When Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, buried in the legislation was a provision most people overlooked: for the first time, clean energy developers could sell their tax credits outright. No special purpose vehicles. No complex partnership flips. Just a straightforward sale.
Alfred Johnson, who'd spent months navigating Treasury's corridors as deputy chief of staff to Janet Yellen, saw something different in that footnote. He saw a market waiting to be built.
Two years later, the startup he co-founded with Allen Kramer has become that market's infrastructure. Crux Climate announced Wednesday it raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Lowercarbon Capital, bringing total capital raised since the company's 2023 launch to north of $77 million. The New York-based firm now sits at the center of what has become a $30 billion-plus annual marketplace connecting clean energy projects with corporate tax liabilities.
The funding round attracted exactly the kind of investors you'd expect to circle a fast-growing fintech play in climate: Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures and MassMutual Ventures joined as new backers, alongside OMERS Ventures, Giant Ventures, and Acrew Capital. Andreessen Horowitz returned, as did Ardent Venture Partners, CIV, New System Ventures, and The Three Cairns Group.
Those insurance giants aren't just passive checks. Both Liberty Mutual and MassMutual manage asset portfolios in the hundreds of billions—and both carry the kind of tax appetites that make them natural buyers on Crux's own platform. Whether the strategic investment translates to customer relationships remains unclear; the companies haven't said.
From zero to billions in two years
The numbers tell a story of unexpected velocity. Crux has facilitated over 70 tax credit transfers worth billions of dollars since opening its virtual doors. The platform now hosts more than 630 participants: developers hunting for buyers, manufacturers looking to monetize credits, corporations searching for ways to offset tax bills, and the lenders and intermediaries who make it all work.
The company projects that network will exceed 1,000 participants by the end of this year. Perhaps optimistic, perhaps not—the market itself has grown faster than most analysts predicted. Industry estimates suggest $30 billion in tax credit transfers changed hands in 2024, up sharply from $7 billion to $9 billion the year prior. Crux's own data indicates the first half of 2025 saw over $20 billion in transfers, compared to $8.5 billion in the same period last year.
That growth comes with challenges the founders understand well. Tax credit transactions have historically moved at the speed of traditional project finance: slow, bespoke, heavily lawyered. Every deal required fresh negotiations, new diligence, custom documentation.
In March, Crux moved beyond tax credits entirely, launching a debt marketplace. The results so far suggest developers and lenders were waiting for something like this. The product generated more than $1 billion in term sheets from 75-plus lenders in its first quarter, according to company figures. Over 100 developers and manufacturers are currently raising north of $11 billion through the platform, with 90-plus financial institutions participating.
AI as the unsexy accelerant
The Series B capital will fund what Johnson calls "AI-enabled workflows," though the actual work sounds more prosaic than revolutionary. Crux plans to automate term sheet generation, build reusable data rooms, develop capital stack planning software, and create post-close reporting dashboards.
Not exactly the kind of AI moonshots dominating headlines. But in project finance, where deals can drag on for months, shaving weeks off contracting and diligence timelines translates directly into faster deployment of clean energy projects. And faster deployment means more credits hitting the market, which means more transactions flowing through Crux's platform.
The company is also doubling down on market intelligence, leveraging a dataset that now spans over $30 billion in tax credit transactions. That treasure trove of pricing data powers the Cruxtimate, a valuation tool Crux introduced last September. Before that, determining fair market value for IRA credits often felt like guesswork dressed up in Excel.
The pedigree question
Johnson and Kramer aren't first-time founders. The pair previously built Mobilize, a volunteer management platform that EveryAction acquired in 2020. That experience running a two-sided marketplace—connecting organizations with volunteers—translates more directly to running Crux than you might think. Both businesses are fundamentally about efficient matching at scale.
Johnson's Treasury stint gave him something equally valuable: a front-row seat to how the IRA would actually be implemented, and perhaps more importantly, where the friction points would emerge. Building the platform while Treasury was still writing guidance probably didn't hurt.
Lowercarbon Capital, which led both Crux's seed round in 2023 and now its Series B, cited "dramatic acceleration in transaction volume" as the reason for doubling down. In a blog post announcing the investment, the firm highlighted Crux's plans to deploy AI for underwriting and matching—the kind of infrastructure improvements that could determine whether the IRA's transferability provision becomes a transformative climate tool or just another well-intentioned policy that never quite scaled.
Building the Bloomberg of clean energy
Crux describes its ambitions as creating "the central capital markets platform for the clean economy." That's a big swing, and it means moving well beyond tax credits and debt into other parts of the capital stack over the next 18 months. The company hasn't specified which products come next.
What's clear is that the tax credit transfer market has already outgrown its boutique origins. With over 60 employees working remotely and offices in Washington, D.C.—plus a New York location planned for early 2026—Crux looks less like a scrappy startup and more like the infrastructure layer it's trying to become.
Whether that infrastructure ultimately matters depends on factors beyond Crux's control: the durability of the IRA under shifting political winds, the continued appetite of corporations for tax credits, and the willingness of project developers to embrace a new financing model rather than revert to familiar structures.
For now, the bet is that when you create liquidity in a previously illiquid market, the buyers and sellers show up. And judging by the transaction volumes, they have.
