A Money + Meaning Podcast with Tom Chi of At One Ventures, Gilad Goren of Nature Tech Collective, Laura Ortiz Montemayor of SVX México & Regenera Ventures Fund, and Amy Cortese of ImpactAlpha
Damaging wildfires and other severe weather events are bringing new attention to the financial threat of the climate crisis. At the same time, major banks are leaving climate finance alliances amid global political shifts.
It’s a critical time for the climate capital field, which was a dedicated content track at SOCAP24 and the focus of a new Money + Meaning podcast episode recorded at the event. In this discussion, leaders in the field offer a comprehensive overview of the climate capital landscape and share how they are working to transform economic systems to be in harmony with the planet. The episode features:
- Tom Chi, Managing Partner at At One Ventures, a venture capital firm that aims to accelerate a future where humanity is net positive for nature.
- Gilad Goren, Executive Director at Nature Tech Collective, a nonprofit member organization working to propel humanity toward effective coexistence with the rest of nature.
- Laura Ortiz Montemayor, Founder & General Partner at SVX México & Regenera Ventures Fund, which has a mission to ensure capital serves life rather than governing it.
- Amy Cortese, Editorial Director at ImpactAlpha and session moderator.
Cortese launched the discussion by highlighting how the three leaders are advancing a shared goal. “They’re all working to transform economic systems to be in harmony with the planet and nature and to serve people instead of profits,” she said.

The speakers agreed that they’ve seen progress and growth over time in the climate capital sector, but the need to do more — and do it more effectively and quickly — remains. Chi noted that investing in the climate sector has increased in the last 20 years, but the way funding is allocated remains stuck in old patterns. More than half of climate capital is invested in the mobility of small vehicles, making it an overvalued and overfunded industry, he said.
While many At One Ventures portfolio companies are doing well financially, Chi said the majority of investors are primarily in it for returns rather than the greater good. “As much as I wish they would care about all the other reasons we invest in the tech … they’re buying it just because it’s better economically. And then they happen to improve the world,” he said.
But those financial gains can help overcome doubts among hesitant investors. “It breaks this kind of false idea that’s been in the market for a long time, which is, ‘Oh, if you make your thing cleaner and greener and better for the environment, it’s intrinsically going to cost more. Or if you want to be better at business and move those costs down, then it’s intrinsically going to be worse for the environment.’ That’s not true 85% of the time,” Chi said.
Ortiz Montemayor agreed on the need to shift capital away from tech and transportation and instead toward nature-based solutions. “What we’re lacking is ecological intelligence — EI. We need to value EI more than we do AI,” she said. “One of the things that soil teaches us is that there are limits.”
There’s also a need to move away from a financial system that relies on debt and compound interest and creates burdens for the Global South and other regions. “It’s not only how we’re doing in terms of what things are underfunded and overfunded; it is the how, and it is the why,” Ortiz Montemayor said.

That includes moving from a perspective of scarcity to abundance, and from ego to collaboration. “The unity paradigm has been around for a long time. We need to learn from it because human beings were not extractive by design,” she said. “We are extractive in a very recent model, and we do know how to be architects of abundance. … We can be responsible stewards.”
Gilad said the current misalignment of investment reflects the need for a much greater influx of capital to address the true scope of the challenge. “They talk about how 55% of GDP is tied to nature. Let’s be real, it’s 100%. No nature, no GDP, right?” he said. “We know every company is either impacted on or impacted by nature — every company realizes this.”
To achieve nature preservation goals and protect the planet’s future, now is the time to accelerate progress and funding for nature-based solutions. “The challenge now is moving quickly from education to action,” he said. “There’s a huge opportunity to think of earning returns and making impact happen. The opportunity is really grand.”
Listen to the episode to hear the full climate capital discussion:
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