Crux is offering a new marketplace for clean energy debt products beyond transferable tax credits, including development, construction, and bridge loans. The goal: a one-stop-shop for developers and manufacturers seeking financing at any stage in the project timeline — and for the lenders seeking projects to get behind.
The platform has been operating in beta for many months already, CEO Alfred Johnson told Latitude Media in an exclusive interview on the company’s expansion, with roughly 80 companies using the new marketplace. Today, it has more than $300 million of loans under negotiation, and lenders have issued more than $1 billion worth of term sheets.
One deal has already closed on the platform. The multi-million-dollar debt financing deal, which is not yet announced, is for a manufacturer that originally worked with Crux to monetize 45X credits, but was also seeking construction debt financing. Crux told Latitude Media that identifying a lending partner and securing multiple term sheets for the deal took just a few weeks.
The company launched in the spring of 2023 with a platform for buying and selling clean energy tax credits. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, kicked off a new market by allowing clean energy developers and manufacturers to transfer the valuable tax credits, essentially creating a new mechanism for financing projects. Treasury guidance that formalized the transferability terms took effect in June 2023, and the market has grown rapidly since — more rapidly than even Johnson expected.
The law also brought different sectors into a single market, he said, defined by their eligibility for tax credits.
“You would not have previously thought about EV charging infrastructure and nuclear and lithium mining and geothermal as part of one market, but the tax credits gave all of those different kinds of projects the same offtake, which was a substantially similar credit that could be sold for cash,” Johnson said. “And that led to the formation of this new market that required a central platform to facilitate transactions at scale.”
As more manufacturers, developers, and lenders used the company’s tax credit transfer platform, Crux began to hear interest from both sides of the market “in interacting on a much wider range of capital products,” Johnson said, including construction loans and bridge financing.
This coincides with electricity demand growth for the first time in two decades, as well as a wave of investment in domestic supply chains for the materials and equipment crucial to the energy transition. This week’s tariffs imposed on Canada, China, and Mexico complicates those supply chains — and makes that domestic push even more urgent.
The launch of the new debt capital marketplace comes as President Trump works to undo clean energy investments, including major IRA provisions. But Johnson is unconcerned that the transferability of tax credits will be walked back: “The market is progressing with the awareness that Congress has very rarely, if ever, made a retroactive change to the tax code that is adverse to the taxpayer,” he said
(However, there are questions about how effectively the credits will be administered, given the fact that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has laid off roughly 7,000 probationary employees of the Internal Revenue Service — and is reportedly drafting plans to fire thousands more.)
The creation of a platform that spans the capital stack has been a part of the company’s plan since the beginning, said Johnson. When Crux raised its $18.2 million Series A round in early 2024, he told Latitude Media that the company planned to expand the platform; Crux began working on the debt capital marketplace last spring, right after that raise.
“There’s an opportunity…to build a consolidated, software-centered capital platform in the center of that really diverse set of projects, in a way that’s absolutely essential as trillions of dollars of capital flow into energy, manufacturing and minerals,” Johnson said. “That is happening regardless of the policy environment.”
How the platform works
Historically, companies tend to take an analog approach to raising debt. They often hire placement agents or already have relationships with potential investors. It’s a timely process, driven by Excel spreadsheets and months of back-and-forth emails.
Meanwhile, companies are often duplicating their work as they seek different types of financing. And while most projects source capital from a wide range of investors, sometimes those conversations are even happening with the same lender that financed a previous stage of the project.
In an attempt to streamline that process, Crux asked a slew of lenders what kind of information they typically request from developers and manufacturers, and structured the platform to present all those details in a standardized way. And for the over 250 developers and manufacturers that are already active on the tax credit side of the Crux platform, data and underwriting information will remain within the marketplace and can be made accessible to new capital providers.
The tax transfer side of the platform functions more like an eBay, allowing a user to sort through the full marketplace of options by parameter; however, the debt capital marketplace presents a lender with only the options that meet what the investor is specifically looking for.
Tax credit transfers were Crux’s point of entry, and the speed of market growth surprised even Johnson. While he can’t predict how quickly the debt capital marketplace will expand, that segment is an order of magnitude bigger. According to an analysis published by Crux last month, the market for tax transfers ballooned to nearly $30 billion in total deal volume by the end of 2024, up from just $9 billion at the end of 2023. Johnson estimates that the debt financing market is more than $230 billion.
“Lots and lots of money is flowing,” Johnson said. “And software can facilitate transactions in an entirely different way, to build a deep and liquid market for other kinds of construction, bridge, and other capital…at a time when we really need it.”
