Sliced: Inside the Minds of Impact Investors – Surprising Secrets to Screening Climate Deals

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Written By: Bobby Sleeth 

In climate-focused impact investing, the pipeline is often not the problem. The real challenge is figuring out what’s worth your time.

Over the past few months, our team at Gordian Knot Strategies has spoken with a wide range of investors – foundations, endowments, coalitions, family offices, and venture firms – about how they evaluate climate investment opportunities. Our conversations were part of the development process for Traro, a proprietary screening platform that we have built to help investors quickly triage deals based on standardized inputs and clear thresholds. But the insights we gathered apply well beyond just our platform tool.

Everyone screens, but not everyone has a clean system, and the industry is lacking a standardized definition for “investment screening” and where this fits into the overall investment analysis. 

According to the Goodinvestor group out of the U.K., they define effective screening as:

“The systematic application of clear, predefined criteria to quickly, consistently, and objectively assess whether potential investments align with an investor’s goals, values, and risk tolerance—thereby identifying suitable opportunities and filtering out those that do not meet the required standards before deeper analysis or due diligence.”

The Messy Middle

Most investors describe their deal flow as a mix of structured and serendipity: RFPs, personal networks, pitch decks forwarded by peers, and the occasional call, email, or text from a portfolio company or advisor. The first step after sourcing is almost always a conversation with the fund seeker or an internal review – but from there, things start to diverge.

Some teams rely on extensive internal scoring rubrics that often absorb entire teams in the consideration process. Others lean into gut instinct or defer to more experienced colleagues. One impact investor told us, “We have five people review each application, but there’s no formal rubric. It’s just a read-and-react process.”

This informal structure creates inefficiencies. Promising but premature ideas steal precious deal origination time. These investors are highly talented and informed, and are able to identify high-quality deals, but many of the processes in place that we reviewed lead to a large amount of time being spent on a deal that should have been screened out early and quickly. Compounding this issue is that, without a standardized framework, it’s hard to look back and understand why certain opportunities were passed over, or why other opportunities ate into valuable bandwidth and prospecting budget when they should have been screened out sooner. 

Time, Tension, and Tradeoffs

Screening is both essential and undervalued. One investor estimated that their team spends 100 hours per project before even entering into the due diligence phase. Another claimed the screening process takes “two to three weeks, if we’re lucky.”

Importantly, despite the time investment, few firms treat screening as a discrete phase with its own role, tools, or budget. It’s squeezed between relationship-building and diligence and is often further complicated by internal dynamics present at each firm. We heard of recurring tension within firms centered on the prioritization of impact versus returns. “We argue more about what to say yes to than what to pass on,” said one fund manager.

Even some of those who had dedicated time to building internal scoring and assessment systems noted that they eventually abandoned them. Why? Too rigid, too time-consuming, or “just not that helpful.”

What’s Working (and What Isn’t)

A handful of firms use commercial platforms (e.g., CapIQ, Pitchbook, or carbon project rating groups) to supplement their process. But the investors we spoke to found that these platforms are often either too broad or too narrow. Few offer insight into climate-specific or impact-specific criteria. And even fewer allow investors to capture custom insights that align with their thesis.

Most investors want (need) a better signal at the top of the funnel. They’re not lacking for decks; they’re lacking for clarity, consistency, and comparability. As one practitioner put it: “If we could quickly understand whether something meets our threshold for quality, alignment, and readiness, we’d save days per week.”

Other common requests included: more standardized data inputs; better tracking of insights over time; and a way to “harmonize” screening across multi-party partnerships, where each stakeholder applies a slightly different lens.

The Gordian Knot Strategies Approach

We built the Traro platform as a direct response to these exact dynamics that our team has witnessed for years, and it was validated by this feedback. It’s a lightweight, front-end predictive analytics tool that allows climate investors to collect structured responses from applicants, apply gating logic, reveal climate investment winners, and enable the decision on which opportunities to move forward with due diligence.

It doesn’t replace investment judgment. But it does reduce screening from an ad hoc, independent, and internally burdensome process to a standardized and repeatable workflow. And in a world where every investor is stretched thin, this saves time, resources, and bandwidth, while providing screening analysis that is accurate and comparable across funding stages and categories of climate solutions, regardless of geography or sector.

Screening is the gate through which all climate finance must pass. It’s time we gave it the tools and attention it deserves.

If you are interested in our free guide, which incorporates some of Traro’s key learnings on effective investment opportunity screening, click here to download the guide, Smarter Climate Investing: 7 Strategic Filters Before Your First Impact Dollar.  

If you would like a demo of our Traro impact investing screening platform, please email: traro@gordianknotstrategies.com.

At Gordian Knot Strategies, we’re building a global database of impact investors to help mobilize $1 billion annually in climate finance by 2030. If your organization is interested in funding climate or environmental projects, we invite you to fill out our Impact Investor Information Form. Your contact details will remain confidential, and we’ll only connect you with aligned opportunities. There is no fee to participate.

To access the form click here.

Interested in connecting with us on climate finance, impact investment, climate solutions strategy, or carbon credit development and commercialization?

Book a 30-minute conversation with Gordian Knot Strategies here to discuss how we can support your goals.

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