Entrepreneurs for Impact

Led by CEO Josh Santos, Noya is bringing carbon-negative technology to market by retrofitting existing cooling towers to provide no-cost carbon removal technology to large facility managers. The company generates revenue by selling upcycled food-grade carbon dioxide to the beverage industry and has established revenue-sharing agreements with its facility manager partners. To learn more about Noya visit their website. Josh highlighted Noya's mission and capital-light approach to carbon capture and sequestration saying, "Noya’s fundamental aim is to combat climate change by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by means of retrofitting existing infrastructure with carbon removal technology. The upfront capital costs of constructing new carbon removal technologies are substantial. Instead, our approach is to retrofit existing industrial cooling towers by adding a chemical blend into the water that sits within these towers. Consequently, this water becomes a sponge that sucks carbon dioxide out of the air. There are two million cooling towers in the United States so we have a lot of work ahead of us." Josh noted two key ingredients in Noya's pitch to facility managers, saying "It has been important to create incentive alignment and appeal to the inherent wants and needs of these facility managers. One of these needs is to improve the sustainability of their facilities. There has been a big push to implement LED lighting and address other forms of low-hanging carbon fruit, but ultimately there is a need to do more. Our retrofit offers a carbon-negative contribution to the larger push to meet sustainability commitments. The second aspect of this incentive alignment has been our business model which requires no capital or operating expenditure from the facilities that we retrofit. Instead, we finance the installation of the equipment and cover operational costs in exchange for getting access to these large carbon sinks. On the back end, we give facility owners 10% of the revenue that we generate from the sale of the consequent carbon dioxide concentrate." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential. Our highly vetted, invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.

Co-led by Principal Amy Duffuor, the Prime Impact Fund invests catalytic capital into early-stage technologies with the capability to have a gigaton scale impact on carbon emissions.  Amy noted Prime Impact Fund's differentiated approach to venture capital saying, "Prime Impact Fund is a $50 million early-stage fund focused on pre-seed, seed, and Series A rounds for companies with the potential to create gigaton-scale carbon emission reductions. All of our capital from limited partners is structurally more patient and flexible, or what we call “catalytic capital,” which gives us an advantage and opportunity to approach the problem a little differently." Amy highlighted some of Prime's early investments saying, "We have invested in 13 companies to date, and they really run the gamut. The first company that we invested in was Lilac Solutions, which is an extraordinary company that is doing great work in the lithium extraction space. Another portfolio company is Clean Crop Technologies that creates unique ionized gasses to increase food safety, reduce crop loss, and address food waste. This is important since agriculture is responsible for over 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and food waste alone is responsible for about 6% of emissions. The last one that I will mention here is Noon Energy which is a long-duration energy storage provider. Their low-cost battery is a carbon-oxygen battery driven by a proprietary catalyst that could replace peaker plants." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential. Our highly vetted, invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.

Led by Claire Schlemme Renewal Mill reduces food waste by upcycling the byproduct of plant-based milk to create high-quality Okara flour and baking mixes. The company's Okara flour is used in products made by other plant-based food makers while its baking mixes are sold directly through its website. Claire summarized Renewal Mill's business saying, "Renewal Mill is an upcycle food company. We upcycle byproducts from food manufacturing into superfood ingredients and premium pantry staples. We are currently working with the pulp residue from plant-based milk. This pulp material is nutritious and has a lot of fiber and protein. This leftover pulp is often wasted and certainly not processed and upcycled at scale as we are attempting to do. For soy milk residue, we dry out the pulp and produce it as “okara,” which has an East Asian heritage. For oat milk, we perform a similar process and brand the material as upcycled oat protein flour. Our goal is to ultimately move beyond the plant-based milk space and continue to capture otherwise wasted sources of fiber and protein. There are numerous opportunities to do this in the tomato and potato spaces in particular." Claire spoke to the importance of mission alignment in seeking outside capital saying, "For the first two years, the company was funded through grants from both Yale and the Closed Loop Foundation. We recently received funding from Kroger as part of their Zero Hunger Initiative. We have also employed more traditional forms of capital raises with convertible and SAFE notes. Our funding sources have been mostly in the impact space. When we first incorporated the company, we did so as a public-benefit corporation, which I believe has been powerful in filtering our potential investor list to the most mission-aligned subset. We have received funding from traditional waste-to-value investors as well as an investor that focuses on plant-based food systems." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential. Our highly vetted, invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.

Led by Nuha Siddiqui Erthos is developing a compostable plant-based resin to substitute to serve as a drop-in replacement for petroleum-derived products in the manufacturing of single-use plastics. Nuha spoke to erthos's mission saying "erthos is our take on the combination of earth and ethos. We are creating plant-powered alternatives for traditional plastic inputs. We aim to make these substitutes both compatible with existing infrastructure and compostable at end of life. Our product replaces polystyrene and polypropylene in single-use applications such as cutlery. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel, but we are trying to make it more sustainable." Nuha elaborated on the company's go to market strategy saying, "We are working with large established manufacturers and aiming to launch our product next year. The end-use applications include bottle caps, food casing, and cutlery." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential. Our highly vetted, invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.

Led by CEO Manik Suri, Therma is deploying next-generation IoT devices to reduce product waste and decrease energy waste throughout the global cold chain.  To learn more about Therma visit their website. Manik noted the company's product offering saying, "Therma stands for Temperature Humidity Equipment Remote Monitoring Application. Our technology is an Internet of Things device that reduces the waste of energy, product, and refrigerants across the refrigeration supply chain." Manik highlighted the scale of the refrigeration industry saying, "The refrigeration industry is interesting but probably not something that the layman has given much thought to, and frankly, I hadn’t given it much thought either until a few years ago. The industry has been around for about 150 years and hasn’t seen as much innovation as you might think. The “refrigeration cold chain” is used to describe all of the refrigeration assets that help keep perishable products cold across the life cycle. There are a couple hundred million units of refrigeration assets in the commercial and industrial sectors alone. There is more than $1 trillion worth of inventory moved through these refrigeration assets each year from fruits and vegetables to pharmaceuticals and blood plasma. The scale of the cold chain is growing at approximately 11% a year with growth fueled by the developing world. There are estimates that China’s current cold chain is only 20% of its full potential while the estimate is closer to 10% in Africa." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential. Our highly vetted, invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.

Led by co-founders Jeremy Greven and Laura Zizzo, Manifest Climate is a building a climate intelligence platform to help companies better understand, manage, and communicate climate risk.  To learn more about the TCFD standards that Manifest Climate looks to broadly implement visit their website. Below are two excerpts from the podcast. Laura highlighted the company's mission and product offerings saying, "Manifest Climate is a climate intelligence platform for business. We help customers translate climate so that they can better understand it, manage it, and disclose it to investors. We help clients communicate climate risk to investors and internally within their companies so they can make decisions that enhance business resiliency. We want to take climate out of the sustainability silo and put it into the organizational framework." Jeremy spoke to the company's evolution saying, "The company and its product offering have evolved with market demands. The company was born out of Mantle 314, a management consultancy company working with big financial institutions globally. It eventually became clear that boardrooms across the world were demonstrating a common need for better information concerning the management of climate. However, the combination of commonality and impact at scale makes this problem uniquely suited for a software solution. Ultimately we are bringing a “SaaS plus” model to the market where we can leverage technology to build upon the experiences and insights of subject matter experts on our team that have over five years of experience working with corporate clients in the climate space. In addition to the technology layer, we can offer a higher-touch service with custom reporting broken down by business lines as well as workshops where management teams can engage with Q&A and get one-on-one time with subject matter experts on our team."

ZERO is a weekly newsletter about climate finance, startups, and personal development. In this issue, we deliver the spoken podcast version, which covers the following: Agtech deals, climate podcasts, plus 2 investor tools to measure GHGs, "soiling your pants" for microbiome health, and beef gets "epi-canceled." For more trends, check out other issues of our free weekly newsletter ZERO: Climate Finance via Entrepreneurs for Impact: https://zeronewsletter.substack.com

Led by CEO Julia Collins, Planet FWD has developed software to provide consumer brands the insight need to understand and reduce their carbon footprints. The company has also developed its own sustainable snack brand called Moonshot. To learn more visit their website. Below are two excerpts from the episode.  Describing Planet FWD's mission Julia said, "Our mission is to help brands bring planet-friendly products to market by helping them deeply understand their carbon footprint and then putting them on a path to carbon neutrality. To facilitate this carbon light approach, we provide access to the data and information that brands may otherwise lack in making supply chain and go-to-market decisions. We also work to connect our brand partners with suppliers that we have independently verified across various measures of sustainability." Highlighting the company's go-to-market approach Julia said, "We have developed a carbon modeling software tool that can be applied to numerous industries from food to fashion, though food remains our initial industry of focus. To demonstrate the feasibility of making sustainability a core part of the value proposition of a consumer brand, we built our own brand called Moonshot to be the first explicitly climate-friendly product in the snack category. Ultimately, our mission is to serve all brands in the consumables space." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential. Our highly vetted, invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.

ZERO is a weekly newsletter about climate finance, startups, and personal development. In this issue, we deliver the spoken podcast version, which covers the following: Recent climate tech deals from Voltus, Mainspring, ESS, Solid Power, Navitas Semiconductor, and 10 more. Plus 8 climate accelerators or challenges to apply for (Joules, LACI, 100+, AirMiners, Clean Energy Trust, Amazon, ADB, GS). For more trends, check out other issues of our free weekly newsletter ZERO: Climate Finance via Entrepreneurs for Impact: https://zeronewsletter.substack.com

Led by Executive Chairman Brett Isaac, Navajo Power develops large utility-scale solar and solar plus storage projects with a focus on providing energy access and economic benefits to the Navajo Nation and other tribal communities. Below are two excerpts from the podcast. "We are a utility-scale solar and energy storage development company with the mission of maximizing community benefit to the Navajo Nation. We started the company to bring the clean energy revolution to the tribal and indigenous communities that have been forgotten and left behind." "I believe the majority of the unelectrified homes in the United States are on Navajo Nation property. There are somewhere between 15,000-18,000 homes on Navajo Nation property that lack access to electricity or reliable electricity. I think many of us do not realize that some of these homes that you drive by each day do not have running water although large transmission lines run overhead." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential. Our highly vetted, invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.