cleantech
(63)
Michael Ahearn and the price of patience
A lawyer, an investor and a factory that took four years longer than planned. How First Solar’s co-founder helped turn a difficult manufacturing process into a business, then returned when growth stopped being the answer.
Josh Wong’s Unfinished Business With the Grid
Josh Wong sold his first grid software company to GE, then returned to the same demanding customers with ThinkLabs AI. His career is a study in what happens when an engineer finds a problem he cannot leave alone.
Lisa Ann Pinkerton and the art of getting a good idea heard
A theater graduate became an environmental reporter, then built a cleantech communications firm after a recession-era layoff. Lisa Ann Pinkerton has been finding new audiences ever since.
Martin Garratt and the value of the right introduction
Before a clean technology can change anything, somebody has to buy it. Martin Garratt built Cambridge Cleantech around the often overlooked business of getting the right people into the same room.
Raghav Narayan and the cost of waiting
After more than two decades at Volvo Group, Raghav Narayan co-founded Aprisium to bring contamination testing closer to the action. His second act turns on a practical question: what could a business do differently if it knew sooner?
Volker Berl started with atoms. Then came companies.
Before founding New Age Ventures, Volker Berl helped turn chemistry into a board game. His route from Strasbourg laboratories to New York investing still runs through the practical business of putting things together.
Mario Venditti and the distance between an idea and a business
From cybersecurity operations to concrete, ocean buoys and aircraft cabins, Mario Venditti keeps returning to the work that comes after invention. At Montreal’s Innovobot, he pairs early-stage investment with the engineers and operators needed to bring technology to market.
The laptop that would not leave
Nitin Gupta and his brother Rohan went looking for a responsible way to retire an old laptop. They ended up building Attero, and a career spent finding the industrial value in things other people had finished with.
Steve Bisset
Steve Bisset is an Australian-born engineer and serial founder who has built two companies four decades apart in two different industries. In the 1970s he left an 18-month stint at Intel - where his first assignment was finding the first working 8080 chip in a tray of parts - to start Megatest out of his bedroom with $10,000 of vested stock and a housemate from Caltech. Megatest grew into a semiconductor test equipment company, survived the 1985 industry collapse that cut it from 450 people to about 200, listed on NASDAQ in 1993, and was acquired by Teradyne in 1995 for $245 million. In 2009 he co-founded Terrajoule, now Terrajoule Energy Inc. in Palo Alto, on a deliberately unfashionable premise: pair concentrated solar heat with pressurised hot-water storage and a reciprocating steam engine, a machine nobody had manufactured commercially since the 1950s. Terrajoule raised an $11.5 million Series A in 2013 led by New Enterprise Associates with Air Liquide, and Bisset continues to pursue low-cost dispatchable solar as an alternative to PV-plus-battery, with work extending into India.
Bryce Jones
Bryce Jones is the CEO and co-founder of Flash Forest, a Toronto-based cleantech startup that uses autonomous drones, AI, GIS mapping and biodegradable seed pods to replant forests faster and more cheaply than traditional hand-planting. A former tree planter and biology graduate from British Columbia, Jones launched Flash Forest in 2019 after seeing how far reforestation methods lagged behind industrial logging technology. The company's stated goal is to plant one billion trees by 2028, with a focus on land that is unsafe or uneconomical for human crews, including post-wildfire terrain.
Alex Grant
Alex Grant is the co-founder and CEO of Magrathea, an Oakland-based startup building a new electrolytic process to make magnesium metal from seawater and brine with near-zero carbon emissions. A chemical engineer who previously founded lithium-extraction company Lilac Solutions and modeled battery supply chains at Minviro, Grant started Magrathea in 2022 to reshore US magnesium production. What began as a climate play turned into a national-security one: after Russia's invasion of Ukraine tightened global magnesium supply, Magrathea won a Defense Production Act partnership with the US Department of Defense. He was a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Energy in 2021.
Maria Intscher-Owrang
Maria Intscher-Owrang is the co-founder and CEO of Simplifyber, a Raleigh-area materials startup that molds cellulose-based liquid directly into finished textile and composite parts, eliminating spinning, weaving, cutting and sewing. After more than two decades designing for Vera Wang, Calvin Klein, Dirk Bikkembergs and Alexander McQueen, she left luxury fashion to rebuild manufacturing from the fiber up, landing partnerships with GANNI and Kia and a $12M Series A led by Suzano Ventures.
Nick Grewal
Nick Grewal is the founder, chairman and CEO of ePropelled, a Laconia, New Hampshire company building smart-propulsion and energy-management systems for drones, marine craft, and light electric vehicles. He founded ePropelled in 2018 after selling his previous startup Nashoba Networks to Cisco Systems for roughly $100 million in 1996 and spending two decades as an angel investor in more than 40 high-tech companies. He was inducted into the 2025 Boston Smart Business Dealmakers Hall of Fame.
Michael Foss
Michael Foss is CEO and Chairman of RanMarine Technology, the Rotterdam-based maker of the WasteShark, an autonomous surface drone that eats floating trash out of harbours and canals. A veteran retail and technology CFO/CEO with prior top posts at Sports Authority, Petco and Circuit City, he joined RanMarine as an advisor in 2022, became board chair in 2023, and now leads the company as it pushes its water-cleaning fleet across ports, cities and marinas worldwide.
Nate Owen
Nate Owen is the founder and CEO of Ampion, a Boston-based Public Benefit Corporation that acquires and manages community solar subscribers across the country. He started Ampion in 2014 after two decades running Energy Services Group, the back-office software company he founded in 1996 to serve the newly deregulated electric and gas markets. Under Owen, Ampion has grown to roughly 120 employees, manages about 1.5 GW of community solar capacity, and says it has saved subscribers more than $42 million on their electricity bills.
Nithish Sairam
Nithish Sairam is the co-founder and CEO of Illumine-i, a solar and power-engineering design firm he built after stints at Tesla and NextEra Energy. Under his leadership the bootstrapped firm expanded from a five-person team to roughly 240 engineers across offices in Fremont, Austin, and Chennai, and has been described as the largest independent digital design engineering firm in the residential PV solar sector.
Ory Zik
Ory Zik is the CEO of Qnergy, an Ogden, Utah company that builds maintenance-free Stirling-engine generators used to convert stranded methane at oil, gas, landfill and livestock sites into electricity. A physicist by training with a Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute, he has spent two decades founding cleantech and scientific-instrument companies, including Heliofocus (concentrated solar), Energy Points (environmental analytics, acquired by Lux Research) and Quantomix (live-cell electron microscopy). He also helped launch Greenpeace's Israel branch and served as scientific director of Israel's National Museum of Science.
Quentin Scrimshire
Quentin 'Q' Scrimshire is the co-founder and CEO of Modo Energy, a London-based B2B SaaS platform that benchmarks and forecasts the performance of grid-scale battery energy storage assets. A Manchester-trained electrical engineer who cut his teeth on offshore wind and gas-fired plants at Centrica before running Kiwi Power's European storage business, he now leads a roughly 80-person team building what he describes as the 'benchmarking and valuation operating system for global electrification.' In December 2025 Modo closed a $33M Series B led by Molten Ventures.
Ryan Begin
Ryan Begin is the co-founder and CEO of Divert, a Concord, Massachusetts impact-technology company that grew from a two-person idea in 2007 into a nationwide network of anaerobic digestion facilities. Divert prevents wasted food across roughly 7,800 retail locations, donates edible surplus, and turns the rest into renewable natural gas. A Maine native and Clarkson-trained electrical engineer, Begin left Raytheon to build the company alongside co-founder Nick Whitman.
Saurabh Ullal
Saurabh Ullal is the CEO of 6K, an advanced materials company in North Andover, Massachusetts that uses a microwave-plasma process called UniMelt to make battery cathode powders and metal powders for additive manufacturing. A chemical engineer by training with a PhD from UC Santa Barbara, he joined 6K as COO and stepped into the CEO role in September 2024 alongside an $82M Series E close, tasked with scaling a technology invented at MIT into industrial tonnage.
Maher Damak
Maher Damak is the CEO and co-founder of Infinite Cooling, an MIT spinout that recaptures the water vapor escaping from power-plant and industrial cooling towers using electric fields. A French-American mechanical engineer with a PhD from MIT and a degree from Ecole Polytechnique, he turned a fog-harvesting experiment in the Varanasi Research Group into a patented technology that recovers water more than 100 times purer than a plant's circulating supply. His work has earned Forbes 30 Under 30, the Lemelson-MIT prize, and an Edison gold medal, and his charged-mesh systems are now being tested on nuclear plants including EDF's Bugey site in France.
Mitch Lee
Mitch Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Arc, the Los Angeles marine-technology company trying to make everything that floats electric. A Bay Area kid raised on the California Delta, he trained as a mechanical engineer at Northwestern, analyzed Apache helicopter rotor blades at Boeing, then spent years in software - founding Penny, which was acquired by Credit Karma - before reuniting with his old Boeing and Northwestern classmate Ryan Cook, a former SpaceX lead engineer, to build electric boats in 2021. Arc has raised more than $150 million, ships its Arc Sport wake boat and Arc Coast center console from a 150,000-square-foot LA factory, and in 2026 pushed into commercial and defense propulsion with a $50M Series C and a $160M tugboat contract for the Port of Los Angeles.
Prakash Govindan
Prakash Govindan is the co-founder and CEO of Gradiant, the water industry's first unicorn, valued above $1 billion. Raised in Chennai during monsoon failures that dried up his family's taps, he turned a childhood of hauling buckets into a PhD at MIT and a company that now renews billions of liters of industrial water a day for clients in semiconductors, pharma, food and beverage, and mining. He co-invented Gradiant's flagship Carrier Gas Extraction technology, holds more than 100 patents, and helped bring the TIME Best Invention 'ForeverGone' PFAS-destruction system to market. A devoted bhakti yogi who has read the Bhagavad Gita some fifty times, he runs one of the fastest-growing water companies on earth while preaching egoless leadership.
Adam Slavney
Adam Slavney is the co-founder and CEO of Pascal, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup commercializing solid-state refrigerants to replace the planet-warming gases inside air conditioners, heat pumps, refrigerators and data centers. A Stanford-trained chemist who studied perovskite solar cells before a Harvard postdoc in clean-energy economics, Slavney spun Pascal out of Harvard in 2023 around a class of barocaloric materials that respond to pressure two orders of magnitude more strongly than other solids. The company raised an $8M seed round in 2024 led by Engine Ventures, with Khosla Ventures participating, and later added a Series A to scale prototypes. Slavney's pitch is blunt: heating and cooling burn nearly 40% of the world's energy and the refrigerants doing it cause about 2% of global warming, and he wants to keep the cooling while deleting the climate cost.
David Kim
David Kim is the co-founder and CEO of Monterra, a San Francisco software company that helps EV charging contractors and developers design, quote, and propose charging projects in minutes instead of days. Before Monterra, he spent years working with utilities and energy companies designing EV charging programs, deploying smart grid infrastructure, and planning energy efficiency initiatives, with earlier stops at The Cadmus Group, Boston Consulting Group, and Accenture, plus a graduate degree from MIT Sloan. He co-founded Monterra in 2022 with Kelson Reiss and raised a $2.5M pre-seed led by Base10 Partners in November 2023 to speed the buildout of EV charging infrastructure with software and AI.
Georg Caspary
Georg Caspary is the founder and CEO of HarvestAi, a Potsdam-based deeptech company that uses machine learning and computer vision to forecast harvest dates and yields in commercial greenhouses growing tomatoes, peppers and strawberries. A former World Bank economist and fundraising lead with degrees from Oxford, the LSE, Sciences-Po Paris and MIT, he spent two decades on environmental and agricultural finance across more than 20 countries before turning his attention to the unglamorous but high-stakes problem of knowing exactly how many tomatoes a greenhouse will produce, and when. HarvestAi has raised over $3 million, won first prize in Food/Agritech at Slush, and runs pilots in Germany, the Netherlands and Canada.
Heather Hochrein
Heather Hochrein is the founder and CEO of EVmatch, a peer-to-peer electric vehicle charging network she likens to Airbnb for chargers. What began as a master's thesis project at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School became a venture aimed at the least glamorous corner of the EV revolution: helping renters and apartment dwellers find a place to plug in. A self-described accidental business owner with roots in energy efficiency and workforce development, she has spent over a decade arguing that the clean energy economy only works if it is also a just and equitable one.
Rustam Sengupta
Rustam Sengupta is the founder and CEO of Tuktu Care, a Vancouver-born platform that matches older adults with vetted community helpers for companionship and everyday tasks so they can keep living at home. A serial entrepreneur who previously built solar microgrid companies across rural India, he turned a pandemic-era scramble to care for his aging parents in Singapore into a fast-growing agetech company backed by Techstars and Melinda French Gates' Pivotal Ventures. He holds an MBA from INSEAD, an MS in Electrical Engineering from UC Irvine, and a Chevening Fellowship from Oxford, and teaches social entrepreneurship at the University of Vermont.
Gregg Semler
Gregg Semler is the founder and CEO of InPipe Energy, a Portland-based company that generates clean, around-the-clock electricity from the water already flowing through municipal pipelines. A serial clean-energy entrepreneur since 2000, he previously led PolyFuel, ClearEdge Power, and Lucid Energy, and spent years as a venture investor in the sustainable economy. His pitch is contrarian: instead of covering the planet with solar panels and batteries, harvest the predictable, weather-proof energy hiding in the millions of miles of pressurized pipe that move our drinking water.
Suvi Sharma
Suvi Sharma is the co-founder and CEO of SOLARCYCLE, a clean-energy company turning end-of-life solar panels into recovered materials and brand-new solar glass. A three-time solar entrepreneur, he previously built and ran Solaria for 17 years and co-founded Nextracker before it was acquired by Flex. Today he is building one of the first US solar glass plants in Cedartown, Georgia, betting that the fastest-growing source of electricity also needs the smartest plan for what happens when the panels come down.