He turned a $25 bank deposit into 600 schools. Now he is building the software that tells trillion-dollar companies how to spend their carbon.
CEO & CO-FOUNDER, CLARASIGHT · NEW YORK
The Work Right Now
Most companies announce a net-zero target the way they announce a hiring freeze: loudly, vaguely, and without a spreadsheet that survives contact with reality. Clarasight, the company Adam Braun co-founded with Philip Charm in 2021, exists to fix the spreadsheet problem. It is an AI platform for carbon planning and intelligence - software that lets enterprises forecast emissions, build reduction scenarios, set carbon budgets, and report numbers they can actually defend.
The pitch is deceptively simple: make carbon planning as rigorous as financial planning. Treat a tonne of CO2 like a line item, not a press release. In April 2026 the bet drew an $11.5M Series A led by AlleyCorp, with Clarasight claiming customers whose combined market value tops a trillion dollars.
It launched under a friendlier name - Climate Club - before growing into Clarasight, a word that promises exactly what every sustainability officer wants and almost never gets: a clear view of where the carbon goes and what to do about it. Travel data, expense data, emissions methodologies, real-time dashboards. The unglamorous plumbing of a promise.
It is a line Braun has built three organizations to prove. The throughline of his career is not pencils, or degrees, or carbon. It is the stubborn habit of turning a good intention into an institution that outlives the mood that started it.
The Origin
At 16 he was already working summers at hedge funds, the kind of head start that usually ends in a corner office and a golf membership. Brown University followed - a triple major, magna cum laude - and then Bain & Company, the consulting firm that turns smart graduates into smarter slide decks.
The detour came on a ship. As a Semester at Sea student traveling through India, Braun asked a child begging on the street what he wanted most in the entire world. Not money. Not food. The boy said: a pencil. Braun handed his over and watched the kid's face change. He spent the rest of the trip handing pencils to children across dozens of countries, collecting the same reaction each time.
On his 25th birthday he deposited $25 into a bank account and called it Pencils of Promise. The math was absurd. The outcome was not. The nonprofit went on to build hundreds of schools, train teachers, and fund scholarships across Laos, Guatemala, Ghana and beyond.
In 2014 he wrote it all down. The Promise of a Pencil debuted at #2 on the New York Times list and climbed to #1 - a how-to manual disguised as a memoir, arguing that scale is not a talent reserved for the well-connected.
The Arc
The Pivot, Visualized
Education access, then debt-free credentials, now corporate carbon. Different markets, identical move: take something everyone says they care about and give it real numbers.
Clarasight folds in travel data, expense data, and emissions methodologies so a sustainability target stops being a slogan and starts being a budget. The unglamorous plumbing of a promise - again.
The Highlight Reel
Pencils of Promise built schools, trained teachers and funded scholarships across Laos, Guatemala, Ghana and more.
The Promise of a Pencil debuted at #2 and reached #1 on the New York Times list - a memoir written as a playbook.
Across three ventures spanning nonprofit, edtech and climate-tech.
Selected by the World Economic Forum as one of its original ten Global Shapers.
Recognized for public service; has spoken at the White House, the UN and the Clinton Global Initiative.
His talks on building change from scratch have been watched by millions.
The Margins
The trivia that makes the resume human.
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