A decade scaling apps people tap on the subway. Then he pointed all of it at the factories that make the city itself - and built the data layer for sustainable manufacturing.
A bag of cement does not look like a climate problem. It looks like a bag of cement. That ordinariness is exactly what Alex Cooper is counting on - because the unglamorous gray powder, multiplied across every road, foundation and tower on Earth, helps make the built world responsible for roughly 40% of global carbon dioxide. Cooper's company, Pathways, exists to make that invisible number show up on the invoice.
Cooper is co-founder and co-CEO of Pathways, a New York climate-AI company building what he calls the data layer for sustainable manufacturing. In plain terms: Pathways automates the creation of Life Cycle Assessments and Environmental Product Declarations - the LCAs and EPDs that tell a buyer how much carbon is baked into a slab of concrete or a treated wooden beam. Traditionally those documents are assembled by hand, over six to twelve months, at meaningful cost. Pathways ingests a manufacturer's own data on raw materials, transport and process, and produces the same answer in real time - cutting the work by as much as three-quarters.
That shock is the origin story. Before climate, Cooper spent the better part of a decade inside startups that obsessed over the smoothness of a tap. He worked in product strategy at Uber, led product operations at the on-demand storage company Clutter, and ran data analytics and finance at the mental-health startup Two Chairs. Ride-hailing, storage, therapy - an eclectic resume, bound together by a single thread: building consumer software so frictionless you forget there's software at all.
Then he walked into the manufacturing sector and found the opposite. Spreadsheets held together with hope. Carbon accounting done once a year, by a consultant, in a report nobody reopened. For a person trained to treat a slow loading screen as a moral failing, the gap was almost offensive. It was also an opportunity hiding in plain sight.
Pathways began at Harvard, where Cooper met co-founder Leise Sandeman - a former McKinsey consultant who had already scaled a material-recycling venture. With ties to research at MIT, the two dug into embodied carbon: the emissions locked inside a product before it is ever used. The built environment kept coming up. It was enormous, it was measurable in principle, and almost nobody had built decent tools to measure it. In 2022 they founded Pathways to fix that.
Cooper describes the partnership in arithmetic that would make a math teacher wince and an investor smile.
The reframe is the whole pitch. Most companies treat an EPD the way they treat a tax form - a compliance chore to survive. Cooper sells the opposite idea: that the same data, gathered properly, is a live map of where a product's emissions actually come from. Find the hotspot, change the recipe, watch the number fall.
His ambition runs further than software. Cooper wants the LCA to become a standard technical specification for manufactured goods - listed as routinely as cost, weight or PSI strength. A carbon footprint printed beside the price, on everything, the way calories sit on a cereal box. Get there, he argues, and manufacturers can shave their products' Global Warming Potential by 20% or more within a year of switching on the platform.
In February 2024, Pathways announced $2.5 million in funding, co-led by London's Pi Labs and the construction-tech fund Zacua Ventures, with a roster of climate and industrial backers behind them. The round was oversubscribed by $1.5 million - a vote of confidence that the dull middle of the supply chain is where the next climate fortunes will be measured. Early customers tell the story better than any deck: Stella-Jones, North America's leading pressure-treated wood producer, and building-materials giant Heidelberg Materials among the names already on board.
There is a quiet contrarianism in Cooper's choice of battlefield. Climate founders mostly chase the photogenic stuff - the solar arrays, the sleek EVs, the carbon-capture render with a blue sky behind it. Cooper went the other direction, toward cement plants and lumber yards and the kind of B2B sales cycle that makes consumer founders break out in hives. The bet is that decarbonizing the boring, heavy, foundational layer of the economy is both harder and more consequential than anything happening at the glamorous edges.
It helps that regulation is catching up. Procurement rules increasingly demand verified EPDs on major projects, and "low-carbon concrete" has gone from marketing to mandate in a growing list of jurisdictions. A producer who can generate trustworthy declarations on demand wins bids. A producer who can't, doesn't. Pathways is positioned squarely on that pressure point - which is why a year-long carbon audit compressed into weeks is not a nicety but a competitive weapon.
For now, Cooper runs the company from New York, with a registered home base in Pound Ridge - a Westchester hamlet of fewer than five thousand people, an almost comic distance from the cement kilns his software is busy interrogating. It suits him. The whole premise of Pathways is that the most important climate data is hiding in places nobody thinks to look: inside a factory's process logs, behind a procurement form, underneath a bag of perfectly ordinary gray powder.
Cooper's wager is that if you make that data legible - fast, real-time, and impossible to fudge - the market does the rest. The cleaner product wins the contract. The carbon number becomes a spec. And concrete, at last, learns to tell the truth about itself.
Software for manufacturing was shockingly hard to use.
LCAs are environmental intelligence, not a checkbox.
With Leise, 1 + 1 = 20.
His pre-climate resume reads like a shuffle deck: ride-hailing (Uber), storage (Clutter), mental health (Two Chairs). The common thread was always making heavy systems feel light.
Pathways' entire pitch is a reframe - turning the dreaded EPD compliance form into something he calls "environmental intelligence." Same data, opposite emotion.
The company is registered in Pound Ridge, NY - a town of under 5,000 people - while its software interrogates cement kilns and lumber yards across the continent.
He measures his co-founder chemistry in deliberately broken math: "1 + 1 = 20." It is the kind of line investors remember and engineers quietly roll their eyes at.
Yes, there is a far more famous Alex Cooper. No, this is not the podcaster - this Alex Cooper's daily drama is the carbon intensity of concrete.