Sanjeev Krishnan spent thirty years arriving at one conclusion: the clean economy's binding constraint isn't technology, it's capital structure. He watched brilliant technologies, brilliant people and brilliant visions get broken on the wheel of misaligned capital — not because the science failed, but because the financing never fit what they were trying to build.

That gap is the heart of this episode of SRI360. His core belief is simple: the thing holding back the clean economy is not technology. It is capital structure. Get the financing right, and the building can follow.

I’m joined by Sanjeev Krishnan, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of S2G Investments, a nearly $3 billion platform across eight funds, investing at the seams of food, energy, and ocean systems. S2G has backed more than 120 companies. Sanjeev has spent his whole career on one question: how do you change an economic system using markets?

Sanjeev was born in Bangalore in pre-liberalization India and moved to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, at age nine — his first time ever on a plane. He studied development economics, transferred to the London School of Economics, and joined JPMorgan just in time to watch the dot-com boom collapse from the inside. His team in Europe went from 120 people to 15. He was one of the 15 who kept their job.

What came next taught him how capital really works in the physical world: building mobile networks across Africa, cutting the cost of a Hepatitis B vaccine by roughly 80–90% at the World Bank’s IFC, and five hard years inside “clean tech 1.0,” watching good companies fail for reasons that had nothing to do with their technology. In 2014, he co-founded S2G with Lukas Walton.

Today Sanjeev invests at the seams — the gaps between asset classes and between sectors that most investors overlook. In this conversation we cover why capital structure is the real constraint, how he thinks about the wave of AI and energy demand, and why he is betting on the oceans, the part of the planet we have barely measured.

In this episode we discuss:

• Why capital structure, not technology, is what really holds back the clean economy
• The “missing middle” — too big for venture, too small for private equity, and where good companies get stranded
• What “investing at the seams” of food, energy, and ocean systems actually means
• Fit-for-purpose capital, and why biotech figured it out but climate has not
• The five forces behind his “Age of Adaptation” thesis
• Why he reframes climate as a 10,000-year economic megatrend, not a moral crusade
• His bet on the oceans, and the company measuring water almost no one else can

Featured guest:

• Sanjeev Krishnan, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at S2G Investments

Listen Next:

AgTech Profits Meet Planet: Where Climate Impact and VC Returns Align

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Key Takeaways:

• Capital structure is the constraint, not technology. Across thirty years, Sanjeev watched good companies with real products fail because the money backing them was shaped wrong for what they were building.
• The missing middle is where good companies get stranded. A business with real revenue and real profits can still be too capital-intensive for venture and too small for private equity control. Venture wants a power law. These companies just grow steadily. So nobody funds them. In May, S2G closed a billion-dollar fund built for exactly this gap.
• Fit-for-purpose capital means matching the money to the reality. US biotech built a system that can take an unproven, clinical-stage company public and attract hundreds of millions. Climate has never built its equivalent. That, Sanjeev argues, is the real gap.
• Every great transition needed a financial invention first. The joint stock company made oceanic trade possible. Bond syndicates built the railroads. The venture partnership funded the microchip. In each case someone built the financial container before the future arrived.
• Impact does not have to be concessionary. At the IFC, his team helped cut the cost of a Hepatitis B vaccine by roughly 80–90% — from $2.50 a vial — while margins stayed above 60–70%. Cheaper, faster, better, and profitable at the same time.
• Invest at the seams. The best opportunities sit between asset classes and between sectors, where a typical energy investor would dismiss it and a food investor would call it something else — so nobody underwrites it.
• Climate is a 10,000-year economic megatrend, not a moral crusade. Humans take useful energy and turn it into useful materials — fire, agriculture, fossil fuels. And the next chapter will still be extractive: it needs copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium.
• Busts are where the returns are made. You learn more in the bust cycles than the boom cycles. Markets overshoot both ways, and the companies that survive get forced into product-market fit and a real P&L.
• The oceans are the least measured part of the planet. We know more about space. Sanjeev co-founded Apeiron Labs in 2022 to close a data gap between 6 and 200 meters — data that matters for weather, offshore wind, insurance, and defense.

Additional Resources

Sanjeev Krishnan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjeev-krishnan-0b1148/

Sanjeev Krishnan at S2G: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/team/sanjeev-krishnan

S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/

S2G “Financing Reality” report: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-financing-reality

Builders Vision: https://www.buildersvision.com/

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