Impact went out of fashion in 2025. Just 6% of S&P 100 companies used "ESG" in their annual sustainability report titles. In 2023, it was nearly 7x that, at 40% (Conference Board, April 2025). It’s not just the largest public companies - across the board investors quietly dropped language and metrics related to impact.

Impact isn’t fashion for us and it has never meant ignoring returns for investors or founders or finding an easy path to LPs. In 2013 we incorporated one of the first ever Delaware PBCs, Urban Us Public Benefit Corporation. The most common response was “I know someone who lost money in cleantech”. Working to generate public benefits alongside financial returns is a feature, not a bug. So it’s appropriate that this report is made with the help of Claude, built by another Public Benefit Corporation, Anthropic.

You can keep scrolling or use the links to jump ahead. And of course, you should drop this link in your favorite LLM and ask questions too.

About Third Sphere

Third Sphere is climate-focused venture capital platform investing at pre-seed and seed stage in startups addressing GHG reduction and climate resilience. Since 2014, we have made 100+ investments across four funds.

We started as Urban Us in 2013 with a focus on climate and urban challenges. Early on, we discovered that many of the most promising approaches had significant hardware components, regulatory complexity and even procurement challenges. We didn’t find a lot of experienced co-investors, so we partnered with BMW to run URBAN-X from 2015 to 2019, providing in-kind hardware development and go-to-market support.

Working with physical assets would eventually lead us to experiment with in-house credit strategies as we noticed this recurring need in our portfolio. By Fund III, we had identified what we call "Zombieland" - the danger zone where companies raise too much venture capital without a path sustainable growth and impact. Seeing multiple unicorns in our portfolio revert to less mythical status had a way of sharpening lessons about capital and startups. That and watching the rise of our next batch of unicorn portfolio companies led us to formalize a different path to impact and financial returns, Speedstrapping.

By Fund IV, we had rebranded to Third Sphere and built Speedstrapping into our core methodology: helping founders reach profitable growth with minimal dilution. We’re not longer alone in recognizing that traditional VC model has finally split into "out-raise competitors" versus "win customers." Out-raise seems less ideal for company building and more appropriate for LPs looking for efficient allocation strategies as well as the large funds that will happily pocket more management fees. We believe customers have always been the more durable path to both winning financially and delivering impact.

What we look for: "Better, faster, cheaper" solutions that can achieve mass adoption. Most investments include hardware or operations and are split between decarbonization pathways and adaptation.

What makes us different:

• Hardware expertise: 60%+ of our portfolio has a hardware component - bits and atoms working together
• Speedstrapping: Methodology to help founders reach profitable growth faster, reducing VC dependency and aligning interests with LPs and our team.
• Asset finance platform: Active matching into non-dilutive sources such as revenue, asset and project finance via our CreditDB platform, connecting portfolio companies to 200+ credit providers from seed stage
• Third Sphere Network: 20,000+ participants for sourcing, evaluation, and founder support
• Pre-seed coaching: even hardware companies are going from zero to $1m+ revenue within 12 months now
• Independent thinking: we’ve sat out of entire segments like voluntary carbon markets because we didn’t believe customers were real. This wasn’t popular or obvious at the time, but nor were many of our best investments.

Third Sphere is led by co-GPs Shaun Abrahamson (MIT CADLab, Govworks, Mediasentry and prior angel in ZocDoc, Blue Bottle, Crowdtwist, Trialpay) and Stonly Blue (5 prior companies, Board Chair of Impact Capital Managers); and supported by CFO Yana Klimova (Dual MS Boston College, Head of Finance at Unreasonable Group, investment banking at Wellington Management), Operating Partner Miela Mayer (Yale Environmental Engineering, prior Bain & Company, NY Green Bank, Bloomberg NEF), and Executive Assistant Roscel Asuncion (15+ years operations and team leadership). Our portfolio reflects our team and our community: 36% female CEO/founders, 35% minority CEO/founders, and 46% non-US born CEO/founders.