Venture capital is an effective source of money for scaling companies quickly. But what if your company needs 15 years to prove itself? That’s the time horizon for many “tough tech” companies in energy that are developing new semiconductors, industrial processes, chemical production methods, and long-duration storage innovations. The first cleantech bubble showed the limits of VC in backing tough, capital-intensive tech. So we are asking: can venture capital ever step up to the big industrial-scale challenges of our day? Wind, solar and lithium-ion batteries are growing — but what about the difficult decarbonization solutions for heavy industry?