climate-finance
(7)
He Shrunk His Agency to Finance a Bigger Idea: Can BlueDot Project Make Regeneration Investable?
Eduardo Esparza left the comfortable agency script for a stranger assignment: make whole communities, watersheds and living systems legible to capital without flattening what makes them alive. BlueDot Project is the small firm testing whether that bridge can carry real weight.
Mast Reforestation Learned Planting Trees Wasn’t the Hard Part - Financing the Forest Was
Mast began with a fleet of seed-firing drones. Then it discovered the expensive truth: after a megafire, the real bottlenecks are native seed, nursery space, dead wood and patient capital - so it bought the supply chain and buried the business model underground.
The Climate Investor With an Unfair Advantage: Its Customers Are Already in the Room
Energy Impact Partners built a venture firm around a stubborn fact: energy startups do not scale on capital alone. Its coalition model puts the utilities and industrial companies that might buy, test and deploy new technology inside the investment platform.
Pathzero
Pathzero is a Sydney-based climate-tech company that builds a unified software platform for financial institutions to measure, share and disclose carbon emissions across public and private markets. Its data-sharing network connects asset owners with more than 500 fund managers, giving investors direct-from-source, audit-ready emissions data where information has historically been hardest to obtain - private markets. Founded in 2020 inside the Antler incubator, Pathzero has grown into what it describes as the world's largest private-markets carbon emissions data network.
Varaha
Varaha is an India-based climate-tech company that builds high-integrity carbon removal projects in the Global South. Working with roughly 170,000 smallholder farmers across about 1.7 million acres, it generates verified carbon credits through four pathways - regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, biochar, and enhanced rock weathering - and quantifies the results with a measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) platform powered by remote sensing, machine learning and field science. Its credits are bought by buyers like Google, Microsoft, Lufthansa and Swiss Re.
Eric Faurot
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.
Troy Carter
Troy Carter is the CEO and Co-Founder of Earthshot Labs, a Sebastopol, California-based climate tech company that uses AI-driven ecological modeling, satellite data, and geospatial analysis to develop, finance, and verify nature-based carbon projects at planetary scale. Before founding Earthshot in 2020, Carter co-founded RIZOME, a bamboo building materials company, and was an early employee at Airbnb. Raised on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands and educated at Stanford, he brings a rare combination of entrepreneurial grit and ecological urgency to the carbon markets, with Earthshot managing 50+ client projects across more than one million hectares and directing $55M+ in project financing.