Recognizing Early-Stage Entrepreneurs: Insights from the 2025 Venture For ClimateTech Global Innovation Challenge

Who’s Leading the Charge? Decoding Applicant Trends

Demographics

The 2025 V4C Global Innovation Challenge attracted a diverse and dedicated pool of innovators. While only 24% of all applicants were women, mirroring trends in the climate sector, the gender ratio remained consistent or improved throughout the multi-phase selection process of semi-finalists, finalists, and ultimately the winner cohort, with 2 out of 3 (75%) of the winners were female-founded teams.  

Female founders in the climate sector are underrepresented and underfunded. Globally and in the U.S., approximately 90% of investment funding goes to male founding teams. In 2024, solo female founders secured only ~5% of total deals. And yet, reports show that women-led teams generate higher returns on investment than male-led teams. 

This underscores the need for initiatives that champion greater gender diversity and inclusion in the climate tech sector, and that give recognition and platforms to female founders to help close the funding gap.

Nearly three-quarters (73.5%) of this year’s applicants based in the U.S. identified as entrepreneurs of color, with significant representation of founders who identify as African-American/Black (20.4%), Asian (16.3%), Hispanic/Latinx (18.4%), Middle Eastern (10.2%), and Mixed-race (10.2%). This may reflect the broader trends of the shares of new Asian, Black, and Latinx entrepreneurs increasing substantially. 

While the climate tech entrepreneurial ecosystem has seen greater levels of representation in recent years, it’s important to keep in mind that white founding and executive teams still raise venture capital more often, showing persistence in bias against founders of color. However, despite being funded less frequently, research has shown that when racially diverse founding teams do raise capital, they tend to raise more across all rounds, and these teams also outperform white founding teams.

Geography

Applicants poured in from across the U.S. and around the world, including from 20 U.S. states and 24 countries. Beyond strong representation from coastal U.S. states like California and New York, we saw notable representation from countries like India and Colombia, followed by Canada, Bangladesh and Kenya. This global reach highlights the universal urgency of climate issues and the need for innovative climate solutions. It also reaffirms the appeal of having New York-anchored networking and support opportunities offered to winners, a reflection of the international standing of the New York climate tech ecosystem.

Team Set-Up

This challenge competition was geared toward early-stage ventures. Over a fifth of the applicants identified themselves as sole founders (23%). While some applicants reported having zero full-time employees (16%), the most common team sizes were small, typically between one to two full-time employees. Over half of the solutions identified as Pre-seed (26%) or Seed stage (26%), with many still in ideation or prototyping phases. 

This demonstrates the challenge’s effectiveness in identifying nascent ideas with immense potential, before they’ve secured significant external funding – which is a crucial aspect for any community of entrepreneurs. This is attractive both to funders as they identify a pipeline of potential future investments, and attractive to early-stage ventures seeking initial visibility and validation within the competitive climate tech landscape. 

Solution Type

Applicants focused largely on hardware-based solutions (71%), particularly mechanical systems (30%), in addition to software and service offerings. Within climate tech industries and spaces, we saw the most representation in the following categories: “circular economy,” “waste management,” “decarbonizing industry,” “energy generation/supply,” and “ag tech/agriculture.”

There was minimal representation in the following categories: “hydrogen,” “supply chain,” and “energy transmission.” The proposed solutions ranged from sustainable jet fuel to energy storage systems and biodegradable manufacturing pellets. This focus on hardware solutions echoes the data that within the climate sector, hardware solutions are becoming more prominent than other sectors.

 This also relates to the fact that the majority of capital investment in the energy space is focused on the hardware space. Ultimately, climate change is a physical problem that requires physical solutions.

While software and services are indispensable for optimizing, managing and accelerating the transition, the foundational changes in energy, industry and infrastructure necessary to achieve net-zero emissions and adapt to a changing climate will likely be driven by hardware innovation and deployment at scale.

The Fuel for Growth: Understanding Entrepreneur Needs

When it came to the needs of entrepreneurs, a consistent trend predictably emerged from our collected data: capital.

Access to funding remains one of the most frequently named hurdles from early-stage ventures. However, we know anecdotally and from research that while early-stage entrepreneurs often highlight funding as their main goal, the nuance is that real traction—like building a valuable product, proving customer demand, and achieving early validation—is what truly attracts investors and predicts success and further investment. Modest amounts of funding often help to achieve some of these early milestones in the first place, but it is just one part of a larger equation.

With that in mind, the majority of applicants also emphasized a need for a robust entrepreneur support ecosystem, including “access to education”, “business services”, “community connections”, “government resources”, “training and mentoring” and “talent”.

Of the applicants who listed “capital” as a resource they find hardest to access, only 20% listed “capital” alone – 80% of applicant responses included “additional resources”. Of the applicants who identified “capital” as the resource they find most valuable for their venture, only 4% listed the category alone – 96%  listed ‘additional valuable resources”.

What we have learned is that entrepreneurs aren’t just seeking money; they’re looking for comprehensive support to build and scale, and they understand the immense value of quality networks.

Applicants voiced the need for “warm introductions to potential customers, utilities, port authorities, municipalities, and pilot opportunities” in addition to “legal & regulatory advice, especially around data privacy, public contracts, and hardware compliance.”

That’s good news for a challenge that provided winners with in-kind resources like network connections, coaching and an introduction to the New York State climate ecosystem. Applicants also stated the need for “access to a community of founders for shared learning and support, along with mental health resources to mitigate entrepreneurial stress,” a nod to the often lonely and stressful journey of being a startup founder. 

In addition to the V4C Global Innovation Challenge, SecondMuse and NextCorps with support from NYSERDA run two entrepreneur support programs for climate tech innovators: Venture For ClimateTech (which supports early-stage entrepreneurs) and Scale For ClimateTech (which supports growth-stage companies with scaling their manufacturing). These programs invest in and support a diverse array of climate tech solutions that will help New York State reach its climate goals. 

Innovation Challenges: A Compelling Offering for Early-Stage Startups and Impact-Aligned Organizations

The journey through the 2025 V4C Global Innovation Challenge itself reveals a key benefit: rigorous evaluation. Through a multi-stage selection process powered by a large panel of expert judges, we uncovered and spotlighted some of the world’s most promising climate innovations and the talent within the community of entrepreneurs. 

“The breadth of companies represented in the Global Innovation Challenge speaks to the myriad ways we can harness tech for a more sustainable future. From waste recovery to material innovation and new battery chemistries, I was inspired by the vision of these founders and look forward to exploring ways to accelerate their climate solutions.” – Global Innovation Challenge Judge, Shaina Horowitz, Director of Program Innovation and Acceleration, The New York Climate Exchange

Innovation challenges are a valuable platform to not only uncover and recognize brilliant, early-stage climate tech startups that might otherwise remain unseen, but also provide crucial data on sector trends and resource gaps.

 For investors, partners and policymakers, these challenges offer a unique opportunity to identify, support and accelerate the solutions that will define a climate-positive future.

SecondMuse has a long history of administering innovation challenge competitions and prizes – from four years of the V4C Global Innovation Challenge and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Food System Vision Prize to the Single-Use Plastics (SUP) Challenge with BMZ’s PREVENT Waste Alliance, NYC BigApps Blockchain Challenge, LAUNCH programs and our NASA Space Apps Challenge work that has been ongoing for over the last decade. 

By better understanding entrepreneur needs and recognizing their work, we can collectively drive the innovation required to address our planet’s pressing challenges. 

_______

Is your organization interested in exploring how to use innovation challenges to achieve its goals? Get in touch with us.