a16z-backed climate startup lands $50M to build out staff and platforms

A New York climate technology company with DC ties is building software to help energy, manufacturing and critical minerals projects fund their work — and raised a whopping eight figures to do more.

Crux on Wednesday announced its oversubscribed $50 million Series B, which was led by existing investor Lowercarbon Capital. Founded in 2023 and spurred by the Inflation Reduction Act, Crux created a marketplace for financial institutions, clean energy developers and tax credit buyers to sell and transfer tax credits as part of their project financing. Crux released an additional tool in March for debt capital, which can also go into these projects. 

Alfred Johnson, the DC-based CEO and cofounder of Crux, knew it was time to raise because of high energy demands, including from major infrastructure projects like data centers.

“It was an obvious time to add more capital,” Johnson told Technical.ly, “to grow even faster and help our clients and customers navigate these transactions more efficiently, and be able to access markets that were previously inaccessible to them.”

Lowercarbon Capital also invested in Johnson and cofounder and COO Allen Kramer’s previous software company, Mobilize. The climate-focused investment firm’s founding partner Clay Dumas will take a board seat at Crux, per Johnson. 

Other investors include Silicon Valley VC titan Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Ardent Venture Partners in DC, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures and Acrew Capital, among others. Andreessen Horowitz led the startup’s Series A round, which was valued at $18.2 million.

Crux has raised $77 million to date. Johnson credits the robust capital flow for Crux’s success — the company, which landed at the top of Technical.ly’s 2024 RealLIST Startups roster for DC,  was profitable in its first operating year. 

“With that kind of traction, that kind of growth and that kind of capital efficiency,” he said, “we were really lucky to have a lot of investor interest.”

Johnson outlined plans to use the capital to nearly double his staff from 40 people to 70 across departments. Crux is remote-first, but plans to open a DC office in the near future. 

The funds will also go toward building the debt and tax credit marketplaces, as well as integrating large language models and artificial intelligence into the products.

AI has a direct influence on Crux in terms of the drastic need for energy to power data centers. But it’s also part of how he wants to explore serving clients, whether through synthesizing large data sets or pinpointing themes in transactions. 

The Trump administration (which counts a16z’s Marc Andreessen as an ally) has taken aim at the clean energy initiative, including attempting to cancel billions in clean energy projects. But Johnson isn’t concerned about business dwindling. He’s seen capital flowing to continue purchasing tax credits. 

There’s a lot of disagreement about policy, he explained, but consensus exists in some areas like energy systems being under stress from data centers and the issue of electricity prices rising. Johnson also cited the need for critical minerals in the energy, aerospace and defense sectors. 

“I think if you look at the objectives of the Trump administration, through the tariffs and other things, they’re quite aligned to those three objectives,” Johnson said. “Everything that we do is also in support of those three objectives.”