A few weeks ago, I was at London Climate Action Week 2026 talking to a range of smart and informed people across sessions that included the Global Innovation Fund's launch of its new climate resilience strategy, EARTHON on last-mile innovation, MS Amlin's half-day workshop on insurability in the age of the climate crisis, and Tesco's roundtable on food systems tech.
In each room one question kept coming up: why can’t capital still can't reach the farmers, ventures and communities who need it most.
It's the same question Abi asked on this blog after LCAW 2025. When the audience there was polled on what was really holding agri-innovation back, ‘more investment’ was only one item on a longer list that included a lack of proven business models, poor collaboration between funders and innovators, and a shortage of innovation capacity itself.
Since then, it seems that very little has changed.
When that’s the case, I always look for the bright spots to get a glimpse of what we could be doing more of, or better. There are a few things moving in the right direction.
More funders and philanthropies are treating resilience as core rather than a footnote to mitigation, and money is starting to follow that shift. More people are also forthrightly saying that the way capital gets disbursed is broken, regardless of how much sits behind it. USAID's collapse and the shrinking aid landscape pushed funders who'd never touched blended structures to consider them; food security has moved from a charitable cause to core infrastructure as climate risks are recognised as a business risk; and there's a growing recognition that supporting innovation is key, but that it has to be relational and embedded in local systems rather than a grant cheque and a check-in call.
Still, there are plenty more issues which seem stuck in neutral. Funding still defaults to big infrastructure because it's easier to deliver and easier to report on; and the instruments meant to fix this (blended finance chief among them) still look like old infrastructure PPPs with a new name. At the same time, few in this domain do the valuable work of derisking and vetting pipelines of ventures, so capital that's ready to move has somewhere to land.
And sadly, the people closest to the problems are still mostly absent from the rooms where those problems get discussed.
Climate and food-systems capital is plentiful, but very little of it is able to reach where resilience gets built, i.e. at the community and early-venture level. This is where innovation is most relevant and viable.
That inability to deploy appropriately comes down to three issues: timing, ticket-size, and matching. For a venture that's still years from proving its model, the right support is often less about capital and more about testing its underlying assumptions, since money that arrives too early ends up getting wasted or distorting decisions.
For the kinds of small, fragmented needs typical of smallholders and early ventures, the right mechanisms are those that can disburse support in small tickets rather than in tens of millions at a time. And even where funders do commit capital to this space, many still can't identify a long-tail pipeline of investable ventures to put it into, which is where progress actually stalls.
Finally, even a well-shaped instrument, once deployed appropriately, still depends on embedded delivery. We're seeing this work effectively through examples like local intermediaries who can translate basis risk into a decision a cooperative can act on, distribution partnerships which are built alongside the product testing rather than after it, and structures where concessional capital absorbs the innovation risks private money won't, treating them as global goods that signal what works to the whole ecosystem.
At Brink we’ve built two programmes around that gap - identifying promising ideas and getting them venture-ready to go from grants to blended and commercial investments, meanwhile helping investors find these good deals:
GoMuhazi and FIRST Fund keep surfacing the same root cause from different angles: the ventures a market needs are often missing entirely, the ones that exist are rarely ready for investment, and the ones that are ready get stranded because ticket sizes and transaction costs don't add up. This is where the correctly shaped funding and support is needed.
A year on from LCAW 2025, the work is the same as it was then, matching the instrument to where a venture actually sits, and investing as much in the connective tissue between them as in the capital itself. I’m keen to speak with others grappling with this, too.
