Eight months after taking the top leadership position at the company, Generate Capital CEO David Crane is “guardedly optimistic.”

“Things are going very well, and we’re actually a little bit ahead of schedule on what I would have hoped to accomplish over the period,” Crane told this publication in a recent interview.

The firm is in a healthier financial position than when Crane took over, he says, as Generate now moves away from investments in platform companies.

“We are de-emphasizing that,” Crane said.  “We’re not doing more investments in platform companies, so we’re engaged in a series of processes to basically liquidate those investments, and how much money we invest this year and next year will depend on our success level in those processes.”

Crane expects the firm to invest a few hundred million dollars in project level equity investments, and a few hundred million more on debt investments each year, under USD 1bn total. Though a healthy amount, it’s significantly scaled back from the firm’s activity in the early part of this decade.

On the project equity side, Generate has focused on projects in three verticals: community solar, energy efficiency, and fuel cells. Investments addressing load growth driven by data centers have emerged as a fourth class, one that underpins the company’s approach across the board.

“Where I believe there’s going to be massive convergence over the next couple years is by doing large load deals or data center deals, specifically as the data center world shifts more totally to onsite power solutions,” he said. “Because those on-site power solutions look a lot like the distributed generation that we already do.”

Crane believes investing at the project level is crucially better from a cash-flow perspective than investment in a platform.

“Cash flow to the projects is much quicker than cash flow to a platform company that is doing projects and constantly trying to grow, and so any last dollar they get from their first project goes into developing their second project,” he said. “So, they’re always cash flow poor, which makes it difficult for us to invest in them.”

The infrastructure sector at large could benefit from placing greater emphasis on cash profitability, Crane believes.

“People really need to focus on cash flow,” he said. “Investors want to get their money back at some point, even infrastructure investors.”

It’s a shift in strategy for Generate, though one Crane sees as returning to the company’s roots.

Bad bet on Pine Gate

Crane was appointed CEO in September 2025, taking over from the firm’s co-founder, Scott Jacobs, who had served as chief executive since the firm’s launch in 2014.

Along with Jacobs, Generate was founded by renewables titan Jigar Shah, who served as president of the company, and Matan Friedman, who was chief investment officer. The firm’s strength early on, Crane believes, was its ability to reach smaller deals, in the USD 10m to USD 50m range, projects too modest for Wall Street to take an interest in.

“That was Generate’s specialty, and something we’ve done successfully for all 11 years, and continue to do,” Crane said.

The exuberance of the early 2020s, especially around the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, changed the firm’s approach along with the industry’s at large, Crane believes.

The firm began to grow rapidly, announcing a USD 2bn capital raise in 2021. In January 2024, the firm announced a USD 1.5bn capital raise from investors including CalSTRS and HESTA, including existing investors QIC and AustralianSuper.

“Generate thought it could raise USD 2bn per year indefinitely,” Crane explained. “That informed everything: the size of the company, its office space, the fact that we had to put money to work in the hundreds of millions rather than tens of millions.”

One company Generate backed heavily was Pine Gate Renewables, the ill-fated North Carolina-based solar and storage developer. Generate committed USD 500m in strategic growth capital and asset financing to Pine Gate in 2022, then upped its ownership stake the following year, according to public announcements at the time. In 2024, Generate led a USD 650m funding round.

In November 2025, Pine Gate filed for Chapter 11, with co-founder and CFO Ray Shem citing increased interest rates, inflation, and policy headwinds including tariffs and the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). Unique in the industry, Pine Gate wholly owned its EPC subsidiary, Blue Ridge Power, which faced accelerating losses, Shem claimed in bankruptcy documents.

“Pine Gate was a product of the sort of exuberance that came into the market, which other Clean Energy investors have experienced as well, after the Inflation Reduction Act,” Crane said. “Generate was raising all this money, and saw difficulty in deploying it USD 10m at a time, so started to do bigger investments.”

Reporting from last October stated that Generate had between 3% and 5% of its AUM invested in Pine Gate when the developer went bankrupt.

“The whole idea of infrastructure investment is you’re not supposed to have zeros, because on the upside it’s hard in infrastructure to have the 10x returns a VC investor expects from time to time,” Crane noted. “A really good infrastructure investment is a 20% return, so you’d need a lot of those to make up for zeros.”

Fighting weight

As Pine Gate floundered and headed towards bankruptcy late last year, Generate made a series of layoffs. The company is now at around 60% of the size it was when Crane took over, he said.

The company may start to grow again, Crane added, but at a much slower pace.

“As I like to say, we’re at our fighting weight,” he said. “This is the size that we should be as we execute on more growth opportunities.”

Meanwhile, Generate has been unwinding its platform-level investments. In March, the company sold Virginia-based greenhouse developer and operator Equinox Growers to Taylor Farms. Last November, the company sold Atlas Organic, a recycling company, to Circular Services.

Generate’s liquidity, Crane said, is “very healthy,” while the company’s financial situation is much improved.

“We’re spending less and we’re accumulating more, and we will continue to accumulate more, but the whole key is for us to accumulate more and find ways to finance these new infra opportunities in our wheelhouse,” Crane said.

The platform sales have so far generated revenues in the low hundreds of millions of dollars, and Crane hopes that in the end that number will top USD 1bn. Much rides on the sale of esVolta, the battery energy storage developer. Generate has mandated Barclays and Truist as advisors on the sale process And Crane said the company is making progress in that process and has seen good interest without giving further detail.

Generate is also exploring strategic options for its UK grid flexibility portfolio, which includes roughly 60 MW of operational gas peakers and a 30 MW/60 MWh battery storage project in the final stages of commissioning.

Return expectations

Crane said that at the project level, the firm is targeting mid-teen returns.

Returns on the debt side actually can be greater, Crane said, as Generate is often given warrants which give the company a long-term stock option, sweetening the potential upside.

Crane already had a long career in the energy sector before joining Generate, including 12 years at NRG Energy, where he served as President and CEO. Crane also served as Under Secretary for Infrastructure at the US Department of Energy from 2022 to 2025.