At Spring Lane Capital, we partner with strong management teams who are selling or using distributed assets with compelling customer economics in the energy, water, food and waste sectors. In these sectors, we focus on solutions that have significantly positive impacts on the sustainability of our natural resources, which we believe offer advantaged long-term benefits economically and socially. We’ve found that in practice, most such solutions have major physical components – “distributed assets” are those solutions using equipment or facilities smaller and less concentrated than traditional project finance can address.

Our experienced team has developed a unique, integrated investment model –

CATALYTIC PROJECT Capital

– to help these companies grow more rapidly, by providing the right capital for the right needs.

For companies that want to offer their customers services and solutions instead of upfront systems sales, or whose business plans require project capital smaller than the typical scale of traditional infrastructure, Catalytic Project Capital may be a good answer to an otherwise difficult investment need.

PROJECT POOLS

Spring Lane’s model is to establish “project pools” (typically, $15-30M initially) that own distributed assets on behalf of growing platform companies. These pools of capital will enable repeatable asset deployment by these companies under pre-arranged structures, and often provide an ongoing revenue stream back to the platform company for continued support and service of the assets. 

Having this committed pool of capital available to finance assets enables these platform companies to focus on what will help them drive growth: Solving customer problems. It can allow the platform company to offer their solution as an onsite service, for example, while simply asking customers to sign long-term contracts instead of having to pay up front for the onsite systems themselves. For other companies we partner with, the pool of capital is used for building multiple smaller-scale production facilities. 

And as a key part of Spring Lane’s Catalytic Project Capital model, we simultaneously support the platform companies themselves with additional corporate growth capital (typically about 10-20% of the size of the initial project pool). Through experience, our team has found that providing both project pools and corporate support simultaneously helps create strong alignment with the management teams that we partner with, and it also enables us to be in a strong position to help these teams succeed however we can.