Submitted
2024 Global Climate Challenge

Waterfall - the digital bridge to bankable climate assets

Team Leader
Joe Bushnell
Solution Overview & Team Lead Details
Our Organization
Waterfall
What is the name of your solution?
Waterfall - the digital bridge to bankable climate assets
Provide a one-line summary of your solution.
Technology and investment platform accelerating the deployment of sustainable infrastructure.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Sydney NSW, Australia
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
  • Australia
What type of organization is your solution team?
  • For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?

The world needs and wants sustainable infrastructure, but there’s a $64 trillion infrastructure investment gap between now and 2050 to achieve net zero. This gap is widening because next generation infrastructure looks different to the large-scale infrastructure projects of the past - it’s smaller-scale, modular and distributed, making it harder to fund. 

The ability for this next generation infrastructure to access traditional debt markets is hindered by its complexity, examples including risk allocation, financial structuring, and forecasting - all leading to projects not reaching deployment. With this complexity comes a funding bottleneck, and with 20x growth in sustainable debt markets required to reach net zero goals we need to solve these hurdles.

There are hundreds of infrastructure solutions coming to market that tackle decarbonisation, such as modular heating and cooling in buildings, 3D-printed tiles to restore marine ecosystems, regenerative agriculture and closed-loop supply chains, however they’re not being deployed quickly due to complex funding pathways. 

To be widely deployed and deliver real climate impact, climate hardware needs a different investment approach from both the massive infrastructure projects of the past and traditional startup funding pathways. We need to design projects to be bankable so that they can target the right funding sources at the right time - increasing their chances of scaling and delivering real climate impact.

What is your solution?

Waterfall helps climate-solution companies to make their projects commercially viable, connect them with capital sources, and ensure both funding partners and the companies can seamlessly transact, manage and report on the investment. We do this through the Waterfall Platform - an end-to-end digital funding solution.

The Waterfall Platform is a two-sided marketplace that allows for climate infrastructure projects to be matched with high probability funding partners. 

For Project Developers we help with the design, delivery and deployment of climate infrastructure projects through a number of products:

  • FOAK by Waterfall helps developers of First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) projects to be funding ready. Our productised approach provides a pathway for companies to create an institutional-grade commercial proposition, apply innovative financing options and accelerate and de-risk their project pipeline.

  • Build by Waterfall provides a digitally enabled corporate development team as a service. We commercialise assets and businesses, structure financing with innovative financial instruments and connect investors and developers to transact quickly and efficiently. 

  • Liquidity by Waterfall offers ongoing compliance, reporting and capital optimisation to enable the liquidity needed to leverage and build new assets.

For investors we convert climate projects into institutional-grade investment assets through a standardised process and smart, data driven tools. This includes:

  • Specialised market intelligence and insights to inform and accelerate decision making for focus climate verticals.  

  • Pre-vetted and pre-built innovative transaction structures that transfer risk and deliver meaningful returns.

  • We make it easy to deal with new development counterparties, preparing projects for market and solving due diligence and process needs.

By removing the barriers of scale, maturity and fees we solve the growing funding gap for smaller scale, distributed climate assets. 

Access the Waterfall demo for Project Developers

Access the Waterfall demo for Funding Partners

Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?

Waterfall is driving investment into a better future. We enable faster and scalable deployment of sustainable infrastructure assets - this accelerates emission reduction, assists with climate adaptation and improves the adoption of sustainable innovations.

By increasing and democratising access to climate markets for landowners, Traditional Owners and communities we’re building financial literacy, reducing conflicts of interest and improving transparency in climate solutions. We’re supporting project developers and funding partners to better value and price the benefits of nature, environmental and social impacts.

For landowners, Traditional Owners and local communities we’re providing direct access to difficult to access funding sources to empower these stakeholders to take ownership in local climate infrastructure. And for those that are hosting these projects, we’re providing resources and direction to project developers to ensure fair and reasonable contracting that supports local development and ensures holistic measurement of project impacts.

Being Australian-headquartered, we have near-term growth ambitions into serving the APAC region. This is because we see South East Asia as an underserved and key market for the deployment of climate solutions and the tools and funding to support these. 

At a global scale, we’re targeting US$5 billion in funding per year by 2030, enabling an estimated 100 million tonnes CO2e of carbon reduction per annum.

How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?

Our solution knows no boundaries, and neither do we. We’ve been global from day one - with a diverse team coming together from international roots. We believe this diversity is key to our success because the projects, communities and funders we represent have differing priorities and mandates for creating next generation infrastructure.

We believe that our capability can be strengthened and are building an influential advisory board which will allow increased support, skills and access for different markets.

Our team continuously engages in direct outreach and attends digital and global face to face events. Feedback on our Platform that we’ve received at these events continues to highlight the importance of high-quality projects that have been accurately vetted. We’re responding to this feedback by building in a rigorous funding readiness process for project developers that supports funding partners to deeply understand their financial, community, governance and environmental obligations and areas for improvement. Our funding readiness process allows us to advocate on behalf of proponents and communities by focusing on the value of localised control and influence over development activity. 

Even after a transaction has been completed, Waterfall is committed to high-quality projects by implementing institutional-grade monitoring and reporting across financial, social and environmental metrics.

Our next stage of development will focus on building a proprietary risk decision model that will utilise a wide range of data sources (including our own) to accurately provide risk indicators across a projects’ sustainability.

Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
  • Adapt cities to more extreme weather, including through climate-smart buildings, incorporating climate risk in infrastructure planning, and restoring regional ecosystems.
Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?
  • 8. Decent Work and Economic Growth
  • 9. Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
  • 10. Reduced Inequalities
  • 13. Climate Action
  • 14. Life Below Water
  • 15. Life on Land
What is your solution’s stage of development?
  • Prototype
Please share details about why you selected the stage above.

The Waterfall Platform currently allows project developers to create a project and for funders to create an account. We have three project developers providing feedback on this MVP and a register of over 100 direct investor/developer relationships to be converted. 

Waterfall has signed one carbon-focussed platform customer ($100m mandate with potential to generate ~$500k over the next 12 months). We are working with 3 other companies under NDA, have 1 additional LOI and 8 other high probability potential customers. These companies are primarily in nature based solutions, with the lower proportion of interested companies focussed on new energies. We also have an ongoing informal partnership with a major bank. 

We've successfully hired our first employee and are progressing to hiring a second due to growing customer demand for our services.

Why are you applying to Solve?

We are looking for expert assistance that can help us build our company quickly and professionally, a community to work with to refine and innovate our solutions, and connections to potential customers and investors.

We are hoping that by becoming a Solver we will be able to access:

  • Technical support by industry experts to help us to build out our product in a meaningful way. We’re looking for advisory expertise from those that have worked on funding new infrastructure projects so that we can undertake regular gap analysis as a way to ensure that our digital simplification and streamlining of the funding process maintains best practice processes and incorporates evolving investor expectations.

  • Legal guidance as we navigate the complexities of our business structure and IP as a global company, and as a financial services company facing regulations around the financial advice we can provide and in which markets. 

  • Financial support to enable us to build the platform quicker. We’re continuously iterating and evolving our MVP with customer feedback and functionality however there are key elements of the platform such as dataroom and standardised documentation functionality that will enable end-to-end transactions and provide a deeper customer experience. We are balancing the costs of building quickly with ensuring we’re receiving customer feedback and achieving business development goals.

  • Public relations support to scale our marketing and sales. As a highly-engaged and informed team we have a lot of topic areas that can provide meaningful insights into how to get climate solutions funded. We’d love to spend the time and energy in developing our thought leadership, backing it up with data and using this data to drive external relations. By improving our position as a leader in financing climate solutions we believe we’ll be able to progress potential clients, especially on the capital markets side, through our acquisition funnel.

In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
  • Human Capital (e.g. sourcing talent, board development)
  • Legal or Regulatory Matters
  • Public Relations (e.g. branding/marketing strategy, social and global media)
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
Joe Bushnell, Co-Founder & CEO
More About Your Solution
Your Team
Your Business Model & Funding
Solution Team:
Joe Bushnell
Joe Bushnell
Alex Fitzpatrick
Alex Fitzpatrick