of institutions, including banks, insurers, private lenders, pensions, asset managers, and family offices are looking for deals to fund.
For many companies, finding early traction is a signal to stay in their lane. Alfred and Allen correctly interpreted it as a signal to expand. After all, their goal was nothing less than to become the financial backbone of the new American industrial economy so we can build a greater share of the world’s energy, infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing projects here at home. When you say it out loud, it sounds absurdly ambitious. But, that’s a big part of what sets great founders apart. If you wait around for someone to hand you a map, it’s going to be a long trek and you’ll never arrive first. Charting the impossibly steep path from here to there means simply driving your ice pick into the side of the mountain before anyone can stop you.
The multi-product financial platform version of going viral.
Crux’s initial focus on standardization and ease of use quickly generated repeat users. Now I’m going to throw some of those telltale VC buzzwords at you so you sound smart when you drop the phrase ‘Crux used product-led growth to tap into network effects and unlock a big Series B’ at your next investor happy hour. Those early repeat transactors didn’t just come back — they brought new projects and new partners. Before we knew it, Crux had made the classic leap from a specialized tax credit marketplace into a multi-product financial hub for developers and financial institutions to seamlessly borrow (or lend, as the case may be) billions of dollars to finance new projects. If we’re being totally honest, the Series B sort of landed on their doorstep when some of those very same lenders asked if they could invest in the company. Now do you see why we’re doubling down?
Backing Crux again is about more than just financial opportunism, although — to be clear — we’re not against some good ol’ fashioned financial opportunism. It’s old hat at this point to decry the sorry state of the grid and the countless ways it’s hamstringing America’s efforts to establish AI superiority. But it isn’t just the nation’s physical infrastructure that’s decaying. For all the fundamental strength of American capital markets, the reality is that a dismaying amount of decisions about which gigawatt-scale energy projects get funded are based on Excel models that include strings like “Final – v7.8 Nov 2023” in the filename.
If we’re serious about energy dominance and making sure Superintelligence speaks English as a first language, we need Crux to accelerate capital flows from the huge pools of infrastructure dollars to the most efficient and deployable technologies.
Our financial system has struggled to keep pace with the historic surge in manufacturing investment of the past few years. Policies may change, but electrification, AI infrastructure, and semiconductor manufacturing aren’t going out of style. If we’re serious about energy dominance and making sure Superintelligence speaks English as a first language, we need Crux to accelerate capital flows from the huge pools of infrastructure dollars to the most efficient and deployable technologies in solar, batteries, thermal storage, advanced wind, enhanced geothermal, bioenergy, next-generation production of critical minerals, and an expanding list of new, head-exploding technologies coming to a market near you.
The team at Crux recognized early on that the clean energy transition is, at its heart, a financial challenge. The next chapter of American growth will be defined by how well we can fund things, not just invent them. The transformative products they’ve built will smooth out traditional sources of friction, bring down financing costs, and speed up capital formation. The direct result will be to make more industrial and energy projects viable and economically attractive. This is precisely how we make up ground to global competitors — by doing what America does best: leveraging capital market superiority to drive innovation, infrastructure, and industrial might.
You can’t spell once-in-a-lifetime resurgence without “u.”
If you made it this far and are wondering what’s in it for you:
For the engineers, financiers, product leaders, and policy experts who want to help reshape America’s industrial future, the other thing Crux is doing with this new loot is hiring, actively.
For investors and institutions looking to deploy capital with greater precision, transparency, and speed, the Crux platform is open for business.
And, if you’re just a red-blooded American who would like us to lower power costs, boost energy security, modernize manufacturing, and clean up heavy industry, you can root on the team at Crux.
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