climate-change
(5)
Francisco Martin-Rayo
Francisco Martin-Rayo is the co-founder and CEO of Helios AI, a climate-risk and commodity-price platform that helps agri-food companies see supply shocks before they hit. A former Mexican-avocado trader who became a BCG principal and AI-fintech executive, he teamed up with ex-Google engineer Eden Canlilar in late 2022 to build an AI that scrapes 250,000 news sources every 15 minutes, runs custom models for dozens of crops, and tells procurement teams when, how much, and where to buy across roughly 90 countries.
Maen Mahfoud
Maen Mahfoud is the founder and CEO of Replate, a technology-driven food rescue organization he started in 2016 while studying molecular biology at UC Berkeley. Raised in Syria, where his mother sent him out on his bike to deliver the family's surplus lunch to neighbors in need, he came to California to study medicine and instead built a logistics-and-software platform that dispatches drivers to collect leftover food from businesses and route it to nonprofits. Replate has recovered millions of pounds of surplus food, served hundreds of community organizations, and counts Netflix, Walmart, Amazon, Chipotle, and Slack among its corporate donors. He is a 2023 James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award recipient and a DRK entrepreneur.
Bret Kugelmass
Bret Kugelmass is the founder and CEO of Last Energy, an Austin-based company building factory-made 20-megawatt nuclear power plants designed to be shipped, assembled, and switched on like industrial equipment rather than built on-site like cathedrals. A Stanford-trained roboticist who once helped build a lunar rover control device at NASA, he sold a drone startup, then interviewed more than 800 nuclear experts on his Titans of Nuclear podcast before concluding that the technology was never the problem - the cost of slow, custom construction was. Last Energy has raised about $164 million, closing an oversubscribed $100 million Series C in December 2025, and is racing to plug a pilot reactor into the Texas A&M-RELLIS grid by mid-2026.
Gonzalo Fuenzalida-Meriz
Gonzalo Fuenzalida-Meriz is a Chilean-born entrepreneur and CEO & Co-Founder of Andes, a California-based climate tech company that deploys beneficial soil microbes via seed coatings to permanently lock atmospheric CO2 into soil minerals. A former investment banker turned biotech founder, he led development of the world's first Microbial Carbon Mineralization (MCM) Methodology — validated under ISO 14064 — and has raised $41M+ to scale a platform that simultaneously improves farm yields and generates durable carbon credits.
Leonard Adler
Leonard Adler is the founder and CEO of Green Jobs Network, a San Francisco-based social enterprise he launched in 2008 to connect job seekers with careers in sustainability, conservation, and clean energy. A Stanford-educated political scientist who went on to earn a J.D. from Georgetown Law and an MPP from Harvard's Kennedy School, Adler parlayed his early work in public-interest law and poverty research into building one of the internet's most active communities dedicated to green and climate careers. Under his leadership, Green Jobs Network has grown to run the largest LinkedIn group focused exclusively on green jobs—135,000+ members worldwide—while publishing a newsletter with more than 100,000 subscribers, hosting the Green Jobs Pod, and launching ClimateJobs.AI, an AI-powered career coaching platform. An Echoing Green Global Fellow and serial social entrepreneur, Adler has spoken at Stanford, the Commonwealth Club's Climate One, the National Career Development Association, and the Green Festivals, making him one of the most visible connectors in the climate workforce ecosystem.