The Story of Crux: Building Market Infrastructure for a $150 Trillion Energy Transition

The Story of Crux: Building Market Infrastructure for a $150 Trillion Energy Transition

A pub in Birmingham, UK. The year is 2020. Allen Kramer and Alfred Johnson are celebrating the sale of their first company together, Mobilize. But they’re not just celebrating. They’re already thinking about what comes next.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Allen Kramer, Co-Founder and COO of Crux, a sustainable finance platform, shared the origin story of how a Treasury Department policy change sparked a company that would attempt to standardize how America finances its renewable energy future.

The Foundation: Proving Mission-Driven Software Works

Before Crux existed, Allen and Alfred built Mobilize. The company launched in 2017 with a clear mission: create a platform for volunteer mobilization. The timing proved prescient. “It was a moment of a lot of social movements and political action,” Allen explains. The platform scaled rapidly, reaching “millions of people taking action.”

But the exit taught Allen something crucial about building mission-driven companies. “I think one of the things that was very powerful about that was being able to prove that you could build mission driven software and drive financial returns as well.” This wasn’t just about validating a business model. It was about proving to investors and the broader ecosystem that social impact and financial returns aren’t mutually exclusive.

The exit to EveryAction came “shortly after the election” in 2020. Allen stayed through the transition but kept his commitment flexible. “I stayed around for a little while. We didn’t have to stay around for a full two years, but made sure that it was in a solid place, steady home, and then left.”

The Decompression Period

After Mobilize, Allen could have immediately jumped into another company. He didn’t. “I definitely took some time, but very quickly started angel investing and advising companies to kind of keep the brain moving while also sort of decompressing.”

This period wasn’t passive recovery. It was active pattern recognition. “It was a very refreshing opportunity to see the startup journey through a whole different lens and also use it as a moment to reflect on the, a lot of the lessons learned from that company and was very helpful to distill some of those lessons and think through company building to get ready to do it again.”

Meanwhile, Alfred rejoined the Treasury Department where he had started his career. This move would prove crucial to Crux’s founding story.

The Spark: When Policy Creates Markets

Allen and Alfred had already begun exploring ideas at “the intersection of the energy transition finance and how we could apply software to both of those.” But they needed a specific market opening.

In August 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act passed. The legislation created something entirely new: transferable tax credits for renewable energy and advanced manufacturing. Previously, these tax credits were non-transferable, limiting who could benefit from them. The new law created what amounted to a new asset class.

“The inflation Reduction act passed and it just became so clear that this new asset class would need new solutions. And because an efficient market was not inevitable,” Allen explains. That last phrase captures the insight that would define Crux’s entire strategy. Markets don’t automatically become efficient. Someone has to build the infrastructure.

“Once that passed and we started doing some research, it became pretty clear pretty quickly that this is where we wanted to build,” Allen says. The decision combined Alfred’s policy expertise with their shared marketplace experience from Mobilize and a clear view of where software could create order in a nascent market.

The Waiting Game

Crux incorporated in January 2023. Then nothing happened. Not because they weren’t working, but because their market couldn’t legally transact yet.

“We incorporated the company January of 2023, but guidance hadn’t been released by the Treasury Department until June of last year,” Allen explains. “No one in this market was transacting because it was that new and guidance hadn’t come out.”

This created an unusual situation. The law had passed. The market existed in theory. But Treasury hadn’t released the implementation details that would allow transactions to proceed. No buyer or seller could move forward without that guidance.

Most founders would view this as disaster. Allen saw infrastructure time. “It was this very unique moment in building, where we could lay a lot of foundation, do a lot of customer research upfront, start to build some of the infrastructure and foundations that we’d need.”

While the market remained frozen, Crux hired team members, raised capital, built product, and conducted extensive customer research. They were assembling the engine while waiting for the starting gun.

The Market Opens

June 2024. Treasury released guidance. “The market really opened up over the course of mid to late Q three of last year into Q four, and from there, it’s just exploded,” Allen notes.

Crux had a six-month head start on infrastructure that competitors would now need to build under time pressure. The pre-market period that seemed like an obstacle became their primary competitive advantage.

Bringing the Band Back Together

The Crux founding team wasn’t just Allen and Alfred reuniting. They brought back key players from Mobilize, including Emily Hughes. “Emily Hughes, who was actually our head of marketing at Mobilize and is now joined as our head of growth. Was one of our early hires at Crux.”

The title evolution from marketing to growth reflected how Allen thought about repeat hires. Emily wasn’t replicating her Mobilize role. She was expanding it for a completely different market with different customer personas and GTM motion.

“There are a number of people on our team that joined us from mobilize or worked previously at mobilize,” Allen explains. This institutional knowledge accelerated everything. Former colleagues understood decision-making processes and communication norms without lengthy onboarding. When you’re moving from incorporation to revenue in under a year, that matters.

The pattern extended to investors. “Clay at lower Carbon had invested in our last company. Ian Samuels from new system Ventures had invested in our last company, Shamiq Dutta from Overture. But previously higher ground Labs had invested in our last company.” These repeat investors already understood Allen and Alfred’s operating style, reducing diligence friction while new strategic investors like Andreessen Horowitz brought fresh perspectives.

The Partnership Philosophy

What makes Allen and Alfred work as co-founders? They’re different in ways that create productive tension. “One of the things that works so well in my partnership with Alfred is that we are very different,” Allen notes. “There are a lot of ways in which we’re similar, but that we think very differently about the world in certain ways.”

This cognitive diversity prevents groupthink. “We push each other to kind of see the other’s perspective and then often end up finding that one of us convinces the other, or we end up finding that real truth is somewhere in the middle.”

The communication cadence matters. “Alfred and I talk five times a day, probably, and then have sort of scheduled check ins and are sort of very consistently sharing insights.” This frequency prevents disagreements from calcifying into positions. No single conversation carries too much weight when you’re debating five times daily.

The debates range across everything. “What are we hearing in the market? What are we seeing from the team? What are we seeing in the data? And then really assessing where we need to be going.” Market signals, team observations, and product data all feed into strategic decisions in real-time.

“It’s always allowed us to balance going quickly with going very deliberately,” Allen explains. This tension between speed and deliberation kills many startups. Having co-founders who naturally pull in different directions creates a forcing function for identifying which situations require careful consideration versus rapid execution.

The Market They’re Building

Crux serves three distinct personas across a massive transaction range. Sellers include renewable energy developers and manufacturers, with deals ranging from $80,000 to “billions of dollars of credits a year.” Buyers span from family offices to the Fortune 100. Intermediaries include banks and tax advisors facilitating transactions for their clients.

The platform isn’t just matching buyers and sellers. It’s creating the standards that allow the market to function. “Our mission is to make sustainable finance more efficient and interconnected,” Allen explains. For transferable tax credits, that means creating “a market where corporate buyers can really easily transact these credits because they very quickly can understand the risks.”

On the seller side, the goal is enabling developers to “come to a liquid market where they can easily find the right counterparty for them.” The transaction and closing experience should become “much more standardized and looks something like the ISDA market, where you see a lot of standardization, a lot more standardization around sort of trading terms.”

This comparison to ISDA, the documentation standards for interest rate swaps, reveals Allen’s ambition. Those standards took decades to develop. Crux aims to accelerate that timeline for sustainable finance.

The Future: Beyond Tax Credits

Allen sees transferable tax credits as the foundation, not the ceiling. “There’s such demand and pull from our existing customers to be able to access additional types of capital, not just this tax credit transaction,” he explains.

The vision is “a much more integrated, one stop shop for our partners to be able to access capital markets as they think about what they need to do to finance their projects and then find the right counterparties for them.”

This expansion path works because Crux already owns the intermediary relationships. As they add new financial products beyond transferable tax credits, the same advisors and banks can offer broader solutions through the platform. The intermediary-first strategy that solved the cold-start problem becomes the moat that enables expansion into broader sustainable finance.

The stakes are enormous. The energy transition represents roughly $150 trillion in new asset development globally. These assets need financing infrastructure. They need standards. They need platforms that create transparency and efficiency.

Crux started with transferable tax credits because the Inflation Reduction Act created a specific opening. But the company’s long-term mission extends to making “sustainable finance more efficient and interconnected” across the entire capital stack for renewable energy and decarbonization projects.

From a pub conversation in Birmingham to standardizing how America finances its energy future, Crux’s story demonstrates that the best market opportunities often emerge from policy changes that create entirely new asset classes. The companies that move fastest to build infrastructure for those new markets don’t just participate in them. They define how they function.