The All Aboard Fund: A Coalition to Bridge the Missing Middle and Scale Climate Companies
Chris Anderson, best known for scaling TED and mobilizing billions for philanthropy, and Stan Miranda, a career investor who helped build Partners Capital into a $65B outsourced CIO, believe they can unlock one of climate investing’s most persistent bottlenecks: the “missing middle” between venture capital and infrastructure/growth equity. In the mid-2020s, they repeatedly saw climate technologies reach technical proof and early commercial traction, only to stall when confronted with the capital intensity and execution risk of building a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) plant or pre-commercial facility. Venture investors often viewed these rounds as too large and project-like; later-stage investors saw them as too risky and insufficiently de-risked. The result was a recurring “valley of death” where promising climate solutions failed before scaling.
The case follows Anderson and Miranda as they launch The All Aboard Fund (AAF), a proposed $300 million co-investment vehicle designed to bridge that gap by orchestrating a coalition of 25 existing top climate funds spanning early and late stage strategies. The coalition model is central to AAF’s thesis: instead of relying solely on a single manager’s judgment, AAF aims to harness “collective wisdom” and the reputational signaling of top-tier investors to accelerate capital formation for FOAK-stage climate companies.
To institutional limited partners (LPs), however, AAF’s most distinctive feature is also its most controversial: a trigger-based, “automated” investment process originally designed to meet a major LP’s request. Under the initial concept, AAF would invest only when predefined eligibility criteria are satisfied. Most importantly, when at least three coalition members each commit a minimum amount to the same company. Once triggered, AAF would match the coalition’s collective investment on the same terms as the lead investor, up to portfolio concentration limits. The design is meant to reduce friction, speed decision-making, and use coalition members’ capital-at-risk as the primary diligence filter. AAF also includes an explicit climate impact threshold, steering the fund toward opportunities with meaningful mitigation or removal potential rather than incremental improvements.
As the protagonists move from vision to fundraising reality, the case drops students into the tense hours before a pivotal meeting with a prospective anchor LP, exactly the kind of institutional partner required to credibly launch a first close. Despite early enthusiasm from philanthropists and supporters, Anderson and Miranda have struggled to convert larger institutional interest into commitments. In repeated conversations, LPs have raised three concerns that could derail AAF’s model.
First, adverse selection. Will coalition members surface only the deals they cannot fund elsewhere, leaving AAF to back the “leftovers”?
Second, governance and accountability. AAF’s trigger-based approach reduces or removes traditional veto rights and independent investment committee discretion. LPs accustomed to conventional fund governance question how risk is managed, how conflicts are handled, and who is accountable if a FOAK-heavy investment fails. Third is fees, access, and value-add. Some LPs argue they already invest in several coalition funds directly and can often obtain co-investments without additional fees, so why pay for AAF?
The case culminates at a moment of strategic uncertainty: Anderson and Miranda must decide whether winning institutional capital requires sharper framing, better explaining why coalition discipline mitigates adverse selection, why collective diligence can outperform centralized committees, and why AAF expands access or whether it requires substantive changes to the fund’s structure. With the anchor meeting approaching, they face a classic entrepreneurial finance dilemma under high stakes: how far to adapt a novel model to institutional expectations without undermining the very logic that makes it distinctive.