Spent the last few months tracking every climate tech raise I could find, and one pattern kept showing up: the deals getting done fastest right now aren't the flashy hardware plays — they're the boring middleware.

Grid software, carbon accounting infra, permitting/interconnection tools. Not sexy. But they're the picks-and-shovels layer sitting between every hardware company and the subsidies/incentives they're chasing, so investors see them as lower-risk, faster-to-revenue bets.

If you're building or raising in climate tech right now, the framing that seems to land with investors isn't "we're decarbonizing X" — it's "we're the infrastructure that makes decarbonizing X actually bankable." Founders who lead with unit economics and time-to-revenue over pure climate impact are closing rounds faster in this market.

I started Carbon Signal to track this stuff weekly — funding rounds, policy shifts, and the strategic angles behind them, built specifically for founders and operators in this space. If that's useful to you, come hang out.