Tenet is a New York fintech building the first lending platform designed exclusively for electric vehicles. It uses the unique attributes of EVs, chargers, and battery storage to offer lower monthly payments, fast 24-hour funding, and a path to home electrification - increasingly as a lending-as-a-service engine that powers credit unions and other lenders.
Hana Kajimura is the CEO of Trellis Group, the climate media-and-events company behind GreenBiz, Circularity and Trellis Impact. Before running the room, she built it: as Allbirds' first full-time sustainability hire she stamped a carbon footprint on every shoe, open-sourced the methodology so rival brands could copy it, and authored the 'Flight Plan' to halve the company's per-product emissions. A Stanford environmental scientist who chose business over activism because companies 'move much more swiftly,' she now runs the largest gathering of sustainability professionals in North America.
Joachim Katchinoff is a Yale-trained biogeochemist who co-founded CREW Carbon to turn ordinary wastewater treatment plants into permanent carbon-removal machines. By dosing treatment tanks with crushed alkaline minerals, CREW converts the CO2 that microbes naturally belch into stable bicarbonate, while cutting chemical costs for utilities. The company became the first in the world to issue certified Wastewater Alkalinity Enhancement carbon credits and raised a $25M Series A in 2026 to scale across the US and Europe.
Ravi Pappu is the founder and CEO of Apeiron Labs, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup building low-cost autonomous robots that drift through the water column to measure the ocean at a scale never attempted. A physicist-turned-serial-founder, he invented Physical Unclonable Functions during his MIT PhD, co-founded the RFID pioneer ThingMagic (acquired by Trimble), and served as CTO of the CIA-linked venture firm In-Q-Tel before deciding the subsurface ocean was the hardest, most under-measured place on Earth and going after it with hardware he calls 'the CubeSat for the ocean.'
Muon Space is a Mountain View-based end-to-end space systems company that designs, builds, and operates mission-optimized satellite constellations for climate, defense, and Earth intelligence customers. Its Halo platform pairs the modular MuSat spacecraft bus with MuOS middleware and the MuSim digital twin, anchoring high-profile programs like Google's FireSat wildfire constellation and a $44.6M U.S. Space Force environmental monitoring agreement.
Ashwin Cheriyan is the CEO and co-founder of Thistle, a San Francisco-based plant-forward meal delivery company he built from a cold-pressed juice pop-up in 2013 into a nationwide subscription service delivering over 20 million meals. A self-described 'recovering corporate lawyer,' he traded a career at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett doing billion-dollar M&A deals for the chance to fix how Americans eat — driven by his parents' experiences as physicians watching patients suffer from diet-related chronic disease. Thistle, which he runs alongside his wife and co-founder Shiri Avnery, has raised over $20 million and now serves the West and East Coasts with chef-designed, nutritionist-approved meals that are gluten-free and dairy-free by default.
Chris Abbott is the Chief Executive Officer of Pivot Bio, a Berkeley-based agricultural biotechnology company pioneering microbial nitrogen solutions that replace synthetic fertilizers. A Minnesota native and University of Minnesota graduate, Abbott built his career at the intersection of agriculture finance and agtech investing - from Wall Street sell-side research at Piper Jaffray to co-leading Continental Grain's Conti Ventures. He joined Pivot Bio's board in 2018, and in August 2023 stepped up as CEO, guiding the company past $100 million in annual revenue while scaling its gene-edited microbes to over 5 million acres. Under his leadership, Pivot Bio achieved 60% year-over-year revenue growth and has helped farmers reduce synthetic nitrogen use by over 129,000 metric tons.
Eric Faurot is the long-serving CEO of Trellis Group (formerly GreenBiz Group), a B2B media company headquartered in Oakland, California that runs flagship sustainability conferences including VERGE, BLOOM, GreenFin, and Circularity. Over 14 years at the helm, he built GreenBiz into a leading platform for sustainability professionals - combining editorial media, peer networks, and live events - before transitioning to a Growth Leader role in July 2024 when Hana Kajimura succeeded him as CEO. His career traces an arc from tech media event production (COMDEX, INTEROP, Black Hat) to climate and sustainability, making him a rare figure who bridged Silicon Valley-era conference culture with the emerging sustainability economy.
Jonny Dyer is the Co-Founder and CEO of Muon Space, a Mountain View-based end-to-end satellite constellation company building mission-optimized spacecraft for Earth intelligence, wildfire detection, and national security. A Stanford mechanical engineer who pitched varsity baseball and co-authored rocket propulsion models, he turned Skybox Imaging into Google's $500M acquisition, ran Google Maps' data collection fleet, led Lyft's autonomous vehicle platform, and then founded Muon in 2021. The company has raised $146M in Series B funding and operates a growing constellation including FireSat - a 50-satellite wildfire-monitoring system developed with Earth Fire Alliance.
Pete May is President and Co-Founder of Trellis Group (formerly GreenBiz Group), the leading media, events, and peer-network platform for corporate sustainability professionals. In 2006, he and Joel Makower purchased GreenBiz.com and built it from a niche newsletter into a global sustainability intelligence brand with flagship conferences, digital media, and professional communities. Drawing on over two decades of B2B publishing leadership at Primedia, CMP, and Miller Freeman, May brought seasoned media-industry discipline to a space that desperately needed it — transforming green business from fringe conversation to boardroom imperative.
Ryan Pandya co-founded Perfect Day in 2014 with the audacious goal of making dairy without cows. Using precision fermentation, the Berkeley-based biotech raised nearly $800 million, built partnerships with Fortune 500 food companies, and proved that animal-free whey protein could reach global markets across dozens of product categories. After a decade at the helm, Pandya stepped down as CEO at the end of 2023 to pursue future ventures, leaving behind a company that had fundamentally shifted the conversation around sustainable dairy.
Perfect Day is a Berkeley-based food-tech company that brews real dairy whey protein with microbes instead of cows. Using precision fermentation in steel tanks, it produces ProFerm - a beta-lactoglobulin identical to the protein in milk - and sells it as a B2B ingredient to food brands building animal-free ice cream, cream cheese, protein powders and beverages.
Trellis Group (formerly GreenBiz Group) is an Oakland-based media, events and peer-network company that has spent more than 25 years helping sustainability professionals turn climate ambition into corporate action. Its newsletters, research, and flagship events - GreenBiz, VERGE, Circularity, GreenFin and Bloom - convene the executives, investors and policymakers building the clean economy.
Factory OS is a Vallejo, California modular-housing manufacturer that builds wood-frame multifamily apartments inside a former Mare Island Navy shipyard. Co-founded in 2017 by affordable-housing veteran Rick Holliday and contractor Larry Pace, the company treats apartments like cars: rolling them down an assembly line with union labor, cutting build times by ~40% and costs by 20–40% compared with conventional construction.
WindBorne Systems is building a planetary nervous system for Earth's atmosphere. The Redwood City company operates a constellation of autonomous long-duration balloons that gather high-resolution atmospheric data from remote and ocean regions previously invisible to weather models - then feeds that data into WeatherMesh, its in-house AI forecasting model that has surpassed Google DeepMind's GraphCast as the world's most accurate medium-range global weather forecast. With backing from Khosla Ventures, the Gates Foundation, and U.S. military contracts, WindBorne is making a credible run at replacing century-old weather infrastructure.
James Wang is the General Partner of Creative Ventures, a San Francisco-based deep tech venture capital firm managing a $50M fund focused on AI, robotics, hardware, industrial automation, healthcare, agriculture, energy, and climate. With a background spanning Bridgewater Associates, Google X (Makani), co-founding the femtech startup Lioness Health, and a career in West African microfinance, Wang brings a rare combination of finance, engineering, and social-impact instincts to early-stage investing. He is also the author of 'What You Need to Know About AI' (2025) and publishes the 'Weighty Thoughts' Substack to over 3,000 subscribers.
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.
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.
Nathaniel Chu is the co-CEO and co-founder of Tezza Foods (now Plonts), an Oakland-based food company using ancient fermentation techniques and microbial science to make genuinely complex, stinky plant-based cheese from soy milk. Holding a PhD in microbiology from MIT and a BS from Brown University, Chu spent years studying gut microbiomes before pivoting to harness those same microbial principles in food. With $12M in seed funding led by Lowercarbon Capital, Plonts launched in August 2024 in New York City and San Francisco restaurants, offering a plant-based cheddar that actually ages, melts, and smells like the real thing.
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%.
Regina Clewlow is a transportation scientist turned CEO who co-founded Populus, the urban curb and mobility management platform that became the operating system for city streets - helping over 100 cities worldwide manage the explosive growth of scooters, bikes, delivery fleets, and autonomous vehicles. Armed with a PhD from MIT and deep research roots at Stanford and UC Berkeley, Clewlow bridged academia and industry to turn GPS data and curb regulations into digital intelligence for cities. Populus was acquired by IPS Group in November 2025, cementing its place as the infrastructure layer between cities and the mobility economy.
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.
Lesley Silverthorn Marincola is the founder and CEO of Angaza, a San Francisco-based B2B software company that powers pay-as-you-go financing for solar home systems and other off-grid products across emerging markets. A Stanford-trained product designer and mechanical engineer, she launched Angaza in 2010 after a course called 'Designing for Extreme Poverty' lit a fire she hasn't put out since. Today, Angaza's platform reaches over 5 million people across 50 countries, enabling low-income households to pay for life-changing energy products through weekly micropayments via mobile money — replacing kerosene lamps one $1 payment at a time. Her work earned Angaza the 2018 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and a TED stage appearance. She is a Forbes '30 Under 30' alum, Echoing Green Fellow, and World Economic Forum Young Global Shaper.
Lily Shen is the Founder and CEO of Dimension, a San Francisco-based technology platform transforming waste management with data-driven, full-service solutions. A Princeton and Harvard Kennedy School graduate, she previously held roles at Niantic (Pokemon Go), Opendoor, Deloitte, and the Federal Reserve. Dimension, formerly Trash Warrior, has raised $19.5M in funding and operates in ~300 US cities with a mission to raise the national recycling rate from 35% to 75%.
Graham Doorley is the Founder and CEO of Terraline, a Fremont-based startup building the first clean-sheet, battery-electric Class 8 long-haul truck with 500+ miles of range. A lifelong car enthusiast with a Physics-Materials Science degree from Carnegie Mellon and a Mechatronics Masters from Stanford, he spent eight years as a senior engineer at Google X and Waymo - where he led the early self-driving truck project that became Waymo Via - before designing Tesla Model S suspension systems. In 2021, he channeled that accumulated expertise into Terraline (originally Solo AVT), assembling a team of Waymo, Tesla, BMW, Ford, Faraday Futures, and Rivian alumni to tackle freight's massive emissions problem with a truck agnostic to whether the driver is human or autonomous.
John Mern is the Co-Founder and CEO of Terra AI, a Khosla Ventures-backed startup using generative AI and probabilistic modeling to transform how humans find and develop critical minerals and energy resources underground. A Stanford PhD in aerospace engineering and alumnus of Boeing Phantom Works and KoBold Metals, Mern built Terra AI's platform to cut mine development timelines in half - running geophysical simulations 125,000x faster than traditional methods, achieving 40% reductions in drilling costs, and helping partners unlock over $100 million in investments. His work sits at the intersection of deep reinforcement learning, geoscience, and the urgent global race to secure the copper, lithium, and cobalt the energy transition demands.
John Doerr is the Chairman of Kleiner Perkins and one of Silicon Valley's most consequential venture capitalists. The man who backed Google and Amazon with early checks, taught the world OKRs through his bestselling book 'Measure What Matters', and bet $1.1 billion on Stanford to build the Doerr School of Sustainability. A Rice-trained electrical engineer turned Intel salesman turned legendary VC, Doerr has spent 45+ years turning missionary founders into category-defining companies - and is now directing that same energy toward solving the climate crisis.
Dustin Moskovitz co-founded Facebook in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, then quietly built Asana into a billion-dollar project management company while giving away billions through Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving). The youngest self-made billionaire in the world when Forbes first named him in 2011, Moskovitz has spent the years since turning wealth into what he believes are the most high-impact charitable causes on Earth - from malaria nets to AI safety - alongside his wife Cari Tuna.
Nitin Pachisia is the Founding Partner of Unshackled Ventures, the only early-stage VC firm in the U.S. exclusively focused on immigrant founders. Born in India and having navigated the U.S. immigration system himself, he co-founded Unshackled in 2014 with Manan Mehta to solve a problem he lived: talented immigrant entrepreneurs trapped by visa rules that punished risk-taking. Unshackled's model is unlike any other fund - it directly employs founders as their visa sponsor, enabling them to legally leave corporate jobs and build startups. Across three funds totaling $55M+, he has backed 80+ companies whose founders come from 35+ countries, helped create 1,100+ jobs, and maintained a 100% success rate on immigration filings.
Kanyi Maqubela is a South African-born venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and thinker who grew up as a refugee in the United States - from homeless shelter in New York City to Phillips Academy and Stanford - and built a career as Managing Partner of Kindred Ventures, a $156M+ AUM seed-stage firm he co-founded with Steve Jang in San Francisco. With a portfolio market cap exceeding $200B (including early bets on Uber, Coinbase, Reddit, and Upstart), Kanyi also co-founded Heartbeat Health, the largest virtual heart health platform in the US. He bridges philosophy, social impact, and frontier technology with a writer's eye and a founder's instinct.