Climate CEOs: Scaling Startups

Discover how Carbon America captures & transforms CO₂, reducing emissions, improving efficiency, & enabling scalable climate solutions.Led by Scott Frazier, Carbon America is a carbon dioxide capture and sequestration 'super developer' deploying existing off-the-shelf carbon removal technology while also developing its own proprietary next-generation technology. Carbon America was created to transform the carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) industry by lowering costs and rapidly increasing deployment. Scott described Carbon America's approach to carbon capture sequestration saying, "Carbon America is an end-to-end vertically integrated carbon sequestration project development company. We think of the company’s evolution in three stages. In the first stage, we are using existing off-the-shelf carbon capture technology to remove CO2 in projects that we consider to be low-hanging fruit, such as ethanol or ammonia production plants. In the second stage, we plan to deploy proprietary technology, currently being developed in-house, for addressing less concentrated flue gas point sources. In the third stage, we intend to deploy ambient carbon capture technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. In this way, we are meeting the urgency of the moment and demonstrating our project development and management expertise while we develop and contribute unique technologies and approaches to the carbon removal space."Scott further highlighted his unconventional cleantech background, "I was originally trained as an aerospace engineer. After my schooling, I was fortunate enough to work on some of the space shuttle programs and then eventually transitioned to working on a really audacious project with Andy Beal [a finance billionaire and philanthropist]. Some of the facilities and projects that I and the team I assembled under Beal are being used today by SpaceX and Elon Musk. I think I learned an incredibly valuable lesson in audaciousness: If you keep it simple and break problems into their component parts, there is no reason that very difficult problems cannot be solved. After about four years working for Beal, I spent eight years working on a solar technology project and then transitioned to working on an energy storage application with the cofounder of Carbon America, Alex Lau [a real estate developer and cleantech super angel]."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.

Learn how GreenSpark Solar installs community-scale solar solutions with social impact, sustainability, & reliable energy delivery.Led by CEO Kevin Schulte, GreenSpark Solar is a distributed solar project developer and contractor based in Rochester, New York. The company has consistently been one of Rochester's fastest-growing businesses and continues to expand to date with project development capabilities ranging from residential solar installations to commercial-scale projects for which the company provides engineering procurement and construction services. To learn more visit the company's website.Kevin summarized GreenSpark's business saying, "GreenSpark Solar is a certified B Corporation and solar energy development/installation company based in Rochester, New York. We do a variety of distributed solar projects ranging from residential projects, of which we will contract 150-200 deals this year, to small business projects, to larger-scale projects for which we have an in-house engineering procurement and construction team. We will do about 50 MW of those projects this year. At our core, we are builders, and we’re building solar at scale in the larger Rochester area."Kevin talked about his path to cleantech entrepreneurship saying, "I have always had the overarching intention of working for the benefit of others. I started college as a biotechnology and premed student with an interest in epidemiology. However, in my first college class, my professor showed a pictograph of the greenhouse gas effect. It immediately became clear to me that this was a very big problem that I wanted to work on. I changed my major and studied economics, public policy, and energy system design. After college, I sent a resume and cover letter to every company on the American Wind Energy Association webpage and got a job in the industry. In 2002 after a couple of years of working in the industry, my college friends and I decided to start a business. That business has evolved from a consultancy to the nation’s largest distributed wind installer, to a solar and storage company today."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.

Discover how Copia uses software to redirect surplus food to NGOs, reducing waste, increasing efficiency, & delivering social impact.Led by founder Komal Ahmad Copia is striving to solve the world's dumbest problem in food waste and hunger by creating a platform to connect food oversupplied businesses with food-hungry nonprofits. The company is also developing predictive analytics tools to reduce food waste for restaurants and large food suppliers. Komal summarized Copia's mission and business saying, "Copia is trying to solve “the world’s dumbest problem.” In a world with so much technology, innovation, and abundance, issues like hunger should not exist. The hunger problem is a logistics problem, not a scarcity problem. Copia is a platform that connects businesses with excess food to nonprofits that are in need at just the right time when these nonprofits can make use of donated food."Komal highlighted Copia's approach to scale saying, "We serve the United States and Canada. We have partnered with Doordash and Postmates, and we have created a webhook integration that automatically notifies a driver for one of these services when a business requests that food be picked up. These partnerships provide tremendous scale with 500,000 drivers throughout the United States, making us geographically agnostic."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.

Learn how Noya captures carbon via industrial cooling towers, turning emissions into measurable environmental & commercial value.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.

Discover how Prime Impact Fund provides catalytic capital for climate ventures, scaling startups, & driving measurable environmental returns.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.

Learn how Renewal Mill transforms food waste into nutritious products, reducing landfill impact & creating sustainable consumer goods.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.

Discover how Erthos develops plant-powered plastic replacements, reducing environmental impact, & providing viable industrial solutions.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.

Learn how Therma uses sensors & AI to reduce food waste, optimize refrigeration, & improve efficiency across global cold chains.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.

Discover how Manifest Climate provides software to assess corporate climate risk, track emissions, & enable data-driven sustainability decisions.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."

Explore recent agtech investments, tools to measure greenhouse gas impact, & emerging strategies for microbiome & sustainable agriculture innovation.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