Samir
Pendse.

The man selling comfort, billing carbon by accident.

Ask most homeowners if they want a heat pump and they will look at you blankly. Ask them if they want a warm house for a few thousand dollars less, and you have their attention. Samir Pendse built a company on the gap between those two questions.

Pendse is the co-founder and CEO of Coral, a New York climate fintech that does something quietly radical: it pays the rebate before the rebate arrives. Federal tax credits, state programs, and utility incentives for electrification are real money - sometimes thousands of dollars per project. The catch is timing. The savings show up months after the install, buried under paperwork most people never finish. Coral fronts the cash so contractors can knock the discount off the invoice on the spot, then handles the filing with the utility behind the curtain.

The result is the thing every sales conversation needs and rebates rarely deliver: a lower number, today, at the kitchen table. Contractors running Coral's instant rebates report a 20 to 30 percent lift in sales conversion. Upfront costs drop by roughly a third. The customer sees the price they would have paid only after a half-year of bureaucracy - except they see it before they sign.

Microfinance taught him the same lesson, twice.

Pendse did not arrive at climate through solar panels or carbon math. He arrived through capital - specifically, the chronic shortage of it for people the financial system overlooks. He started his career at Accion, a microfinance nonprofit built on the idea that very small loans to very small businesses can change a life. The theme stuck.

From there he went to Boston Consulting Group, where he helped large banks build small-business lending products, and later into fintech itself, doing product work that turned slow, manual, paperwork-choked lending into something fast enough to actually approve. A lot of those small businesses were contractors - the same trade he would later build Coral to serve. He holds an MBA from Wharton and a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Northwestern.

In 2023 he met Nizar Dhamani, an engineer who had built fintech infrastructure on the technical side at Betterment. The two of them looked at electrification - heat pumps, batteries, panel upgrades - and saw the same wall Pendse had spent a decade chipping at: the money exists, but the people who need it cannot reach it in time. They founded Coral to knock that wall down. The target is a $450 billion market in US sustainable building upgrades, gated almost entirely by upfront cost.

He left climate out of the pitch. On purpose.

Here is the line that tells you who Pendse is as a founder. Recalling Coral's fundraising deck, he shrugged: "I don't even know if we had climate in the deck, to be totally honest, but it didn't matter because it's around." The decarbonization happens regardless. He just refuses to lead with it, because leading with it loses the room.

He describes himself, in effect, as a chameleon - one story for contractors who care about closing the sale, another for the VCs underwriting the model, another for the homeowner who only wants the cold to stop. The constant underneath all three is money saved. "Everyone wants to save money," he says. "And I think that's how clean energy becomes really the best way to do that." It is a pragmatist's theory of change: the planet wins when the wallet wins first.

It is a contrarian stance in a sector that often markets to the converted. The heat pump world is full of charts about emissions and electrification curves. Pendse spends his energy somewhere else - on the homeowner staring at a quote, doing fast arithmetic, deciding whether they can swing it this month. His argument is that the rebate was always supposed to be the bridge across that gap, and the system simply built the bridge in the wrong order: pay first, claim later, wait months, maybe give up. Coral flips the sequence so the bridge is there when the customer needs to cross it.

That reordering matters most for the contractor, who is the real customer in Pendse's model. A contractor does not lose a sale because the planet is fine - they lose it because the number is too high and the financing is clumsy. Pendse has spent years inside that exact problem from the lending side, watching small businesses and tradespeople get stuck behind slow approvals and manual paperwork. Coral applies the fintech playbook he already knew - speed, automation, higher approval rates - to a category that had been running on spreadsheets and faxed forms.

The unglamorous genius of doing the paperwork.

Coral's business model is almost charmingly boring, and that is the point. It takes a 1 to 2 percent fee for filing rebate paperwork with utilities - the one job in the entire transaction nobody wants. By absorbing both the float and the friction, Coral converts a six-month bureaucratic slog into a single-day filing and an instant discount. The contractor sells more. The homeowner pays less. The utility gets a clean claim. Coral clips a small coupon for being the only party willing to stand in the middle.

That willingness to own the dull middle is winning serious partners. The 2026 seed round was led by ResilienceVC, with participation from Twelve Below, Floating Point, Accion Ventures, Blackhorn Ventures, Remarkable Ventures, and New Climate Ventures. The strategic name that matters most: Watsco Ventures, the venture arm of the largest HVAC distributor in North America. When the company that moves the equipment bets on the company that finances it, the distribution math gets interesting fast. Coral is also working with Mitsubishi Electric Trane HVAC on national expansion. In 2025, Pendse and Coral were named to Company Ventures' Boost Founder Fellowship.

The float is where the cleverness hides. To hand a contractor an instant rebate, Coral has to be confident the underlying incentive is real, the project qualifies, and the utility will pay. That is an underwriting problem dressed up as a software problem - exactly the kind Pendse cut his teeth on. Verifying eligibility, advancing the right amount, and recovering it cleanly is the muscle a microfinance-and-lending career builds. Coral pairs the rebate advance with access to low-cost financing too, so a homeowner who still needs to spread the remaining cost has a path that does not blow up the deal.

Where it goes next is a question of footprint. Coral today powers more than 100 installers concentrated in the US northeast, where state and utility programs are dense and the incentives are worth chasing. National expansion means more programs, more rules, more utilities, each with its own forms and quirks - a complexity that would terrify most founders and clearly delights this one. The bet is that the harder the paperwork, the wider Coral's moat, because the value of a partner who simply makes it disappear only grows. If Pendse is right that affordability is the real engine of the energy transition, Coral is building the gearbox.