About Us
Overview
Prize CapitalSM was established by entrepreneur and environmentalist Lee Stein to provide capital to environmental startups worldwide while mitigating risk for investors. Traditional funding mechanisms are not designed to deliver capital to innovators from developing countries or to non-traditional early stage inventors, preventing the world from hearing these innovative voices. Prize CapitalSM believes innovation will solve the great environmental challenges we face, and that we need to empower people globally to innovate.
Prize CapitalSM’s proprietary financing mechanism combines inducement prize competitions with companion investment funds to deliver capital to achieve radical technological breakthroughs. The prize mechanism increases the pool of suitable investment candidates by enabling innovators previously excluded from capital markets. The related investment funds mitigate the inherent financial risk through a unique option equity strategy. Public sector partnerships reduce deployment risk by providing loan guarantees, advance purchase commitments and global market access.
The first Prize CapitalSM Earth 2.0SM program is the Biofuels Prize for sustainable decentralized renewable energy.
+ + Our Approach
Prize CapitalSM was initially formed to design financial models to support the X PRIZE Foundation, its large prize competitions. Specifically, the Prize CapitalSM methodologies are designed to attract investment capital for individual competitors, especially from developing countries.
There are many activities which a business or management team can schedule. Innovation, however, is impossible to schedule. It is also impossible to identify from where innovation may emerge. Since the vast majority of humanity does not have access to investment capital, enormous pools of talent are excluded from the innovation arena.
The culprit is risk. Methodologies to mitigate risk are essential in order to bridge the cultural gap and enable inclusion of all peoples in solving the problems facing our world.
Throughout history Prize Competitions have proven to be a remarkable tool to enable breakthroughs. Prize Competitions are especially powerful in inspiring solutions to problems outside the reach of conventional thinking. In fact, many Prize Competition winners, an estimated 30% of all winners, originated outside of the competition field.
Prize CapitalSM has merged the power of Prize Competitions with innovative financial instruments to facilitate capital for prize competitors.