Companies in the adaptation space are starting to get the kind of growth-stage cash that was once relegated to mitigation.
That’s according to the latest climate tech investment trend report from Currence, formerly known as Sightline. The report flags two Series F funding rounds for radar satellite companies — $521 million for Finnish ICEYE and $175 million for U.S.-based Tomorrow.io — as propping up a “record” investment year so far for adaptation and earth observation.
However, these numbers are complicated by the fact that these satellite technologies that are so valuable for climate and energy resilience are also valuable to some of the world’s most deep-pocketed customers: the military.
ICEYE, for example, provides satellite data to NATO and has contracts with militaries across Europe, including in Germany, Finland, and Ukraine. And Tomorrow.io, which focuses more on weather data than ICEYE, has the U.S. Air Force as a customer. According to Katie MacDonald, director of innovations at RWDI and co-founder of Tailwind, an investment firm focused on adaptation solutions, said that the military applications of their technologies are “difficult to extricate from the use cases that are resilience and adaptation,” MacDonald said.
As a result, there’s a risk that these high raises make it appear that the climate management sector is further developed than it is.
With its half-billion-dollar raise, ICEYE in particular is among the top 10 climate tech venture capital deals for the first half of 2026. The company develops advanced radar satellites capable of providing granular imagery with a resolution as high as 25 centimeters. The data can be used by governments, utilities, and insurance companies to assess and respond to extreme weather events.
Indeed, Currence said explicitly that the two rounds suggest that “growing climate risk and cheaper satellite capacity are pulling capital toward monitoring.”
And these high raises represent a departure from the status quo for adaptation. Despite being a sector with trillions of dollars of potential, global adaptation finance has so far struggled to grow quickly. It was plateauing at $64 billion in 2024, according to the latest data by the Climate Policy Initiative, which tracks climate finance data.
To be clear, the data intelligence that ICEYE and Tomorrow.io are providing to their military customers is also hugely useful to companies using it for adaptation purposes, and those uses are central to how they present their products.
Utilities, for example, can use it to gain a granular understanding of their infrastructure, mapping things such as equipment failures across the electric grid, underwater substations after flooding, and hailstorm damage in solar fields. “And this kind of data is incredibly valuable for corporate resilience… It can unearth climate risk for corporate customers in a way that has never been done, ” MacDonald added, noting that it can help companies that rely on natural resources, such as a rubber farm, gain a clear and quick understanding of how climate change is affecting all their assets.
But as much as they need the data, unlike the military, these types of customers have yet to figure out how to monetize it.
“Whether it’s insurance or it’s utilities or it’s agriculture, they’re still figuring out how to get an ROI from that data: It’s one thing to be handed a bunch of data; it’s another thing for it to be integrated into your workflow,” MacDonald Said. “The ability of companies to integrate the data into decision making, and then witness that decision making save them money, is going to be key for more client investment.”
