Venture capitalist Finn Murphy believes world leaders could soon resort to deflecting sunlight into space if the Earth gets unbearably hot.
That’s why he’s invested more than $1 million in Stardust Solutions, a leading solar geoengineering firm that’s developing a system to reduce warming by enveloping the globe in reflective particles.
Murphy isn’t rooting for climate catastrophe. But with global temperatures soaring and the political will to limit climate change waning, Stardust “can be worth tens of billions of dollars,” he said.
“It would be definitely better if we lost all our money and this wasn’t necessary,” said Murphy, the 33-year-old founder of Nebular, a New York investment fund named for a vast cloud of space dust and gas.
Murphy is among a new wave of investors who are putting millions of dollars into emerging companies that aim to limit the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth — while also potentially destabilizing weather patterns, food supplies and global politics. He has a degree in mathematics and mechanical engineering and views global warming not just as a human and political tragedy, but as a technical challenge with profitable solutions.
Solar geoengineering investors are generally young, pragmatic and imaginative — and willing to lean into the adventurous side of venture capitalism. They often shrug off the concerns of scientists who argue it’s inherently risky to fund the development of potentially dangerous technologies through wealthy investors who could only profit if the planet-cooling systems are deployed.
“If the technology works and the outcomes are positive without really catastrophic downstream impacts, these are trillion-dollar market opportunities,” said Evan Caron, a co-founder of the energy-focused venture firm Montauk Capital. “So it’s a no-brainer for an investor to take a shot at some of these.”
More than 50 financial firms, wealthy individuals and government agencies have collectively provided more than $115.8 million to nine startups whose technology could be used to limit sunlight, according to interviews with VCs, tech company founders and analysts, as well as private investment data analyzed by POLITICO’s E&E News.
That pool of funders includes Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s largest venture capital firms, and four other investment groups that have more than $1 billion of assets under management.
Of the total amount invested in the geoengineering sector, $75 million went to Stardust, or nearly 65 percent. The U.S.-Israeli startup is developing reflective particles and the means to spray and monitor them in the stratosphere, some 11 miles above the planet’s surface.
At least three other climate-intervention companies have also raked in at least $5 million.
The cash infusion is a bet on planet-cooling technologies that many political leaders, investors and environmentalists still consider taboo. In addition to having unknown side effects, solar geoengineering could expose the planet to what scientists call “termination shock,” a scenario in which global temperatures soar if the cooling technologies fail or are suddenly abandoned.
Still, the funding surge for geoengineering companies pales in comparison to the billions of dollars being put toward artificial intelligence. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has raised $62.5 billion in 2025 alone, according to investment data compiled by PitchBook.
The investment pool for solar geoengineering startups is relatively shallow in part because governments haven’t determined how they would regulate the technology — something Stardust is lobbying to change.
As a result, the emerging sector is seen as too speculative for most venture capital firms, according to Kim Zou, the CEO of Sightline Climate, a market intelligence firm. VCs mostly work on behalf of wealthy individuals, as well as pension funds, university endowments and other institutional investors.
“It’s still quite a niche set of investors that are even thinking about or looking at the geoengineering space,” Zou said. “The climate tech and energy tech investors we speak to still don’t really see there being an investable opportunity there, primarily because there’s no commercial market for it today.”
Aerosols in the stratosphere
Stardust and its investors are banking on signing contracts with one or more governments that could deploy its solar geoengineering system as soon as the end of the decade. Those investors include Lowercarbon Capital, a climate-focused firm co-founded by billionaire VC Chris Sacca, and Exor, the holding company of an Italian industrial dynasty and perhaps the most mainstream investment group to back a sunlight reflection startup.
Even Stardust’s supporters acknowledge that the company is far from a sure bet.
“It’s unique in that there is not currently demand for this solution,” said Murphy, whose firm is also supporting out-there startups seeking to build robots and data centers in space. “You have to go and create the product in order to potentially facilitate the demand.”
Lowercarbon partner Ryan Orbuch said the firm would see a return on its Stardust investment only “in the context of an actual customer who can actually back many years of stable, safe deployment.”
Exor, another Stardust investor, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Other startups are trying to develop commercial markets for solar geoengineering. Make Sunsets, a company funded by billionaire VC Tim Draper, releases sulfate-filled weather balloons that pop when they reach the stratosphere. It sells cooling credits to individuals and corporations based on the theory that the sulfates can reliably reduce warming.
There are questions, however, about the science and economics underpinning the credit system of Make Sunsets, according to the investment bank Jeffries.
“A cooling credit market is unlikely to be viable,” the bank said in a May 2024 note to clients.
That’s because the temperature reductions produced by sulfate aerosols vary by altitude, location and season, the note explained. And the warming impacts of carbon dioxide emissions last decades — much longer than any cooling that would be created from a balloon’s worth of sulfate.
Make Sunsets didn’t respond to a request for comment. The company has previously attracted the attention of regulators in the U.S. and Mexico, who have claimed it began operating without the necessary government approvals.
Draper Associates says on its website that it’s “shaping a future where the impossible becomes everyday reality.” The firm has previously backed successful consumer tech firms like Tesla, Skype and Hotmail.
“It is getting hotter in the Summer everywhere,” Tim Draper said in an email. “We should be encouraging every solution. I love this team, and the science works.”
The next frontier
One startup is pursuing space-based solar geoengineering. EarthGuard is attempting to build a series of large sunlight deflectors that would be positioned between the sun and the planet, some 932,000 miles from the Earth. The company did not respond to emailed questions.
Other space companies are considering geoengineering as a side project. That includes Gama, a French startup that’s designing massive solar sails that could be used for deep space travel or as a planetary sunshade, and Ethos Space, a Los Angeles company with plans to industrialize the moon.
Both companies are part of an informal research network established by the Planetary Sunshade Foundation, a nonprofit advocating for the development of a trillion-dollar parasol for the globe. The network mainly brings together collaborators on the sidelines of space industry conferences, according to Gama CEO Andrew Nutter.
“We’re willing to contribute something if we realize it’s genuinely necessary and it’s a better solution than other solutions” to the climate challenge, Nutter said of the space shade concept. “But our business model does not depend on it. If you have dollar signs hanging next to something, that can bias your decisions on what’s best for the planet.”
Nutter said Gama has raised about $5 million since he co-founded the company in 2020. Its investors include Possible Ventures, a German VC firm that’s also financing a nuclear fusion startup and says on its website that the firm is “relentlessly optimistic — choosing to focus on the possibilities rather than obsess over the risks.” Possible Ventures did not respond to a request for comment.
Sequoia-backed Reflect Orbital is another space startup that’s exploring solar geoengineering as a potential moneymaker. The company based near Los Angeles is developing a network of satellite mirrors that would direct sunlight down to the Earth at night for lighting industrial sites or, eventually, producing solar energy. Its space mirrors, if oriented differently, could also be used for limiting the amount of sun rays that reach the planet.
“It’s not so much a technological limitation as much as what has the highest, best impact. It’s more of a business decision,” said Ally Stone, Reflect Orbital’s chief strategy officer. “It’s a matter of looking at each satellite as an opportunity and whether, when it’s over a specific geography, that makes more sense to reflect sunlight towards or away from the Earth.”
Reflect Orbital has raised nearly $28.7 million from investors including Lux Capital, a firm that touts its efforts to “turn sci-fi into sci-fact” and has invested in the autonomous defense systems companies Anduril and Saildrone.” Sequoia and Lux didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The startup hopes to send its first satellite into space next summer, according to Stone.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, whose aerospace company already has an estimated fleet of more than 8,800 internet satellites in orbit, has also suggested using the circling network to limit sunlight.
“A large solar-powered AI satellite constellation would be able to prevent global warming by making tiny adjustments in how much solar energy reached Earth,” Musk wrote on X last month. Neither he nor SpaceX responded to an emailed request for comment.
Don’t call it geoengineering
Other sunlight-reflecting startups are entering the market — even if they’d rather not be seen as solar geoengineering companies.
Arctic Reflections is a two-year-old company that wants to reduce global warming by increasing Arctic sea ice, which doesn’t absorb as much heat as open water. The Dutch startup hasn’t yet pursued outside investors.
“We see this not necessarily as geo-engineering, but rather as climate adaptation,” CEO Fonger Ypma said in an email. “Just like in reforestation projects, people help nature in growing trees, our idea is that we would help nature in growing ice.”
The main funder of Arctic Reflections is the British government’s independent Advanced Research and Invention Agency. In May, ARIA awarded $4.41 million to the company — more than four times what it had raised to that point.
Another startup backed by ARIA is Voltitude, which is developing micro balloons to monitor geoengineering from the stratosphere. The U.K.-based company didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Altogether, the British agency is supporting 22 geoengineering projects, only a handful of which involve startups.
“ARIA is only funding fundamental research through this programme, and has not taken an equity stake in any geoengineering companies,” said Mark Symes, a program director at the agency. It also requires that all research it supports “must be published, including those that rule out approaches by showing they are unsafe or unworkable.”
Sunscreen is a new startup that is trying to limit sunlight in localized areas. It was founded earlier this year by Stanford University graduate student Solomon Kim.
“We are pioneering the use of targeted, precision interventions to mitigate the destructive impacts of heatwave on critical United States infrastructure,” Kim said in an email. But he was emphatic that “we are not geoengineering” since the cooling impacts it’s pursuing are not large scale.
Kim declined to say how much had been raised by Sunscreen and from what sources.
As climate change and its impacts continue to worsen, Zou of Sightline Climate expects more investors to consider solar geoengineering startups, including deep-pocketed firms and corporations interested in the technology. Without their help, the startups might not be able to develop their planet-cooling systems.
“People are feeling like, well wait a second, our backs are kind of starting to get against the wall. Time is ticking, we’re not really making a ton of progress” on decarbonization, she said.
“So I do think there’s a lot more questions getting asked right now in the climate tech and venture community around understanding it,” Zou said of solar geoengineering. “Some of these companies and startups and venture deals are also starting to bring more light into the space.”
Karl Mathiesen contributed reporting.
