Manik
Suri

The walk-in freezer at your local McDonald's runs 24 hours a day. Nobody's watching it. When it malfunctions, the food spoils, the service call arrives late, and the energy bill climbs quietly. Multiply that by every 7-Eleven, every Domino's, every hotel minibar, every airline catering unit - and you get a picture of the inefficiency Manik Suri has spent the last five years dismantling.

Suri's company GlacierGrid deploys wireless IoT sensors (using the same LoRaWAN protocol that powers smart city infrastructure) across commercial refrigeration and HVAC systems. The platform monitors temperature and humidity in real time, fires alerts before product is at risk, and uses AI-driven controls to cut energy consumption by roughly 10% - significant, given that refrigeration runs nonstop. The ROI lands before the first invoice: energy saved, service calls avoided, food loss eliminated. Typical multi-site deployments pay back within the first month.

The climate angle is not incidental. Cooling systems - refrigeration and air conditioning together - are responsible for nearly 10% of global carbon emissions. That makes the cold chain one of the largest and least-examined contributors to warming. Suri is building infrastructure to fix it at scale.

GlacierGrid's client roster tells the story efficiently: McDonald's, 7-Eleven, Domino's, Delta Airlines, Marriott Hotels, NOW Foods. These are not experimental pilots. They are operational deployments across thousands of locations where the margin of error is measured in spoiled inventory and compliance fines.

In February 2024, the company Suri originally called Therma - a name that fit the temperature-monitoring product he launched in 2020 - became GlacierGrid. The rebrand was not cosmetic. It signaled the company's expansion from a sensor-and-alert business into a full Cooling Intelligence platform: smart controls, energy optimization, demand response integration, sustainability reporting. The category Suri named now has a name.

The through-line in Suri's career is not climate - it's opacity. He has always built things that make hidden systems visible and navigable.

His first startup, MeWe (later CoInspect), digitized compliance paperwork for government agencies and food-service businesses. Described at launch as "TurboTax for compliance," it raised a $2.3M seed round and was covered by TechCrunch in 2017. The premise: food safety inspections happen on paper, the results vanish into filing cabinets, and nobody has the data to act on patterns. MeWe made those inspections digital, searchable, and actionable.

Before MeWe, Suri had worked at D.E. Shaw - one of the world's most quantitatively sophisticated hedge funds - and served on the White House National Economic Council, where policy is made at the intersection of data and power. He co-founded the Governance Lab (GovLab) at NYU, a leading center for using technology to improve how governments work.

He was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, an Affiliate at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and a Fellow at the Truman National Security Project. In 2016, the American Bar Association named him one of its ten annual "Legal Rebels" - people reimagining what the legal profession could do.

The pattern is consistent: Suri moves toward the unsexy infrastructure problem that everyone depends on and nobody wants to modernize. Food safety inspections. Cold storage. Energy systems. He builds the layer underneath.

The product stack is layered. At the hardware edge, wireless sensors attach to walk-ins, reach-ins, prep tables, and freezers - monitoring temperature, humidity, and equipment status in real time, without requiring a wired installation. The cloud layer aggregates that data, applies machine-learning models, and surfaces actionable alerts and analytics through a mobile app and dashboard.

The control layer is where the energy savings happen: GlacierGrid can adjust compressor cycles, coordinate with utility demand response programs, and optimize scheduling to flatten peak energy demand. For large multi-location operators, this is material. Refrigeration is often the single largest energy cost in a food-service or retail operation.

The business model is B2B SaaS. Operators pay per location; enterprise contracts cover thousands of sites. The sales cycle favors operators already managing multi-site compliance burdens - where GlacierGrid's sustainability reporting and regulatory compliance tools reduce overhead alongside energy costs.

Funding has followed the traction. The $19M Series A in February 2023 was led by Zero Infinity Partners, with participation from Deciens Capital, CityRock Venture Partners, Homecoming Capital, Ananta Capital, Kindergarten Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and Govtech Fund - a mix that reflects GlacierGrid's overlap between climate, enterprise software, and govtech. Additional Series A-1 and A-2 rounds in 2024 brought the total raised to over $29 million.

Running a 48-person climate startup apparently leaves Suri time to run a VC fund. Progress Fund AI, which he founded in 2024, backs early-stage companies using artificial intelligence for positive impact - specifically in climate, health, education, and work. It is a continuation of the thesis he has operated from since MeWe: that the hardest problems are infrastructure problems, and that the best technology makes things work better for the people operating closest to those problems.

Suri joined the Board of Directors of the US Coalition on Sustainability in 2024, alongside executives from large enterprise and energy companies. He is a member of YPO and the Forbes Business Council. His personal website (maniksuri.com) publishes writing on technology, policy, trade, India, and immigration - a window into the breadth of thinking behind what looks, from the outside, like a focused climate-tech play.

Emmanuel College, Cambridge - where he studied as Harvard's annual Paul Williams Scholar - features him in its "Stories from Emmanuel Entrepreneurs" series. The framing they chose: a builder who left the world of policy and finance to solve a problem at planetary scale. That's the right frame. The part they left out: he was already doing that before GlacierGrid. He just keeps going.