The carbon portfolio is a working commercial business. This page shows the engine in one picture, how commercial capital actually deploys into it, and the specific layer that capital cannot reach, which is what the fund buys.
Financing the engine: Virridy equity, the $10M Bridges SDG Outcome Fund debt facility (in advanced due diligence), and credit revenue itself. Production is revenue-positive at contracted prices.
The financial model deploys the Bridges facility in milestone-gated tranches, and the gates are strict: capital advances only against contracted, de-risked credit production, and expansion volumes are financed on delivery. That discipline is what makes the debt lendable, and it defines exactly what debt will never pay for.
Working capital advances against credits already under contract with creditworthy buyers. The existing offtake book clears this gate today.
Expanded volumes are financed only as they are delivered and verified, with eligibility conditions (registry status, buyer channel) checked per project.
New volumes enter the facility only after a project reaches creditable, registered, monitored status. Everything before that moment is outside the commercial stack.
Consequence: commercial capital arrives after a project is creditable, contracted, and delivering. Nothing in the commercial stack pays to make a project creditable in the first place, and nothing in it pays for the shared verification layer the gates depend on.
Each line of the fund fails a commercial financing test on purpose: it returns no cash, has no collateral, or benefits the whole credit class rather than one balance sheet. That is the definition of additive.
| Fund allocation | What it pays for | Why the commercial stack cannot | What it unlocks in the model | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| De-risking the projects | $4.0M | Baselining, registration, monitoring build-out, and first-loss capital, in the 2-year window before a system generates its first credit | Pre-revenue and pre-contract: no collateral exists yet, and losses land first | Projects cross the gates; the $10M debt facility and $25M offtake book can execute against them |
| Lume validation & acceptance | $3.5M | Field hardening, portfolio-scale paired sensor-versus-lab validation, Gold Standard Pilot 14 → full methodology | Returns no cash and benefits every issuer of water credits, not just this portfolio | Credits are issuable at crediting grade, and the continuous record defends the ~$21 contracted price against integrity discounts across ~7.6M tonnes |
| Methodology & standards | $1.0M | Digital-MRV codification with Gold Standard and other registries | A public good: accrues to the entire credit class | The gate criteria themselves: what "creditable" means, written on continuous evidence |
| Implementer capacity | $1.0M | Partner capability and demand aggregation | Partners' delivery capacity is not financeable collateral | Delivery milestones the gated tranches require partners to hit |
| Fund operations | $0.5M | Governance, allocation, reporting | — | Implementer-neutral allocation, ratified with the anchor donor |
Figures are from the portfolio financial model's base scenario and are illustrative pending fund structuring. Commercial terms of the debt facility (pricing, tranche sizes, investor returns) are deliberately not shown here.