Gradiant is an MIT spinout turned global water-technology company that designs, builds, and operates advanced systems to treat, reuse, and recover industrial water and wastewater. Using a stack of proprietary technologies - from Carrier Gas Extraction to Counterflow Reverse Osmosis and an AI control layer called SmartOps - Gradiant helps semiconductor fabs, food and beverage giants, pharmaceutical makers, miners, and refiners cut freshwater use, recover lithium and other minerals, and destroy 'forever chemicals.' The first unicorn in the water industry, it reached a $2 billion valuation in 2026.
Infinite Cooling is an MIT-spinout climate-tech company that helps the world's most water-intensive industries cut water loss and run cooling towers smarter. Its patented WaterPanel technology uses electric fields to recapture purified water escaping as plume from cooling towers, while its TowerPulse platform layers AI-driven analytics and real-time monitoring on top of existing cooling systems. Customers include power plants, data centers, refineries and manufacturers across the U.S. and internationally, including a flagship deployment with EDF, the world's largest nuclear operator.
SOLARCYCLE is an advanced solar panel recycler turning America's mounting pile of retired solar panels into raw materials and new solar glass. Using patented technology, the company recovers more than 95% of the value in a panel - silver, silicon, copper, aluminum and glass - and feeds it back into a domestic clean-energy supply chain. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Mesa, Arizona, it runs facilities in Texas and Georgia and has signed long-term recycling deals with more than 40 of the largest solar companies in the U.S.
Adden Energy is a Harvard spinout building dynamically-stable, self-healing solid-state lithium-metal batteries designed to make electric vehicles charge in minutes, last a million miles, and never catch fire. Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company is scaling its lab breakthrough into commercial pouch cells on a roll-to-roll pilot line and shipping samples to automakers for validation.
Mantel is a Cambridge, Massachusetts cleantech company building a molten-salt approach to industrial carbon capture. Spun out of MIT in 2022, its molten borate materials operate inside the high-temperature guts of boilers, kilns and furnaces, absorbing more than 95% of CO2 while recovering high-grade heat that offsets the energy cost of capture. The pitch is blunt: cut the cost of capturing a ton of carbon by more than half and make it work in the dirtiest, hottest corners of heavy industry - cement, steel, pulp and paper, power and refining.
Cameron Halliday is the co-founder and CEO of Mantel, a Cambridge, Massachusetts climate-tech company spun out of MIT's chemical engineering labs. Mantel uses molten borate salts to capture CO2 from heavy industry at high temperatures, recovering most of the energy as usable steam and slashing the cost and energy penalty of carbon capture. Halliday discovered the core material during his PhD at MIT, then co-founded the company in 2022 and raised a $30 million Series A co-led by Shell Ventures and Eni Next.
Tim Heidel is the co-founder and CEO of VEIR, a Massachusetts startup building overhead superconducting transmission lines that can carry five to ten times the power of conventional lines on roughly the same footprint. An MIT-trained electrical engineer who ran the research behind MIT's Future of the Electric Grid study, then steered a portfolio of grid projects at ARPA-E and vetted climate bets at Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Heidel concluded that the grid's biggest bottleneck was transmission itself - too slow, too costly, too ugly to permit. VEIR is his answer: black pipes carrying superconducting tape bathed in liquid nitrogen at -321F, aimed squarely at AI data centers, utilities and renewable developers.
Ciaran Long is the CEO of a.k.a. Brands Holding Corp. (NYSE: AKA), a portfolio of next-generation fashion brands targeting Gen Z and millennial consumers. A qualified Irish Chartered Accountant with 25-plus years of financial and strategic leadership, Long joined a.k.a. Brands as CFO in 2021, stepped into an interim CEO role in 2023, and was named permanent CEO in January 2025. Under his leadership the company returned to net sales growth with three consecutive quarters of double-digit U.S. sales expansion, repositioning the portfolio around a demand-driven 'test-and-learn' merchandising model and a major bet on physical retail expansion. He previously served as CFO of Samsclub.com and held senior roles across Walmart's e-commerce division, and earlier in his career he co-founded CleanGrow, a water quality sensor technology startup.
Lilac Solutions is an Oakland-based cleantech company commercializing a patented ion-exchange technology that pulls lithium directly out of brine - using ceramic beads instead of evaporation ponds. The process is faster, uses up to 90% less freshwater, and is designed to unlock low-grade brine resources around the world to feed the electric-vehicle battery supply chain.
Nicholas Flanders is the Co-Founder and CEO of Twelve, a carbon transformation company that converts CO2, water, and renewable electricity into sustainable aviation fuel and carbon-neutral chemicals. A Stanford MBA and former McKinsey consultant, Flanders co-founded Twelve (originally Opus 12) in 2015 alongside scientists Dr. Etosha Cave and Dr. Kendra Kuhl to commercialize breakthrough electrochemical CO2 conversion technology developed at Stanford. The company has raised over $790 million, including a $645 million financing round in 2024 led by TPG Rise Climate, and is building AirPlant One - the world's first commercial-scale e-fuels facility - in Moses Lake, Washington.
Rebecca Hu-Thrams is the co-founder and CEO of Glacier, a San Francisco-based company building AI-powered robotic arms that sort recyclables in material recovery facilities. Raised by Chinese immigrant parents who instilled a 'reduce, reuse, recycle' ethos, she channeled her Bain consulting background and Thumbtack operating experience into tackling what she calls 'the most demented form of manufacturing on the planet.' Glacier's robots, trained on 3.8 billion images of waste, sort 70+ material categories at 60 picks per minute - preventing roughly 10 million items per robot from reaching landfill annually. Named Fast Company's #1 Most Innovative Company in Robotics & Engineering for 2026, Glacier has raised $33.2 million including a $16M Series A extension in April 2025 backed by Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund and New Enterprise Associates.
Shashank Samala is the CEO and Co-Founder of Heirloom, the company operating America's first commercial direct air capture facility. A serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Tempo Automation (raising $100M+ for aerospace-grade electronics manufacturing), he pivoted to carbon removal after a stint as Entrepreneur in Residence at Carbon180. At Heirloom, he's building limestone-based DAC technology to remove one billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2035, targeting a cost of $50 per ton. The company has raised $354M total, including a $150M Series B in December 2024, and is building two new DAC facilities in Louisiana with combined annual capacity of nearly 320,000 tons.
Daisy Cai is a General Partner at B Capital, the multi-stage venture firm co-founded by Eduardo Saverin. With nearly two decades of investment experience spanning Silicon Valley, Hong Kong, and global markets, she heads B Capital's China expansion and leads investments in deep tech, AI, robotics, autonomous systems, clean energy, and space technology. Before B Capital, she was a Partner at SoftBank Vision Fund and Managing Partner of Baidu Capital and Baidu Ventures. She holds a B.S. from Tsinghua University, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from USC, and an MBA from Columbia Business School - and has six U.S. patents in semiconductor chip design.
Lyten is a San Jose-based supermaterials company building lithium-sulfur batteries, advanced composites, and sensors on top of its proprietary 3D Graphene platform. Founded in 2015, Lyten makes its 3D Graphene by cracking methane into nanostructured carbon, then uses that material to produce lighter, higher-energy batteries with a domestic, non-conflict supply chain. The company is scaling production from a San Jose pilot line toward a multi-gigawatt-hour gigafactory in Reno, Nevada and a newly acquired European footprint.
Pebble Mobility is a Fremont, California startup building the Pebble Flow, an all-electric, self-propelling travel trailer designed to make RVing as easy as using an iPhone. Founded by ex-Apple, Tesla, Zoox, Rivian and SpaceX engineers, the company is rethinking the 50-year-old RV playbook around electrification, automation, and off-grid living.
Verdi is a Vancouver-based agtech company building affordable, retrofit-ready irrigation automation systems for orchards, vineyards, and specialty crop farms. Founded in 2020 by UBC Engineering Physics graduates Arthur Chen and Roman Kozak, the company makes wireless IoT controllers and soil moisture sensors that install in minutes on existing irrigation infrastructure. Its AI-powered platform gives farmers real-time monitoring, leak detection, variable rate irrigation, and fertigation control from a mobile app - delivering documented results of up to 70% water savings, 90% labor reduction, and 10-20% yield increases. Backed by $9.5M total funding including a $6.5M CAD seed round in May 2025, Verdi counts E&J Gallo, Arterra Wines, and UC Davis among its customers, with 16,000+ acres automated across North America.
Dirk Morbitzer is a senior executive and consultant with 25+ years of experience in renewable energy, solar, and cleantech. He is CEO of DIMOCO Inc., a boutique consulting firm specializing in solar and energy storage, and is a top 1% expert in the Energy Group at GLG (Gerson Lehrman Group). Previously CEO North America and Group CEO of AEROCOMPACT Group Holding AG, and before that Director of Strategic Sourcing at Sunrun for eight years, Morbitzer brings deep expertise in strategic sourcing, international supply chain management, M&A, and PE investment navigation across Europe, Asia, and North America.
Milo Werner is a General Partner at DCVC leading the firm's climate investments, bringing a rare combination of deep operational experience - nearly a decade at Tesla launching the Model S, Model X, and dual-motor powertrain - and a track record of venture investing at Khosla Ventures, Ajax Strategies, and MIT's The Engine. She founded The NextGen Industry Group, a nonprofit helping ~140 companies navigate the treacherous 'missing middle' between pilot production and commercial scale. At DCVC, she focuses on breakthrough deep tech ventures that decarbonize high-emitting industries and transform value chains.
Mohan Iyer is a General Partner at SOSV's IndieBio SF, the world's leading biotech accelerator. With 25+ years operating life science startups across Genentech, Tethys Bioscience, Second Genome, and Pendulum Therapeutics, he brings rare bench-to-boardroom experience to pre-seed biotech founders. Trained as a chemical and biomedical engineer before earning his MBA from Yale, Iyer has spent his career translating disruptive biology into products the world actually needs — and now bets on founders doing the same.
Fernando Llaver is the CEO and Co-Founder of Splight, a San Francisco-based AI company that unlocks hidden transmission capacity on existing electricity grids using machine learning - without building new infrastructure. A veteran of more than two decades in the energy industry, he left a C-level role to co-found Splight in 2021 alongside CTO Thomas Vadora and Chief Data Scientist Carlos Caldart. Splight's Dynamic Congestion Management technology now manages over 6 gigawatts of grid assets across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, and has raised $28.1M in total funding. Llaver was invited by the International Energy Agency to join global leaders in Paris to discuss energy and AI, and is a member of the Unreasonable Group portfolio of entrepreneurs tackling major global challenges.
Amit Narayan is the Co-Founder and CEO of GridCARE, a Redwood City-based generative AI company that unlocks hidden power grid capacity to slash data center connection timelines from 5-7 years to 6-12 months. A serial entrepreneur with a PhD from UC Berkeley and a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur, he previously founded AutoGrid (acquired by Schneider Electric in 2022) and Berkeley Design Automation (acquired by Mentor Graphics in 2014), and holds 7 U.S. patents across semiconductor design and energy software. GridCARE emerged from stealth in May 2025 with a $13.5M seed round led by Xora and backed by Tom Steyer, Ram Shriram, and Breakthrough Energy, targeting what Narayan calls the defining constraint on AI: immediate access to power.
Amrit Robbins is the CEO and co-founder of Axiom Cloud, a San Jose-based AI-powered refrigeration management software company serving grocery chains and cold storage operators. A Stanford-trained engineer and Forbes 30 Under 30 alumnus, Robbins previously co-founded Axiom Exergy — a hardware-first thermal energy storage company — before pivoting to software in 2020 with Axiom Cloud. His work addresses refrigerant leaks, which rank #4 on Project Drawdown's climate impact list, with a platform that requires no new hardware, deploys remotely, and earns payback in under a year.
Hannes Boehning is the CEO and founder of Blumen Systems, a San Francisco-based AI company building environmental intelligence software that converts complex regulatory documents and geospatial datasets into permitting matrices, site layouts, and engineering documents for energy infrastructure developers. A Stanford-trained engineer and former Division I athlete, Boehning left roles at Rothschild & Co and Fortress Investment Group to found Blumen in 2023, raising $6.39M from Climate Capital to tackle one of the biggest bottlenecks in the clean energy transition: the permitting process.
Jason Aramburu is the cofounder and CEO of Applied Carbon, a Houston-based climate tech company building the world's first mobile, in-field biochar production machines that convert agricultural crop waste into permanent carbon storage - and improved soil - in a single pass. A Princeton-trained ecologist who first encountered biochar during field research in Panama, Aramburu has spent two decades building at the intersection of soil science, robotics, and carbon markets. Before Applied Carbon, he founded re:char (smallholder biochar in Kenya, backed by Gates Foundation) and Edyn (smart irrigation, Y Combinator W14), then invested in AI and energy startups at Baidu Ventures and Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures before returning to his original mission. Applied Carbon raised a $21.5M Series A in July 2024, backed by Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, Congruent Ventures, and the Grantham Foundation, and won the $500,000 Wilkes Climate Launch Prize in September 2024.
Mark McClure is the co-founder and CEO of ResFrac Corporation, a Palo Alto-based company building advanced physics-based simulation software for the energy industry. A Stanford PhD in Energy Resources Engineering, he spent time as an assistant professor at UT Austin before founding ResFrac in 2015. His research on hydraulic fracturing, induced seismicity, and enhanced geothermal systems has earned over 5,800 scholarly citations and an h-index of 38. Under his leadership, ResFrac has grown to serve 60+ exploration and production companies and secured a platform investment from Banneker Partners in 2026. He also advises Fervo Energy on geothermal development.
Dr. Molly Morse is the CEO and co-founder of Mango Materials, a Vacaville, California-based startup that turns waste methane into biodegradable PHA biopolymers. Founding the company in 2010 on the back of her Stanford PhD research, Morse has spent over a decade building a circular bioeconomy solution that converts a potent greenhouse gas into a commercially viable plastic replacement — branded as YOPP pellets. She has won the Postcode Lottery Green Challenge (2012), the C3E Entrepreneurship Award (2018), and was selected as an Unreasonable Fellow in 2022.
Nadim Maluf is the co-founder and CEO of Qnovo, a Silicon Valley battery intelligence software company whose technology has shipped inside over 150 million smartphones and is now entering the electric vehicle market. Holding a PhD from Stanford, an MS from Caltech, and over 50 patents, Maluf spent three decades mastering sensors, photonics, and MEMS before channeling everything into a singular bet: that software, not chemistry, would solve the world's battery problem. His platform, SpectralX, and its automotive extension SentinelX, use real-time electrochemical diagnostics and machine learning to make batteries charge faster, last longer, and fail less often — a proposition that earned strategic investment from Hyundai and Kia.
Olgica Bakajin is the CEO and Founder of Porifera Inc., a San Leandro, California-based company pioneering forward osmosis membrane technology for the food, beverage, and industrial water sectors. A physicist by training - B.A. from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. from Princeton - she spent nearly a decade at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory developing carbon nanotube membranes that move water 1,000x faster than conventional materials. Her 2006 Science paper on carbon nanotube desalination became the most-cited chemistry article in the journal. In 2009 she spun Porifera out of LLNL, and the company now serves 100+ customers across 20+ countries, helping breweries, coffee roasters, and winemakers concentrate their products without heat, preserving flavor, aroma, and nutrients while slashing energy use by up to 80%.
Nicolas Pinkowski is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nitricity, a Fremont, California-based clean energy company reinventing how nitrogen fertilizer is made. Armed with a Stanford PhD in Energy Systems, Pinkowski and his co-founders turned a backyard experiment on a lemon tree into a $95M-funded company producing organic nitrogen fertilizer from air, water, renewable electricity, and recycled almond shells. Their flagship product, Ash Tea, delivers 92% lower emissions than conventional fertilizers, has achieved OMRI certification, and has already generated over $150M in binding offtake agreements. Pinkowski was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021 and is an Unreasonable Food Fellow (2024), leading Nitricity's expansion from California into global markets.
Shane Dyer is the CEO and co-founder of Irrigreen, an Edina, Minnesota-based company reinventing residential lawn irrigation with AI-powered digital sprinkler systems that use up to 50% less water than conventional setups. A Stanford-trained computer systems engineer and serial entrepreneur with three company foundings under his belt - including Arrayent, an IoT platform acquired for $37M - Dyer applied inkjet printing precision to lawn sprinklers, creating a 'water printing' system now deployed across 300+ installation partners in nearly every U.S. state. Irrigreen raised a $19M Series A in April 2025, bringing total funding to $35.89M, and has saved 400 million gallons of water for customers to date.