By Marissa Moore (subscribe to her Substack here for more)
One of the things we love most at OMERS Ventures is the opportunity to dive deep into thorny, unglamorous problems holding back entire industries. In project finance, one such problem is funding — specifically, how we efficiently fund the massive wave of energy and manufacturing projects essential to our economic growth and competitiveness. We meet many founders tackling pieces of this puzzle, but occasionally a team emerges with an approach capable of unlocking transformational change. Crux is exactly this kind of team.
Crux is a capital markets technology platform making it easier, faster, and more efficient to finance clean energy and manufacturing projects. This month, Crux announced a $50 million Series B funding round led by Lowercarbon Capital. We’re excited to announce our investment in the round alongside new investors Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, MassMutual Ventures and existing backers a16z, Ardent, Climate Innovation (CIV), New System Ventures, and The Three Cairns Group.
The problem
Today, financing energy and manufacturing projects is an exercise in frustration. Developers typically must secure multiple forms of capital for a single project — from early-stage equity and construction loans to tax equity, transferable credits, and structured debt — each involving distinct counterparties, negotiations, and underwriting processes. The process is fragmented, opaque, and painfully slow. A developer may spend months cobbling together deals with banks, tax investors, and specialty lenders, all while navigating bespoke paperwork, uncertain pricing, and disjointed timelines. On the investor and lender side, participants struggle with limited visibility and fragmented opportunities lacking a centralized marketplace.
As a result, many high-quality projects face financing bottlenecks. Capital that could rapidly advance infrastructure development and economic growth instead becomes stuck in inefficient transactions. This inefficiency arrives at a pivotal moment: energy demand is surging, driven by reindustrialization, electrification, and domestic supply chain growth — initiatives requiring trillions in new financing. Traditional, relationship-driven project finance simply can’t scale quickly enough to meet the magnitude and urgency of this infrastructure build-out.
Why now
Several key market shifts make this the ideal moment for a solution like Crux:
Unprecedented demand and complexity in project finance: Energy infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and critical domestic supply chains are experiencing historic growth, requiring trillions in capital investment over the next decade. The sheer volume of funding needed, combined with the increasing complexity and diversity of projects — from traditional infrastructure to batteries, hydrogen, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing — is pushing traditional, manual financing methods beyond their limits. Each new project type comes with unique underwriting, risk, and structuring demands, underscoring the need for a digital, scalable approach.
Market readiness and appetite for digital transformation: Historically conservative and relationship-driven, the project finance sector is finally embracing digital solutions. Spurred by the pandemic and generational shifts in leadership, banks, institutional lenders, and investors are now actively looking for technology to streamline workflows, improve efficiency, and enhance competitiveness. The market’s newfound openness to digital platforms creates a timely opportunity for Crux to rapidly establish itself as the central platform for modernized project financing.
Emergence of new financial asset classes and incentives: Recent U.S. legislation has introduced significant financial incentives across diverse industries — including transferable tax credits, creating entirely new asset classes for investors. This quickly growing urgently requires liquidity, efficiency, and intelligence to realize its full potential. Crux is purpose-built to facilitate and standardize these novel financing mechanisms, and is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this momentum.
The vision
Crux’s strategy is to tackle these challenges head-on by building a unified financial platform for the next century of American energy and manufacturing. The company launched in early 2023, focusing initially on the nascent transferable tax credit market — becoming the first central marketplace for buying and selling these credits. By building the largest network of buyers, sellers, and intermediaries and standardizing processes, Crux immediately brought liquidity, intelligence, and efficiency to what had previously been a chaotic and offline market. The early results were compelling: Crux has facilitated over 70 transactions involving billions of dollars of transferable credits, spanning sectors such as solar, wind, battery storage, advanced manufacturing, bioenergy, geothermal, and beyond. More than 630 developers, manufacturers, tax credit buyers, lenders, investors, and banks now use the platform regularly, turning deals that once took many months into transactions often closed in mere weeks.
Encouraged by this initial success, Crux rapidly expanded its platform. Earlier this year, the company launched a comprehensive debt marketplace, enabling developers to secure construction loans, bridge financing, and other structured debt products through the same centralized hub. Within just the first quarter, this debt marketplace already includes over 100 developers and manufacturers seeking more than $11 billion in debt capital, with over 90 banks and institutional lenders actively issuing more than $1 billion in term sheets.
By integrating transferable tax credits and debt financing into one seamless digital platform, Crux is evolving into a true one-stop financial platform. A developer or manufacturer could soon finance an entire project — covering all capital types and project stages — with dramatically improved speed, cost, and efficiency. Each new participant on the platform reinforces powerful network effects, further enhancing value and liquidity.
Looking forward, Crux’s ultimate vision is to become the foundational financial infrastructure for project finance across energy development and manufacturing. Think of it as the central operating system for capital deployment into the clean economy — a digital, standardized, and frictionless hub through which trillions of dollars can flow efficiently into critical projects. Crux’s software and data-driven platform will intelligently match projects with tax credit buyers, investors, and lenders, automate due diligence and underwriting, and provide industry-leading market intelligence. In doing so, Crux aims to drastically reduce the complexity, cost, and time needed to finance projects, transforming a process that historically took the better part of a year into one that could take just weeks.
The team behind Crux is exceptionally well-suited for this ambitious vision. Alfred Johnson (CEO) and Allen Kramer (COO) are second-time marketplace co-founders, having previously co-founded and scaled the volunteer recruitment platform Mobilize (acquired by EveryAction in 2020). Alfred brings experience from BlackRock and as Deputy Chief of Staff at the U.S. Treasury Department, where he worked on structured finance and economic policy. Allen’s background includes strategy roles at Bain & Company and deep expertise in marketplace operations. Together, they’ve assembled a standout team with deep domain expertise in energy, finance, tax, government, and technology — an essential blend for a business navigating the complex intersection of private capital and public incentives.
This latest Series B funding will accelerate Crux’s journey toward its vision. With the fresh capital, Crux plans to further develop its platform into the industry-standard infrastructure for project finance — adding new features, expanding transaction types, growing the team, and exploring strategic partnerships and acquisitions. Leveraging cutting-edge AI and data analytics, Crux will enhance its matchmaking, transaction workflows, and market intelligence capabilities, further cementing its central role in clean energy and manufacturing finance.
At OMERS Ventures, we believe Crux’s platform can unlock immense economic and societal value. By removing friction in project financing, Crux can help direct capital swiftly into the energy and manufacturing projects our economy urgently needs. If successful, financing a major energy or manufacturing project could soon become as seamless as securing a mortgage or trading equities online. That would represent a fundamental leap forward in the pace and scale at which critical infrastructure gets built.
Crux’s ambition is no less than to reinvent how clean energy, manufacturing, and critical mineral projects get financed in the 21st century — by making capital markets more liquid, efficient, and intelligent. We’re excited to partner with them on this journey.
