Interview date: June 24th 2025
As the world races toward net zero by 2050, climate tech has become a booming yet demanding frontier, surpassing USD 2 trillion in investments in 2024. Leaders from Marunouchi Innovation Partners, Amogy, and Fervo Energy discuss the sector’s key challenges and opportunities — from scaling hard tech to building global partnerships that drive the energy transition forward.
In recent years, climate technology has become one of the most dynamic and complex environments. With the 2050 net zero goal and regulations around the world, investments in cleantech surpassed USD 2 trillion in 2024 globally, and this trend is expected to continue in the coming years. Can you talk about the key challenges and opportunities that you’re seeing in the current cleantech environment?
Ichiro Miyoshi: I believe climate tech companies face several challenges. First, their organizational structures tend to be more fragile compared to those of mature businesses. Second, most climate tech firms are hard tech companies, like Amogy and Fervo Energy, which we primarily focus on, and their growth trajectories are typically slower than those of software companies. These are two major challenges facing climate tech companies today. Of course, there are additional hurdles, such as rising interest rates, increasing material costs, labor shortages, and backlash from the current US administration, including tariffs and taxes.
Given these circumstances, I believe collaboration among investors, industry companies, and climate tech companies is essential. Partnerships that share knowledge and insights, and leverage expertise, are especially valuable in this challenging environment.
Barbara Burger: In this space, there are all the inherent issues of building new businesses, but in energy or climate tech, one we’re trying to solve for, besides growing businesses, is a different environmental footprint. That has some urgency, and it’s a global issue, so that’s the nature of this, and it’s huge. Companies that don’t have a very large impact don’t cut it, so I think there are challenges to the space that we’re taking on inherently. There is tremendous support for it at the private company level, at the investor level, and at the government level, so that has provided some tailwinds.
I think three things are happening right now. The first is that the US has an outsized impact, and is doing two things. One is redefining what the energy transition really means. Some parts are no different from what they’ve been throughout all of this, but some parts are very political. So, the definition of what is needed has changed a bit. The second is that macroeconomics is creating a lot of uncertainty for investors, including, as you mentioned, inflation, the workforce, and tariffs. The third thing is, I think, an opportunity, which is that we realize that this is not a replacement of the current energy sources with new sources. We are expanding the energy system for a wide variety of reasons, but it’s getting more electrified and we need more electricity. The world is getting hotter. There are more people. We want air conditioning. We want AI. And we’ve electrified a lot of our industry.
So, I think the problem has gotten clearer, and it’s really about growing and adding rather than a replacement for a static system. That presents challenges but also opportunities.
You mentioned something interesting regarding collaboration and shared knowledge in this industry and the focus on hard tech versus software. Marunouchi Innovation Partners is part of the Mitsubishi ecosystem. Can you tell us how you leverage the Mitsubishi ecosystem to support your investment companies?
Ichiro Miyoshi: Mitsubishi Corporation is a majority shareholder of Marunouchi Innovation Partners which is the general partner (GP), as well as the biggest limited partner (LP) of the fund managed by Marunouchi Innovation Partners. Mitsubishi Corporation has been engaged in a variety of businesses for several decades in areas related to climate tech, such as energy, mining, and electricity. Collaborating with Mitsubishi Corporation presents significant opportunities, especially for energy transition companies.
Of course, these companies are pursuing highly innovative businesses, but for their growth, incumbent players must adopt their technologies. That’s why collaboration between startups and established industry players is crucial. In addition to our relationship with Mitsubishi Corporation, we also work with other Asia-based LPs and investment partners who are active in the industry. Through these relationships, we can leverage their expertise to support business growth and foster partnerships with climate tech companies.
We also have financial investors, including large banks, who may be able to assist with financing projects that are critical for company growth. It’s not only Mitsubishi Corporation, but also our broader ecosystem of investment partners that really matters and that plays a vital role in supporting energy transition companies.
Can you share a concrete example of how the Mitsubishi ecosystem helps to support the development of one of your investment companies?
Ichiro Miyoshi: Since we began our investment activity just two years ago, there aren’t many examples yet. However, the fund’s concept is to support the expansion of its portfolio companies. I’ll defer to Seonghoon of Amogy to share concrete examples of the collaboration, but our focus is on leveraging our LP network to drive growth across the portfolio.
Seonghoon Woo: Some of these LPs are direct investors in Amogy. As already mentioned, most of the climate tech companies, including Amogy, are building hard tech like manufacturing. Therefore, you have to collaborate with companies who know how to do these things pretty well, because things like manufacturing and Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) are not often strengths of a startup business.
For example, we have partnered with one of the industrial LPs based in Japan to come up with a solution much more adoptable for maritime vessels combining respective technologies. We are also actively collaborating with other industrial companies so we can provide a solution which is much more economical and easy-to-adopt for industry customers. The industry and manufacturing experience that these investors are bringing to startups like Amogy is critical for us to successfully commercialize.
Unlike venture capital firms that invest in many early-stage companies hoping that some will pay off in a few years, your company looks to invest in companies that are more mature in their technology and product development that need resources to commercialize and to scale to be ready for the market. Can you tell us why you decided to target these kinds of companies and what value you add to this investment group that other companies don’t?
Ichiro Miyoshi: The chart below illustrates our investment thesis. Early-stage companies are shown on the left, and more mature companies on the right. Looking back at the Cleantech 1.0 era nearly fifteen years ago, there were many promising investment opportunities, along with strong support from early-stage investors, government subsidies, and accelerators. However, there was a noticeable gap in growth-stage investment, particularly during the commercialization and scaling phases. Based on this, we decided to establish a fund focused specifically on those stages. Otherwise, startup companies may not survive, and it’s critical for them to reach the mature market stage. That’s the rationale.
We invest in startup companies that have already validated their technologies, typically those with a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of seven or eight. Companies in the commercialization and scaling phases have a strong need for business expansion, so we leverage our relationship with Mitsubishi Corporation and other LPs and investment partners to create opportunities for our portfolio companies. That is the most important thing for startup companies to survive the Darwinian Sea.
Why do you think that before you arrived there weren’t many investors targeting these companies?
Barbara Burger: The companies in these two areas are fundamentally different. One is very much an innovator, and the other is an executor. I think a lot of the venture capital investors who started out in software were very comfortable with the innovators but scaling of hard tech and physical tech, which involves working with contractors, land, permitting, etc., is a world that is completely alien to a software investor. So, I think in this next evolution of investment, Marunouchi can really help because when these companies are ready to scale, there’s still a lot of work to do in terms of getting costs down, building their supply chain, etc. This is what the Mitsubishi companies know how to do and know how to help.
Of course, it’s very important for these companies to not only scale their technology but also to bring it to other countries. How important is it for you to find partners for these companies to help them move overseas?
Ichiro Miyoshi: I believe that to expand these businesses, we need international collaborations and partnerships. We were established in Tokyo, but our LPs and investment partners are based across Asia, including Japan, Korea, and Singapore. Asia is a major business market for energy transition companies, which is why we can add value by helping and supporting their expansion into the region. This is one of our key differentiation factors.
Switching gears to focus on Amogy, your company uses ammonia cracking technology to help decarbonize hard-to-abate sectors like maritime, power generation, and heavy industry by delivering high-density, zero-emission energy. Can you tell us why your technology is such a strong solution for the climate tech ecosystem and these sectors in particular?
Seonghoon Woo: I think in the hard-to-abate sectors like shipping or distributed power generation, people have known about the merits and great characteristics of ammonia as a fuel for a while, because it fundamentally has high energy density, probably the highest density amongst the non-carbon fuels. Ammonia has also been traded as a commodity, for uses like fertilizer, for over 100 years, so there is pretty well-established infrastructure, which we can use. However, there has not been an effective way to convert that ammonia to power to-date.
If you look at conventional heavy industries, we essentially burn the fuels to generate power. However, there has not been a way to generate power using ammonia as a fuel because it has some special characteristics, including that the chemical is not combustible, so you cannot burn ammonia by itself. While you can mix a bit of carbon fuel with it to combust, then the combustion of the mixture generates both CO2 and nitrogen oxide (NOx).
That’s been the dilemma about using ammonia as fuel. It’s a potentially good fuel source, but there has not been a technology which can convert it to power without making significant emissions. That’s where Amogy’s technology, ammonia cracking, comes in. Ammonia cracking is an ammonia to hydrogen technology.
Amogy Tugboat 
Amogy’s ammonia-to-power architecture for fuel-cell and hydrogen-engine systems.
If you look at hydrogen, it has been used as a propulsion technology commercially, including in vehicles by companies like Toyota and Hyundai, so the hydrogen propulsion technology is pretty mature. However, hydrogen as a fuel has been very difficult and costly because storage and transportation are very challenging. Ammonia cracking technology can address those transportation and storage dilemmas, so it can be a promising fuel technology, and we’re enabling that by combining this ammonia cracking together with hydrogen propulsion technology. Essentially, we are opening up a new way of using ammonia as a fuel without generating emissions. That’s the core of the technology.
How do you assess the scalability of your technology and its market readiness right now?
Seonghoon Woo: In terms of scalability and readiness, when we want to use a new technology like using ammonia as a fuel, it’s not just the technology you need in the market. You also need infrastructure and policies. From that perspective, countries like Japan, Korea, and Singapore will have the perfect combination of policy, technology readiness, and infrastructure readiness, starting in the next couple of years.
As I shared earlier, the ammonia infrastructure in terms of storage and transportation already exists because of the fertilizer use case. The biggest bottleneck has always been technology readiness, but our ammonia-to-power technology is maturing fast enough that we plan to commercialize it starting next year as the very first product comes to market. At the same time, if you’re in Japan, you may have heard about policies such as Contracts for Difference (CFDs), and there is something similar in Korea called the Clean Hydrogen Portfolio Standard (CHPS). With that, if you generate electricity using, for example, ammonia as a fuel, versus something like coal as a fuel, the government will subsidize the difference in cost in an effort to reduce the overall emission from the conventional coal plants. Such scheme will allow ammonia to smoothly land on the market as a fuel for power because the government sees this as the most economical solution.
So, the policies are starting. CFD RFP was announced in Japan this year and will be finalized later this year, and then the actual power generation will come to the market in 2029-2030 in Japan and a bit earlier in Korea. Policy coming together with the technology readiness for commercial use is all happening now, which is giving us a great opportunity to commercialize our technology in this market.
Are you also considering other emerging markets in Asia, such as India or Indonesia, for your technology?
Seonghoon Woo: Definitely. We are targeting the markets that are most relevant to ammonia as a fuel. If you look at countries like India or Saudi Arabia, those are the biggest clean ammonia producers, and we plan to launch some projects in these countries because we can use the ammonia produced locally to decarbonize industry operations. Overall, we are going after those markets where ammonia is available, relevant, and where the infrastructure and regulations are there to allow us to commercialize our technology.
What do you expect to be your first major project?
Seonghoon Woo: In the past, we focused a lot on maritime shipping decarbonization. We also publicly announced projects with companies like NCL, Green Ships and Hanwha Ocean, to build ammonia powered vessels powered by Amogy technology. Recently, we have started seeing very strong demand from the distributed power generation market, especially in countries like Japan and Korea, because they are building an ammonia infrastructure with supporting policies as mentioned earlier.
Can you talk about the direct collaboration you have with Marunouchi Innovation Partners and what they bring to your company to help you commercialize your technology?
Seonghoon Woo: We only know about how to build our technology. If you think about building a ship, you need like 100 different auxiliary technologies to adopt your product smoothly and economically to such a large-scale transportation method. In that sense, you really have to collaborate with the companies that have the knowhow to build a vessel and that can help you better commercialize your technology. For example, last year we announced a partnership with one of the industrial LPs of Marunouchi Innovation Partners based in Japan where their ammonia supply system combined with Amogy technology making the total solution more economical and easier to adopt in the commercial market.
We are also doing something similar with an EPC company in Korea . When you deploy ammonia-to-power technology, what the customer cares most about is not necessarily your technology. It’s how cheaply and how easily they can access the clean electricity. They care about how easily they can have the turnkey solution so the customers don’t have to worry about things like construction. To make that easier, you must work with the companies who know how to build and deploy infrastructure that is typically done by EPC company. From that perspective, we partnered with the leading EPC company in Korea who is also one of the investment partners of Marunouchi Innovation Partners, and they’re helping us to easily deploy our ammonia-to-power solutions that enables Amogy staying focused on the core technology.
Turning our attention to Fervo Energy, your company provides carbon-free geothermal energy using proprietary technology, including fiber-optic sensing, data analysis, and real-time information. Can you tell us about your technology and your project?
Tim Latimer: Geothermal is one of the few ways to get 24-7 carbon-free baseload power, which is incredibly valuable in the market today. Yet today it only accounts for 0.5% of the US electricity supply, and globally, it’s less than 20 gigawatts. So it’s a small fraction of the overall economy.
The reason for this is because historically, with existing technology, geothermal has been limited to unique geologic conditions. For most of the past century, you either needed to have Iceland’s geology, or you were out of luck because geothermal was not an opportunity.
There are places like here in Japan, or Indonesia, or Northern California that also have a similar geology, but those places got tapped, and the economies that have access to that energy benefit from it tremendously because it’s such a unique resource. However, the attempts to expand geothermal beyond those very specific footprints over the last several decades have always fallen short, and that’s principally for two reasons. The first is that drilling geothermal wells has historically been far more expensive than drilling oil and gas because you’re in a higher temperature, harder rock environment. The second is that you often end up with dry holes if you drill with conventional technology, where you can’t get the right flow rates needed to support power plant construction.
Fervo is working on enhanced geothermal systems, though we’re not the first to do so. Government research on this goes back into the 1970s. The concept is, if flow rates are the problem, can you use well stimulation mechanisms like hydraulic fracturing or other technology to achieve consistently high flow rates even in a lower quality geology? I would call the attempts to do this over the last 50 years scientifically interesting but commercially unsuccessful. That was usually because these projects have not generated the amount of flow rate needed to justify building a power plant. What Fervo has done is advance the field of enhanced geothermal systems by incorporating horizontal drilling into the project.
We drill down deep and turn horizontally. Whenever we do enhanced geothermal systems, we can create hundreds of fractures to create a significant new network of flow opportunities as opposed to just a small number, and that has shifted the economics tremendously. In much the same way that these technologies opened up new oil and gas resources in the United States, they’re now opening up a new economically viable geothermal resource in the United States.
We deployed these technologies for the first time in Project Red, our pilot project in northern Nevada, which we did in a partnership with Google. That project validated that we could adapt technologies from the oil and gas industry to solve these systematic technical challenges that have held in the geothermal industry back to date. We generated extraordinarily high flow rates on this project in an area that had previously had dry holes in exploration for geothermal. We also developed new technology that dramatically lowered the cost of drilling, so what the Fervo package can now do is deliver commercial flow rates to generate electricity in an incredibly wide set of geologies. We’ve also significantly increased the performance of drilling in such a way that it’s opened up far more locations to geothermal around the world.
So, our view is that geothermal has always been this wonderful resource if you have it, but few people have it. Now, it’s scalable everywhere, and that’s our mission.
Talking about it being scalable everywhere, can you tell us which country you want to deploy this technology to next?
Tim Latimer: We’re a US-based company, so we’re focused on scaling in the US first. The first project was in Nevada and we’re now building our second project in Utah, and we’ve made it a significant jump in scale. The first project was fascinating from a technical standpoint, but it was only a 3-megawatt project, which is not very sizable in terms of the overall power grid. We’re now jumping up to a much more expansive effort called Project Cape that is a 500-megawatt project, so its size is significant.
Right now, power demand in the US is unprecedentedly high, driven by many factors, including the build-out of infrastructure to support AI, so we believe we will bring on gigawatts of new geothermal power in the US market alone and so we’re very excited about that opportunity.
We’re also looking to expand internationally over the medium term, and that’s one reason we were so excited about the collaboration with Marunouchi Innovation Partners. If you look at the portfolio we’ve done in the US, we started out in known geothermal areas that had a little geothermal, and we’ve been able to expand it to a very scalable amount of geothermal. When we think about going international, we think it’s the same. It’s always easier to start with a base of geothermal assets in place and expand from there rather than start from scratch. So, Japan is a compelling market because there’s been geothermal development here going back to the 1980s. Elsewhere in Asia, countries like the Philippines and Indonesia have expansive geothermal resources which we believe our technology can significantly increase the potential of. In general, we’re interested in expanding to regions that have strong incentives in place, clear industrial policy, the right quality of geology, and growing grid needs.
I’m curious to know a bit more about your core technology, specifically about the data aspect. It was interesting to read that you can retrieve this data from your operations with fiber optic sensing and real-time data analytics. Can you tell us more about how this technology is improving your operation?
Tim Latimer: Fiber optic sensing technology is also a technology that’s not new, but the way we’ve applied it to geothermal is. Actually, fiber optics were deployed in the 1930s for the first time. They used to run fiber optic cables through tunnels because if there was a fire in the tunnel, it would burn the cable, and then you couldn’t communicate through it anymore, so it’s been used in that application for a long time. In the 1990s, it became very popular to use for oil and gas.
Fervo Energy Cape Station Power Plant Construction 
FBG strain sensing
With fiber optic sensing technology, you run a fiber optic cable into the well, and you send laser pulses down that fiber optic cable. Some of the laser pulses refract back to you because there are impurities in the fiber optic cable, and you can actually map the backscatter there. Then, if there’s a change to the fiber, you can determine properties about the flow or the formation from the fiber. When things heat, the cable expands, so if there’s a temperature change, where something gets hotter or colder, those impurities will get farther apart or closer together. That lets you directly measure the temperature, not with any sort of temperature sensor, but just by looking at the properties of the fiber itself, which is really valuable to us in the geothermal context.
We were the first—and are really the only company at this point—to use fiber optic sensing in geothermal. There are things we had to do to make that work such as upgrading the equipment to work at higher temperatures and changing our well designs. In fact, we’ve developed some very interesting proprietary technology around the well designs that allow us to use this proven oil and gas technology in geothermal for the first time. It allows us to learn what works and what doesn’t work in a geothermal well much faster than the old trial-and-error method, where there were few data tools at the disposal of geothermal developers before.
To close this interview, we have a few last questions regarding the collaboration between Marunouchi Innovation Partners and your investment companies. They mentioned the expectation of coming to Japan and the support that you’re going to provide them, but from your perspective, what is the key support you want to bring to each of your investment companies?
Ichiro Miyoshi: I think that achieving net zero by 2050 is a challenging target, given current market trends. That’s why accelerating collaboration between investors and climate tech and energy transition companies is more important than ever. We aim to foster opportunities for collaboration, as we have done with Amogy and Fervo Energy, to share ideas and to inspire more investors and companies to tackle these challenges together. Our goal is to be a true accelerator in the climate tech space, driving progress toward net zero by 2050. That is the core purpose of our fund.
Regarding your future investments, what other kinds of companies do you want to invest in and in which parts of the world will you focus?
Ichiro Miyoshi: We are global investors, so we can invest anywhere in the world. However, looking at our pipeline, the US is the primary source of investment opportunities, with nearly 70% of our deal flow coming from the US, followed by Europe. Of course, there are APAC companies as well. While we are working to diversify our portfolio regionally, the US may remain our major market.
Barbara Burger: I think the problem we’re trying to solve is global and the sectors that we’re playing in are global sectors, so while the innovation may come from the US, the deployment opportunities cut across the world. For example, Amogy’s technology was developed in the US, but the first markets will not likely be there. Fervo Energy is coming from the US as well, but he already mentioned the implications for other parts of the world, so I think having a syndicate of investors that are not all from one geography is very healthy for a global sector.
Ichiro Miyoshi: Net zero is not the issue of a single country. It’s a global challenge. Collaboration among global players must accelerate further.
Barbara Burger: The companies Marunouchi has invested in have American, European, Middle Eastern, and Asian investors. I know the American investors well. They benefit from having Marunouchi on the cap table, because it has a different perspective than they have.
If I were to come back to interview you in five years, what key goals for Marunouchi Innovation Partners would you like to have achieved by then?
Ichiro Miyoshi: As I mentioned, we launched our investment operations two years ago and are still in the middle of the investment period. In five years, we expect to complete the first fund’s investment period. We are aligned with other stakeholders who joined the cap table before us, and we’re continuously working to deepen our expertise in the climate tech and energy transition sectors. We aim to showcase collaboration between our LPs, investment partners and climate tech companies and demonstrate how we can contribute meaningfully to these industries.
In five years, I hope we can showcase more examples of collaboration between us and our portfolio companies, and that those companies will have expanded their businesses into Asia.
For more information, please visit their website at: https://marunouchi-innovation.com/en/about/company/ • https://amogy.co/ • https://fervoenergy.com/about/
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