This interview highlights Lucas Turner-Owens, Principal at Building Ventures, currently deploying a $100M Fund II with a thesis of enabling a better built world into Seed and Series A startups changing how we design, build, operate and experience our built world to help unlock a more sustainable future. Prior to his role at Building Ventures, Lucas was a principal at early-stage venture firm TMV and the fund manager at The Ujima Fund, which invests in under-resourced entrepreneurs in Boston. Lucas spends his days at the intersection of two things usually discussed separately: the built environment and the climate transition. He believes that a better built world is affordable, accessible, resilient, and sustainable, and that we get there with technology that earns its place on the merits. He is also the co-host of Impact(ed), an impact investing podcast sponsored by Impact Alpha.
Q: Does climate investing require a fundamentally different model than venture?
A: The question contains an assumption I’d gently push back on. “Climate” isn’t a sector; it’s an investment lens that now touches nearly every sector. So the honest answer is that the right model depends entirely on where in the stack a company sits. At the software and services layer (where I spend most of my time) the best climate companies look like very good venture companies: capital-efficient, real revenue, enterprise customers, sales cycles measured in quarters rather than decades. They don’t need a special dispensation from venture math; they need a thesis investor who genuinely understands their market. The deep infrastructure layer is different. Power assets and anything that gets poured in concrete really do require blended capital (e.g. venture equity sitting alongside project finance, tax equity, and insurance wrappers). So I don’t believe climate needs a fundamentally different model. It needs a layered one, and it needs investors disciplined enough to match the capital structure to the layer rather than treating “patient capital” as a euphemism for weak economics. Patience is not a substitute for a business.
Q: What within climate is the market still underpricing?
A: The market loves generation. New ways to make clean electrons get funded enthusiastically and priced richly. What stays underfunded in my opinion, is the demand side, the deeply unglamorous work of making the buildings we already have perform better. Roughly eighty percent of the buildings that will exist in 2050 are already standing, and 30% of the energy consumed by those buildings is wasted. Separately, we know that the grid is underbuilt in a way it cannot construct its way out of within the decade. That means some of the most valuable companies of the next ten years won’t generate a single watt; they’ll make existing demand flexible, legible, and efficient — capital planning for decarbonization, onsite generation and storage on commercial real estate, load orchestration, and the decision-support software that lets asset managers act on all of it. I’d add climate adaptation and resilience to that list: we pour capital into mitigation and badly underfund the equally certain need to make our built environment survive the climate we have already locked in.
Q: How do you think about policy and regulation?
A: I actually came up in economic policy and local economic development, so I take regulation seriously; infrastructure spending and building performance standards have genuinely moved markets. But I underwrite to the economics that work without the subsidy. If a company only makes sense because of a particular tax credit or a particular administration, its success is too binary and outside of our control. Instead, we ask: would this still be the rational choice for the customer if the policy incentive disappeared tomorrow? As an example, onsite solar is now often the cheapest power available; efficiency saves money whether or not anyone is compelled to pursue it. Those are durable. Has the calculus shifted? Yes. We used to have the IRA acting as an accelerant to adoption and now companies have to win in other ways. And some companies have had to augment their positioning to tell a story more in alignment with the political narrative in certain states. But our underlying thesis is not policy dependent. It is rooted in an understanding of the size and sophistication of the market and where we see opportunities for new solutions to win on their own merits.
Q: What do you look for in climate founders specifically?
A: Across the investment team we look for one thing in particular: earned secrets. The built environment is old, fragmented, conservative, and relationship-driven. You cannot growth-hack your way into a commercial real estate portfolio, and you cannot charm a utility into moving faster. The founders who win here have usually spent years inside the industry before they tried to change it. In my view, the best operators were personally burned by the problem and carry a hard-won understanding of the customer’s real “job to be done.” That’s a different profile from the archetypal AI or consumer founder. I look less for the prodigy and more for the translator: someone fluent in both the physical and the financial, able to orchestrate an ecosystem of utilities, contractors, capital providers, and insurers, with the stamina to sell through long enterprise cycles. Domain credibility, plus patience, plus the ability to make a slow industry move. I think that combination is rarer than raw technical brilliance, and it’s one thing I screen for.
Q: What’s your contrarian view on the next five years?
A: Here is what I believe that isn’t yet consensus: AI, usually cast as climate’s adversary because of its enormous energy appetite, will turn out to be climate tech’s greatest catalyst. Data center load growth is forcing the questions our industry has raised politely for a decade — how do we power demand, flex it, generate locally, and optimize what we’ve already built — into every boardroom as an urgent financial problem. Building more generation can’t be done in the timeline we need, so load shaping will become critical in the next decade, and AI is well positioned to orchestrate the complexity of our increasingly electrified and distributed world. I also have faith that AI, much like its been applied to techbio, will help us find new chemistries to solve climate challenges tied to mitigation and adaptation (e.g. new battery chemistries). And in all these cases, I think the winners of the day will enable abundance and put forth a regenerative model. I think the climate message from decades past around the scarcity of resources is sobering and important, but we will need to envision a more “solarpunk” abundant and regenerative system to capture the minds of the majority. That is the future we are investing toward.
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