Point Nine launches to direct 0.1% of business revenues to clean energy: ‘Almost nothing changes everything’
A new initiative with big-name backers has launched with a small but mighty goal: to get businesses to channel 0.1% of their revenues to clean energy projects.
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Point Nine is asking businesses to commit just 0.1% of annual revenue to clean energy projects in emerging and developing economies.
The UK-based platform, launched today, has already signed up 30 companies to participate. The threshold is set deliberately low – low enough, the founders hope, that saying no becomes harder to justify.
"It's a simple message to be able to tell and our line is 'Almost Nothing Changes Everything'," Propercorn founder Ryan Kohn, who heads up Point Nine, told Reuters.
A recent analysis by think tank Global Nation found that 0.1% of total global business revenue would amount to around $171bn annually based on 2025 figures. That sum, the study found, would be sufficient to fully transition the world's power supply to clean energy by 2040.
While still in its infancy, Point Nine has an A-list of early backers, including Paul Polman, former Unilever CEO and a prominent impact investor and has Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who led the Paris Agreement negotiations as UN climate chief.
Sir Andrew Steer, former CEO of the $10bn Bezos Earth Fund and knighted in 2024, is also involved. British actor and rapper Riz Ahmed is among the “cultural influencers” lending their name to the effort.
Catalytic capital
Point Nine is working with the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) to deploy leverage the corporate contributions as form of de-risking capital for clean energy projects. The idea is that businesses take first-loss positions to absorb the initial risk on an investment, making the remaining exposure more palatable to institutional investors.
GEAPP's track record suggests that this kind of structure can attract around 15 times the amount in follow-on capital. That would put total mobilisation at around $3bn if Point Nine hits its $200m target.
The initiative is deliberately focused on SMEs, which account for over 90% of all businesses globally and roughly half of GDP.
Whether Point Nine can sign up enough businesses to get anywhere near the numbers it requires is another question. For now, it has 30.
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