Hey there,

The jump from technology development to project development is one of the hardest transitions that founding teams need to make: translating pilot results into something investors, project financiers, and customers will all actually believe.

That gap between a promising pilot and a bankable project shows up in predictable places: a pitch that lands with VCs but falls apart in a room with a lender who wants to re-run your model line by line; a customer who's excited about your solution but won't sign a long-term contract until they believe you'll still be operating in five years to deliver on it.

Switching registers between these stakeholders is a critical - and overlooked - skill for founding teams to build.

Today’s post is a guest contribution from Ari Lesniak, Head of Growth, and Andrew Gilbert, Head of Project Success at Aire Labs. They break down why mastering translation matters and concrete steps you can apply to take a project from believable to bankable.

Join us on September 9th for a curated roundtable where we’ll dive deeper into the transition from technology development to first-of-a-kind deployment.

​Expect a select group of peers and seasoned pros who've seen it before. ​This event is for startups, investors, corporate customers and offtakers, and ecosystem partners looking to level up their project development game.

Spots are limited. Join the list here →

Most climate infrastructure founders spend years talking to VCs. Pitching vision, roadmaps, TRL ramp up and hockey stick adoption.

After locking in customer interest and raising VC money, they then find themselves talking to a new set of stakeholders that speak a different language: project financers, debt providers, EPCs, and insurance underwriters.

Understanding and translating between VCs, project financers, and industry customers is a critical — but overlooked — skill that founders need to develop.

Each stakeholder has different incentives and interests, assumptions and risk tolerances, and, importantly, different levels of detail that they care about. Bringing the same pitch that you gave your VC investors to your project finance partners isn’t going to work (and may actually backfire). You need to switch between multiple hats, and translate from one player to another. It’s the skill that lets you take a project from Believable to Contractable to Bankable.

Successful founders end up doing multiple things in parallel: building the technology, and building the vocabulary (and evidence) investors need to understand and back their projects.

We’ve seen this firsthand at Aire Labs. Our team collectively has raised over $100M in equity capital for deep tech, analyzed over 800 project and techno-economic models representing over $15B in US Department of Energy lending, and spent over 15 years in project development and financing. Climate infrastructure companies currently testing the Aire platform and driving our development roadmap have collectively raised over $500M in equity capital, and much more in project finance capital. The gap between those with strong translation skills, and those without it shows up constantly.

Founders everywhere need to build this skill, whether you’re doing B2B SaaS or energy infrastructure. But founders building infrastructure in the real world face bigger challenges:

Longer timelines for technology development also mean that founders stay away from project finance longer. When they start showing up in those rooms, they need to pull themselves out of the habits they’ve developed for the last five years and rapidly learn a new language. What got you here, won’t get you there.

The upside: because it’s harder, it’s a bigger unlock. Founders who figure out how to do this well are building a new moat — executing fast on hard things.

People often think of a moat as a product or distribution feature — proprietary data, IP, network effects, etc. But doing hard things well (including raising the hundreds of millions needed to bring physical infrastructure to market) is a structural moat. The founders who crack translation first often aren’t just faster. They’re the only team that finishes at all since most first-of-a-kind projects only get one shot at getting built.

As a startup founder, you’re used to wearing many hats: VCs, customers, regulators, communities — the list goes on. And they all matter. But there are three that need to come together to turn a believable technology into a bankable project, and they’re all looking for different things.

Venture Capital. The highest level. Vibes are allowed as long as they’re backed up by a credible plan. You’re telling a story, particularly at the early stages. VCs want to know that you understand the entire capital stack and that this business is eventually financeable. More “tell me” than it is “show me”.

VCs can take on this risk because they’re being compensated for it — with more equity. VCs expect to lose money on most of their investments, and recoup 100x on a few portfolio outliers. They’re looking for that upside case, the outlier, the exciting “What if things go right?”

That said, even if it’s vibes-heavy, it’s still extremely hard to raise. Compounding the challenge for infrastructure startups, VCs need to believe that their investment could return 10x or 100x capital on fund timelines that are much shorter than typical project timelines.

Customers. A little bit of vibes, a whole lot of trust. The conversation starts with “We’re excited, here’s the competitive value” but quickly moves to “Don’t screw us over and get me fired”. Customers are trusting you on price, integration and, critically, whether you’ll still be around in five years. Nobody signs a long-term contract with a company that might not exist to actually deliver it.

Particularly for first-of-a-kind projects, they are the key to unlocking equity and debt financing. There’s a big difference between qualified leads in a pipeline, an LOI, and a long-term contract that a lender can actually underwrite.

In many cases, your customers won’t just be offtakers. They’ll need to be an investor in you too. Equity stakes give upside and control to offset the risk, and signal to project financers that there’s a committed and credible strategic buyer.

Project Finance. Zero vibes. If VC is “tell me”, project finance and debt are “show me”. If VC is looking for “How big is the upside if things go right? Is there a 100x here?”, project finance and debt is “How painful is the loss if things go wrong? Why is there a 100 basis point gap here?”.

Project finance wants the nuts and bolts: not just “who’s your insurer”, but “what does the contract actually say? What’s actually covered?” VCs may dig into your TEA and finance models, but Project finance analysts often rebuild your model, substitute their own assumptions and data (especially the “vibey” ones), and come to their own conclusion.

Project finance accepts far less risk because they aren’t being compensated for it — they’re being compensated for steady, predictable cashflows over decades. They want to know what risks need to be priced, how they’ve been mitigated, where they’ve gone and who’s carrying them.

To close this gap, approach these stakeholders much as you would different customer segments:

Once you’ve done the background work in understanding the needs of each stakeholder, and how you translate your project’s value to each stakeholder, the hard work begins: preparing the evidence (and it is never too early to start capturing this).

This is presented through two primary artifacts: the digital models of your project (Simulations, TEAs, LCAs, Project Finance Models, Equity Waterfalls, Portfolio Views, etc.) and the data room (Offtakes, Engineering Reports, Studies). Collectively, these should tell the story of your project, in one connected, coherent way.

As you move through the maturity ladder — going from Believable, to Contractable, to Bankable — these artifacts should evolve in detail, certainty, and coherence. At each stage, the artifacts should communicate the key pieces of evidence that that stakeholder is most interested in (and at the level of detail relevant for that stakeholder).

This is where good “Customer Discovery” will help you understand what evidence is most important to communicate and in what format (ex: which assumptions are critical at this stage? How accurate should the estimations be? Which scenarios should be modelled? Which critical assumptions should be sensitized, and over what ranges? What data sources are considered credible to this stakeholder?)

Critical to successfully translating the story of your project to each stakeholder is building credibility through each interaction. Provenance refers to the record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality. In the infrastructure world, provenance is no less important. The better the “provenance” of the data behind the model - the history of risks identified and retired, the records of how the models evolved stage to stage - the easier it will be for investors and customers evaluating one of these artifacts to verify the “authenticity” of your story.

At Aire, we followed a very similar process to learn about the needs of all the stakeholders involved in the journey a new infrastructure technology project takes from concept to successful commissioning. We designed our platform to make it easy for innovators to traverse that ladder from Believable to Bankable. To learn more, you can schedule a call with one of our team members.

Building your translation skills unlocks execution. It’s the key to solving the chicken-and-egg problem every project developer runs into: VCs want to know that customers are lined up and projects will be financeable before investing. The customer wants confidence the project will actually get funded and built before they'll sign. And the lender wants the offtake signed before they'll commit.

Breaking that circle is a translation problem.

It means convincing a lender, in lender language and data, that the offtake is solid enough to underwrite against a term sheet instead of a signed contract. It means convincing a customer, in customer language, that financing will close on the strength of your track record, even if it's not yet a done deal.

Iteratively, progressively retiring risks, building credibility, and closing the loop — one conditional commitment unlocking the next — is what a good project developer actually does. It means wearing three hats and making each hat's claims credible enough to move the other two forward.

A prototype and a vision may have gotten you started on the journey, but pretty quickly it's about who is the best and fastest at turning a story into evidence — and eventually steel in the ground. That skill — of turning stories into capital and commitments — makes it harder for your competition to catch up with you, building real durable competitive advantage.

The biggest infrastructure buildout of our lifetime is underway. Trillions in capital hunting for bankable projects in energy, industrial capacity, and data centres. Development velocity, speed-to-power, firm offtakes: these are the new competitive edges.

Aire Labs is agentic project development for this new era. AI agents work on top of one integrated, structured, auditable project model — doing in hours what teams of analysts and consultants did in weeks, and giving lenders structured data they can underwrite instead of bespoke black boxes. The developers already running agent-powered development will take the capital; the ones still emailing Excel files will watch it go to someone else.

Schedule a call with the Aire Labs team.

Join us on September 9th for a curated roundtable where we’ll dive deeper into the transition from technology development to first-of-a-kind deployment.

​Expect a select group of peers and seasoned pros who've seen it before. ​This event is for startups, investors, corporate customers and offtakers, and ecosystem partners looking to level up their project development game.

Spots are limited. Join the list here →