Sarah Kearney

Sarah Kearney founded Prime Coalition in 2014 to close the funding gap for early-stage climate technologies that conventional investors overlook. Prime is a public charity that empowers philanthropists — foundation grantmakers, donor-advised funds, corporate donors, family offices, and individuals — to place charitable capital into market-based climate solutions. Under her leadership the organization has steered more than $300 million (cited as $317M in 2025) in catalytic capital, worked with 250–420+ philanthropic partners, backed roughly 39 portfolio companies, and introduced over 120 first-time catalytic investors to the field. She describes Prime's role as a "trustworthy on-ramp for first-time climate or catalytic investors."

Before Prime, Kearney served as Executive Director and Trustee of the Chesonis Family Foundation, a grantmaking organization supporting transformational energy research, development, and deployment. She has worked at the nonprofit/for-profit boundary of climate innovation since 2006, beginning her career marshalling philanthropic capital immediately after college. She also co-founded Aligned Intermediary, a group facilitating investments into climate infrastructure projects, and launched the investment vehicles that grew out of Prime — the $50M Prime Impact Fund and, later, Azolla Ventures.

Kearney holds a B.S. in Commerce from the University of Virginia and an M.S. in Technology and Policy from MIT's Engineering Systems Division. Her recognitions include the Raven Society (University of Virginia), the 2012 MIT Ronald Heller Entrepreneurship Award, the 2014 Caltech Resonate Award, a 2014 Echoing Green Fellowship, MIT Technology Review's 2014 "35 Innovators Under 35," and Forbes' "30 Under 30/35."

In 2021–2023, Prime spun out Azolla Ventures as an independently run successor to the Prime Impact Fund; in 2023 Azolla debuted a $239 million blended fund ($80M philanthropic + $159M impact-aligned capital). Prime later added Trellis Climate to deploy catalytic capital into commercial-scale climate infrastructure.

• Catalytic capital for the overlooked "missing middle." Prime and Azolla back impact-first early-stage climate companies that "cannot attract conventional investors" but could deliver gigaton-scale greenhouse-gas reductions.
• Impact-first, not returns-first. In her own framing, catalytic capital is "built to alter the risk/return profiles of high-impact companies, projects or funds to bring mainstream, economically motivated investors to the table."
• Stage: pre-seed, seed, and seed-plus — "where the potential for both risk and reward is highest."
• Three-part screen for every deal: optimized for (1) climate impact, (2) attractiveness for commercial co-investment or follow-on, and (3) fitness for charitable capital.
• Sectors: carbon removal, industrial process decarbonization, clean/renewable energy, agriculture and food, critical minerals/mining, and the built environment.
• Investor mobilization is the product. Prime's aim is to build "a tribe of courageous philanthropists" and serve as a first-time-investor on-ramp, mobilizing philanthropic dollars (from ~$10,000 up) into climate.