Scaling breakthrough technology requires the right capital, at the right stage, in the right order.

What It Takes to Make It Work

This May, Fervo Energy priced its IPO at $27 a share. A carefully staged sequence of financing preceded the IPO, demonstrating the strategic, multiphased, and multipronged choreography that infrastructure-scale technology increasingly requires to reach the market.

Founded in 2017, Fervo adapts horizontal drilling techniques from shale oil fields to make geothermal energy viable almost anywhere, a technical leap built on decades of research spanning government labs, universities, and private industry. Venture and growth equity funding carried the company through its earliest years. Then, in 2021, Google made a unique bet , partnering with Fervo and funding its first commercial pilot years before there was any power to sell. Once the pilot was built, Google expanded its commitment with a large power purchase agreement from that same facility. Early funding built the track record needed to attract capital designed specifically to support project development , which in turn unlocked hundreds of millions of dollars from a group of banks willing to lend against the project itself, financing that would have been out of reach without every earlier partner already in place. Within months, that same strength carried Fervo to its IPO, and just last week, the company began generating revenue from its first commercial-scale plant, ahead of schedule.

Technological innovation is the foundational wellspring of long-term growth and competitiveness. Converting that innovation into market leadership requires financing. Just as AI requires data centers, a wide range of technologies now on the cusp, from geothermal power to synthetic biology and robotics, require large-scale infrastructure to be built in the physical world at enormous cost. Finance is what turns breakthrough technologies into assets that actually produce and sell output at commercial scale. PwC estimates that roughly $151 trillion in infrastructure investment will be needed globally through 2050, with energy and digital systems making up a substantial share of the total. Meeting that need will require focused effort and coordination.

The capital that funds industry has a different shape than the capital that funds invention. Most public discussion simply treats “more funding” as the answer, but the real key to success is choreography, getting the right form of capital to the right stage, in the right order, so that each round sets up the next.

This sequence can involve early-stage investors taking a chance on a new venture, public or catalytic capital willing to absorb the risks that keep others on the sidelines, creditworthy buyers whose purchase commitments provide predictable revenue, banks willing to lend once the largest risks have been absorbed, and institutional capital and public markets committing once the business has proven it can perform.

The Bridge Between Invention and Industry

The staged financing that carried Fervo to its IPO is one way of crossing a challenging bridge that new industrial technologies often face, moving from financing invention to financing the large-scale infrastructure needed to bring it to market. The bridge from invention to industry is hardest to cross for the first- and second-of-a-kind projects, when capital needs outgrow early-stage investors before conventional infrastructure finance is ready to take over.

This dynamic recurs across geographies and sectors, and intersects with national strategy and global trade competitiveness over the long term. The country that funds an invention’s earliest research is not guaranteed to be the country that builds the industry around it, and the gap between these achievements can carry lasting economic consequences.

Semiconductor manufacturing is a prominent example. American labs invented the transistor and the integrated circuit, with early chip companies designing and manufacturing under one roof. As the cost of each new generation of fabrication technology climbed into the billions, that vertically integrated model became uneconomical, contributing to a broader reorganization of the value chain. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) stepped in when Taiwan’s government supplied the patient, capital-intensive equity that no venture investor or conventional lender had provided. The world now depends on Taiwan for more than 90% of advanced chip manufacturing capacity, a position built on capital structure as well as technological advancement.

Having lost industrial leadership in the technology it first invented, the United States is now trying to rebuild that missing capital layer at home, the driving rationale behind the CHIPS Act. Invention and industrialization require entirely different ecosystems, from business models to financing, and winning over time requires precision strategy at every stage.

A Question of Precision and Sequence

The financing sequence is critical. If capital arrives in the wrong form or at the wrong stage, it can strand an otherwise viable technology. Each stage of a technology’s path to market carries a different risk (technical, execution, revenue, credit), a different scale, and a different required duration of commitment. The type of financing needs to address each of these variables. For example, a short-term subsidy should not underwrite a decade-long asset, even once other underlying risks have been addressed. The order must also arrive such that each stage de-risks the next: discovery capital proves the science; catalytic or first-loss capital proves the first project can be built; institutional capital and project finance deliver commercial scale.

Public capital is constrained by strained government budgets, with sovereign debt now at record highs worldwide , and catalytic capital has always been scarce by comparison. Both are most valuable when they change the risk profile enough to unlock the far larger pools of private capital waiting behind them.

The underlying realities of bankability also differ from country to country. In developed markets, an emerging technology may be constrained by the uncertainty of being the first project of its kind ever built and operated, by the difficulty of scaling up manufacturing, or by a lack of visible future revenue streams to underpin present value. In emerging markets, even a proven technology may still remain unfinanceable because of currency risk, weak counterparties, sovereign risk, or shallow domestic capital markets.

India’s Viability Gap Funding scheme for battery storage offers a good example of how to bridge these gaps, with government capital covering up to 40% of project cost specifically to achieve a level that commercial lenders and private developers can underwrite. The local constraints in India may be unique, but every geography should identify the risks that prevent commercial capital from entering, and place those risks with the actors best equipped to bear them.

The Buyer Matters as Much as the Builder

Most attention in project and infrastructure finance only focuses on supply, but demand matters just as much. Some of today’s most sophisticated buyers, from hyperscalers to defense agencies and airlines, have started using their own money to help build what they plan to purchase, underwriting demand long before a single unit exists to sell. A commitment like this works almost like insurance. It turns an uncertain stream of future income into something a financier can count on, which is often what it takes to get a new project built at all. Two examples illustrate this approach in practice.

In July 2025, U.S. Department of Defense agreed to pay MP Materials a floor price of $110 per kilogram for its key rare earth products, addressing national ambition to secure domestic supply chains behind a strategic industry that supplies essential inputs to defense technologies and beyond. It also agreed to ensure buyers for the full output of a new magnet facility for ten years, extended a $150 million loan to help build the plant itself, and purchased $400 million of convertible preferred stock and warrants that, once converted, would make it MP’s largest shareholder. These commitments unlocked $1 billion of financing from JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs for the facility, private capital that only made sense once the government had already absorbed significant risks.

Corporations are rolling out similar strategies to meet their own needs. In March 2022, United Airlines Ventures put $5 million into Cemvita , a Houston startup working to convert carbon dioxide into jet fuel using synthetic biology. A year and a half later, after Cemvita had advanced the technology through pilot development, United signed on to buy up to a billion gallons of fuel over the next twenty years. In the same period, United launched its Sustainable Flight Fund with inaugural partners including Air Canada, Boeing, and GE Aerospace, among others, extending the same invest-then-buy strategy across a broader portfolio of technologies.

Sequencing capital correctly gets a technology to the point where it can be built. Building it well, navigating challenges around permitting, equipment, supply chains, and skilled labor must also be addressed . Fervo’s stock is now trading well below its IPO price, as execution risks remain top of mind for investors. MP Materials still has to scale processing to the volumes its floor price assumes. Cemvita has demonstrated its process at industrial scale but has yet to bring its first commercial-scale plant online.

The Pentagon and United Airlines became investors because the assets they need, rare earth magnets and sustainable aviation fuel, remain structurally undersupplied relative to their long-term demand, scarcities that have not yet been resolved. A coordinated ecosystem is required to deliver technologies from pilot to commercial scale, one that includes finance but also depends on engineers, regulators, and the companies themselves.

Every successful effort to move invention into large-scale production requires strategic choreography. Early investors, catalytic capital, buyers, banks, and finally institutional capital and public markets each have a role to play.

Acknowledging and executing this sequence is its own mastery. The breakthroughs now sitting on the cusp, in energy, in healthcare, in the physical systems that will carry the next decade forward, will not reach the people they’re meant to help on the strength of proven technology alone. They will need investors, executives, and policymakers who can each take their own step when the moment calls for it, and move in time with others.