About Us: History
Environmental Entrepreneur Roots
Our new model evolved from a combination of factors. It originates from Prize Capital’sSM Founder, Lee Stein’s personal interest in the environment. A serial entrepreneur, Lee’s involvement with environmental policy started in 2000 with the National Resources Defense Council and lead to starting a chapter of its group Environmental Entrepreneurs, which believes a healthy environment supports healthy business. He became personally involved in passing ground-breaking legislation in California that would increase jobs and provide environmental protection.
As an entrepreneur, Lee traveled the globe in search of new and unmet investment needs for dealing with environmental change, meeting with governmental and non-governmental organizations, multinational corporations and environmental associations.
Introduction to X PRIZE’s
In October 2005, Peter Diamandis, founder of the X PRIZE Foundation, invited Lee Stein to Las Cruses, New Mexico to attend the first X PRIZE Cup event. While at the event Lee had an experience which proved to change his investment and philanthropic focus.
Lee met Dumitru Popescu, President of ARCA , the Romanian Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association, a non-governmental organization, that promotes innovative aerospace projects. At first it seemed funny, a Romanian space team...it sounded very much like the Jamaican Bobsled team. Soon Lee learned that ARCA joined the Ansari X PRIZE Competition in 2002 and since then it became one of the leading teams.
Lee found Dumitru and his team’s story to be fascinating. The raw spirit of opportunity and innovation was admirable, but was most intriguing for Lee was the fact that the ARCA team had invented a composite engine for their rocket launch, but had not filed any intellectual property protection due to capital constraints. The challenge was compelling: Figure out how to get capital to competitors so that others could follow in Dumitru's steps, but do so with the opportunity for financial gain.
So began the journey to develop risk mitigation methodologies which could work be applied to solving future X PRIZE Competitions for the benefit of those without access to financial markets.
Working with the Public Sector
In the fall of 2006 Prize CapitalSM introduced their approach to representatives of the Global Environment Facility (GEF). Since its inception in 1991, the GEF has disbursed nearly $7 billion in grants to developing countries for more than 1,300 projects implemented by UN agencies and the The World Bank Group.
In June 2007, the GEF’s governing Council approved $50 million in seed funding for a new Public Private Partnership that proposed using Prize Capital’sSM approach to address a variety of environmental challenges. Following this the International Finance Corporation (IFC) was named Implementing Agency for projects with Prize CapitalSM,, including the first proposed prize for biofuels.
The relationship with the GEF and IFC brought a wealth of perspective to ensure the prize resulted in technologies that would benefit citizens around the globe, particularly in developing countries. Through their networks of country ministers, these agencies can provide funding and potential markets.
In October 2007 the X PRIZE Board approved serving as the Prize Awarding Entity in the planning phases of the Biofuels Prize. The process began to determine when to begin the planning phase of the prize.
On December 10, 2007 in Bali at the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC), Prize CapitalSM shared the stage with the IFC and the GEF to announce the Earth Fund – a new partnership that will support innovative market-based solutions for the most pressing environmental challenges in developing countries. The Prize Capital, LLC approach is a key mechanism of the fund.
With this global declaration, the stage was set to announce a planning phase for the Biofuels Prize that would invite technical experts to refine the prize rules, and open this unprecedented opportunity for prize sponsors and investors.