Environmental Accelerators - Value-Driven Velocity
While I was exploring metaphors to introduce accelerators I ran through every “pedal to the metal” cliche within a 1000 miles of me. They were all bad. My creative process was bogging down, until it occurred to me that the most important decision about using accelerators effectively is the same as the most important decision about using metaphors effectively: when not to. Due to their broad success with private sector technology firms, accelerators have become a golden goose for launching startups. But like every other module, they come with clear definitions and best uses based on the context of the technology, team, and timeline in question.
Accelerators are limited duration, cohort based, programs that inject participating early stage startups with learning, networking, and resourcing opportunities to empower their founders and spur rapid development. Easy, simple, blog complete! Or, it would be if they all worked the same. But there are nearly as many ways to implement an accelerator as there are accelerators - 408 spread over 176 countries in a survey of work done by this paper in 2024. What separates one accelerator from the next is in the fine-tuning of each of these elements. Fortunately for me as the writer (and you as the reader, given my love of long-winded metaphor) applying them to environmental technologies drives these decisions in a clear direction. We’ll make a quick run through the common support elements that compose accelerators, and then dive into what makes Environmental Technology Accelerators different from their traditional technology cousins.
The Pit Crew Makes it Possible…
At EPIC, we frequently argue that the impact of environmental technologies is more about the people than any particular tech, data, or function. We’re pleased to announce that all the big private sector accelerators agree with us!
Community: Communities of innovators reinforce one another's effects, they brainstorm breakthroughs, they cheer up difficult days and cheer on new releases, they share networks, sometimes they buy the coffee. These big and little boosts make the work easier, more worthwhile, and - as a result - more effective.
Connections: Year-after-year, accelerators add allies and partners to their network. All of this social capital is like blowing dandelion seeds into the wind. If you drop them all at the base of the plant most of them wither, but spread to the winds, their roots will find rich soil for miles.
Coaching: Accelerators provide their participants with expert coaches who’ve run these roads many times with many technologies. They understand the convoluted and constantly evolving market, making them capable navigators when uncertainty inevitably crops up.
…and the Fuels Make it Function
Capitalizing on the Three-Cs above requires good strategy and, well, capital!
Market Assessments: In the relatively resource sparse and scientifically complex ecosystem of environmental technology, market assessments are critical to ensuring every dollar spent is put towards tools that fulfill an economically sustainable and environmentally beneficial purpose.
Money: Funding in accelerators focuses on prioritization. It forces the question: what must get done now to present a minimum viable product soon? Accelerator money focuses our attention on developing features committed to environmental outcomes.
Legal Support: Many accelerators provide legal support for startups maneuvering incorporation, trademarking, insurance, and other foundational steps for establishing a business. Public interest and environmental accelerators can and should expand this support to help with environmental law and permitting, government procurement and ethics, and advising on the tradeoffs of tax status.
Deciding to Hit the Gas
Despite all their permutations, the use of accelerators is pretty simple and well-explained by the name. Accelerators are for innovators who mostly know where they’re headed and need to get there fast. They promote prototype development and market research through the rapid injection of resources and knowledge. Supercharging projects in this manner addresses a variety of hurdles.
Focus: Developing this one technology usually isn’t anyone’s full-time job, especially in the environmental tech domain where product development isn’t the ultimate goal. Accelerator resources support focused, efficient development sprints that drive immediate outputs.
Domain Barriers: The scientific and technical skills needed to build environmental technology tools are highly specialized. Teams that have one and lack the other cannot hope to succeed. The right accelerator bridges that networking gap and provides funding to bring in needed experts.
Public Interest Peculiarities: Public sector technology procurement is unfamiliar ground for many technologists and environmental scientists, there’s a reason Big Tech companies employ entire divisions for this purpose. Environmental technology accelerators provide the knowledge, networks, and cultural understanding to guide their cohorts through these twisting paths and uncertain incentives.
Environmental Accelerators in a Class of their Own
Environmental accelerators offer many similar resources and support structures to traditional tech accelerators. However, greater complexity and risk is added by their focus on scientific accuracy and environmental impact in addition to technical excellence and product-market fit.
Achieving a Scientific Standard
Every founder wants their application to work, and most want it to work very well. For environmental tech developers, the need for scientific accuracy is not negotiable. It doesn’t matter how well-optimized the code is if the tool inaccurately classifies invasive species resulting in improper forest management practices. While the error may be fixable in a patch after the fact, the tree deaths leading to increased risk of wildfire is a much more difficult bell to un-ring. Compare this to the current consumer-facing experimentation approach of Large Language Model developers (OpenAI, xAI, etc.) and it’s easy to see how much more inaccuracy is accepted at for-profit tech companies in favor of capturing early market share.
To reach these standards, the best environmental tech accelerators:
Address scientific challenges early to mitigate risks to both the business and the environment.
Facilitate collaboration with scientific experts and field agents who can validate results, recommend features, and provide meaningful test conditions.
Focus funding on experimentation and iteration to detect and resolve these issues in development, rather than production.
Maneuvering Multiple Markets
Finding an unfilled niche is as critical to business survival as it was for Darwin’s finches. For tech developers of all beak-shapes it is increasingly difficult to find fruitful paths for evolution as Apple’s 2009 ideal became reality. Environmental technologists are fighting this war on two fronts. Increased attention on climate change, the wildfire crisis, citizen science (biodiversity, for example), and numerous other planks of environmental advocacy have led to a proliferation of associated digital tools. It’s not enough for an environmental technologist to find customers who will pay them, they also have to build something that meaningfully improves their targeted environmental outcomes. Success on both fronts is necessary to launch an impactful piece of environmental technology that can sustain itself financially.
Environmental accelerators address this complexity by providing:
Dual-purpose market assessments developed by business and environmental experts who collaboratively assess the interwoven pressures of financial sustainability and environmental impact.
Non-dilutive funding that offsets the inherent risk created by the combined financial and environmental pressures. This practice maximizes financial flexibility for environmental technologists at their most vulnerable stage and lets them reinvest early profits. It also frees them to take on funding from dilutive sources, increasing the pool of investors they can pursue.
Streamlined funding processes for non-profit and for-profit enterprises. Building operational systems that can easily fund technologists in either sector expands and diversifies the solutions that the accelerator can support.
Let’s take a quick look at how two environmental accelerators put these practices into action.
Quick Case - Cleveland Water Alliance (CWA)
CWA is a non-profit freshwater innovation accelerator operating on the shores and waves of Lake Erie in pursuit of economically advantageous and environmentally stable uses of water resources. Since 2022, they’ve turned Lake Erie into the largest digitally connected freshwater body on the planet. Combined with their in-house expertise and funding capacity, CWA leverages this data infrastructure to support the development and benchmarking of freshwater technology innovations. Their key benefits include:
Access to their robust monitoring infrastructure and the data it collects. This unique asset functions as a test bed, empowering participants to benchmark and validate their technology’s performance throughout the piloting process.
Through their Freshwater Innovation Fund, CWA provides investments from $250,000 - $500,000 for portfolio companies.
Risk mitigation through insurance support for qualified pilots. This is especially crucial for experimenting with physical technologies within a critical public good like the freshwater of Lake Erie.
A broad network of water experts, buyers, adopters, investors, and water entrepreneurs.
CWA stands out for how it approaches environmental data as an input to innovation. Technologists in other accelerators would need to secure the data that is critical to their success. The money and time to do so can be significant – if an appropriate test bed isn’t available – adding vulnerabilities to the ledger. CWA flips this paradigm on its head. By managing the data apparatus themselves, they not only offer it to their participants free of charge and with built-in expertise, but also hold it in trust as an ongoing asset for their operations. This defining tactic returns countless benefits to CWA, their participants, and the freshwater innovation ecosystem on the whole. As federal support for environmental monitoring is jeopardized, more organizations should take a page from CWA’s book.
Quick Case - Venture for Climate Tech (VCT)
VCT is a non-profit global accelerator focused on supporting early-stage climate entrepreneurs. They stick to an extremely fast timeline spanning 6-7 months that takes participants from business model development to pilot building. In the modular innovation framework, this accelerator would sit in the incubator+lab phase of development, feeding into test beds for final tuning. They focus on six key benefits that will largely be familiar from our breakdown above.
Validate the market opportunity
Secure up to $50,000 in non-dilutive funding
Build a robust team from their expansive talent network
Get comprehensive support from mentors, structured education, and tooling access
Access free or discounted services through their partners
Establish a scaling pathway to move from prototype to production.
While VCT supports many industrial technologies, its agnostic process is flexible enough to apply it to digital technology development as well. VCT has an additional acceleration program dedicated to scaling instead of venture launching. By offering both, they can support a wider variety of innovators and cross-pollinate success from one to the other while keeping the processes distinct and tightly focused. Goal delineation is critical in this space. Innovations should be free to grow in many ways, but keeping support structures consistent and focused results in process improvements over time that deliver better results in the aggregate.
Conclusion
Accelerators can encompass a wide range of development functions, supports, and resources. They are the most flexible of the modules in our framework depending on which stage of venture they are designed to support and the type of educational resources and opportunities they provide. For this reason we’ve positioned them as a supplemental track running alongside the other modules. Innovators should look to accelerators opportunistically, identifying periods in their development journey where they can dedicate time and energy to take advantage of a focused sprint with major investment. Timed correctly, the use of accelerators can take a team from jumping hurdle-by-hurdle, to leaping over the lot of them and delivering a tool tested and tuned for environmental impact.