Christian Zabbal

Christian Zabbal is Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Spring Lane Capital, an investment firm based in Boston and Montreal that provides tailored project finance and corporate equity to sustainable real-asset companies. Spring Lane describes its focus as investing in the “missing middle” of sustainable real assets: companies that have moved beyond technology proof points but are not yet large or standardized enough for conventional infrastructure capital.

Before Spring Lane, Zabbal was Managing Partner, Canada at Black Coral Capital, beginning in early 2009. Black Coral was a family-office-backed investor focused on cleantech and renewables, with portfolio companies including Clean Energy Collective, Digital Lumens, newterra, Next Step Living, Noesis Energy, OneRoof Energy, Powerit Solutions, Solantro, and ZETA Design+Build.

Earlier in his career, Zabbal was a partner at ghSMART, a management consulting firm focused on talent assessment and development for the private equity industry, where he grew and managed several offices. Before ghSMART, he was a junior partner at McKinsey & Company, working in the firm’s Amsterdam and Montreal offices and focusing on media, broadband deployment, and new media.

Zabbal started his career as a cancer researcher developing new cancer therapies and founded and sold a small research company before earning an MBA and joining McKinsey. Public bios also identify him as a co-founder and board member of CREO Syndicate and as a member of Sustainable Development Technology Canada’s investment committee.

• Spring Lane’s stated thesis is to invest in the “missing middle” of sustainable real assets, where companies need capital to scale deployment but are not yet served well by traditional infrastructure finance.
• The firm’s model combines project finance with corporate equity. Spring Lane describes this as “tailored project finance and corporate equity” for real-asset platforms.
• Target sectors are decentralized, low-carbon assets in energy, transportation, waste-to-value, food and agriculture, and water.
• Spring Lane looks for companies with a capable, high-execution management team, an existing distributed-asset solution, customer economic benefits, commercial revenues from proven technology, and customer preference for onsite services or no-CAPEX offerings.
• The firm emphasizes deeper partnership over high-volume deal flow, stating that it maintains “fewer, deeper relationships” and invests alongside teams with a growth mindset.
• Zabbal’s broader climate-investing view, expressed through CREO-related commentary, is that family offices can be early pioneers in climate markets: “What Creo is doing today is essentially a preview of what institutional capital will do very shortly.”