Pioneer – an AI-powered service for climate tech companies pursuing government incentives – recently announced the closing of $2.9 million in seed funding led by Blue Bear Capital. And participating investors include Collaborative Fund, Soma Capital, Cool Climate Collective, and Kayan Ventures. The funds will be used to accelerate the company’s growth.
Launched in 2022, Pioneer combines large language models (LLMs) with process execution expertise to help climate tech companies win more non-dilutive funding more efficiently from the vast government and non-governmental funding ecosystem. Specifically, Pioneer empowers companies to match their sector focus, business model, and capital needs with potential funding sources and then apply across thousands of grants, contracts, and other incentives from hundreds of sources at a federal, state, and local level. Pioneer’s emphasis on LLMs enables them to handle a lot of the bureaucracy associated with the application process through software, and the company’s co-founders have extensive experience working in AI.
Dimitar “Mitko” Simeonov (CEO) received a Master’s in AI and natural language models from MIT and deployed AI to hundreds of millions of users while working for Twitter; Kyle Treige (COO) previously founded two startups and worked at an early-stage VC firm.
Last year, non-defense federal grants and contracts to private businesses exceeded $220 billion. The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) bucketed roughly $359 billion for energy security and climate change work. Despite such massive funding opportunities, applying for and securing government financing is often a labyrinthine process, fraught with complexities and challenges that deter many companies from applying. And since launching their service in February 2023, Pioneer has enabled companies to quickly discover and strategically apply for funding opportunities, helping companies to continue growing and focusing on their core business.
KEY QUOTES:
“For thousands of climate tech companies, access to non-dilutive funding can make or break their growth trajectory. Our seed round will enable us to speed up development and serve more entrepreneurs looking to rapidly deploy and scale key climate solutions.”
— Mitko Simeonov, CEO, Pioneer
“There is a lot of hype in both AI and climate tech, but what Mitko and the team at Pioneer have built is truly impactful. Parsing and matching huge amounts of written data for a process that’s non-core to your daily operations: that is a perfect job for LLMs. Informed by Pioneer’s industry expertise, their LLMs are already revealing millions of dollars of new funding for companies that otherwise don’t have the bandwidth or experience to navigate the complexity of grant, program, and credit funding.”
— Ernst Sack, Partner at Blue Bear Capital
