climate-resilience
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The Firm Behind the People Behind the Policy
Freedman Consulting sells something Washington rarely puts on an invoice: the patient work of getting foundations, governments, and advocates to move in the same direction.
The Consulting Firm That Turned a Stormwater Tax Into a Day at the Park
Shockey Consulting sells something city halls badly need and cannot manufacture on command: a credible conversation. Its best work begins where the engineering ends and the public questions start.
The Small-Town Money Machine Hidden in a Clifton Office
Bruno Associates sells something local government rarely has enough of: time to hunt, write, win and manage grants. The payoff shows up as fire gear, safer streets, cleaner buses and projects that might otherwise wait years.
Civic Edge Consulting and the art of making government make sense
A dozen program names can leave a resident wondering what to do. Civic Edge helps public agencies turn institutional complexity into clear messages, useful conversations, and events people can actually navigate.
Miller Center Knows a Better Pitch Won’t Pay for 500 Freezers
At Santa Clara University, Miller Center pairs social entrepreneurs with executive mentors, then helps bridge the gap between a workable business and money to grow. Its next test is making that support last beyond graduation.
The One-Truck Bet That Taught 40,000 Canadian Lawns to Survive Summer
Green Drop started with a newspaper ad, one truck and a phone that would not stop ringing. Forty-seven years later, its most useful lesson is still the same: sell relief from uncertainty, not a bag of fertilizer.
Intact Built a $25 Billion Insurance Machine - Then Sent It Toward the Fire
Canada's largest property and casualty insurer grew by treating insurance as an operating system: price risk better, control more of the repair, and buy only what the machine can improve. The catch is that climate volatility keeps stress-testing every advantage it has built.
The Grid Failed. Adaptive Insurance Paid in Days.
Most insurance waits for proof of loss. This Austin startup watches for the event itself - then turns a dark grid, a flooded home or a brutal deductible into a faster, prearranged path to cash.
Acumen Made Patience an Investment Strategy
For 25 years, Acumen has financed the awkward stretch between a promising idea and a market that works - pairing risk-tolerant capital with leaders willing to build for communities most investors overlook.
Agros
Agros is a Singapore-based agtech company that helps smallholder fruit and vegetable farmers across Southeast Asia switch from diesel to solar-powered irrigation. It bundles hardware (its Agrosolar water pumps), flexible post-harvest financing (Agros Finance), and agronomy advisory into a one-stop platform, aiming to double farmer incomes while cutting fuel costs and carbon emissions. Founded in 2019 by Max Nelen, it operates in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Indonesia and has supported over 6,000 farmers.
Near Space Labs
Near Space Labs is a Brooklyn-based earth-imaging company that flies small autonomous robots called Swift into the stratosphere on helium balloons to capture 7-centimeter-resolution imagery of the ground below. Founded in 2017, it delivers frequent, analysis-ready aerial data to property and casualty insurers, governments, utilities and environmental groups at a fraction of the cost of traditional planes or satellites, positioning balloon-borne imaging as a scalable, low-emission alternative for monitoring cities, infrastructure and disasters.
Arable
Arable is a San Francisco-based agricultural technology company that builds solar-powered, in-field IoT sensors and a cloud analytics platform to give growers real-time crop intelligence. Its flagship Arable Mark device measures more than 40 weather, plant, soil and irrigation metrics from above the crop canopy, and machine-learning models turn that data into decisions on irrigation, crop stress and yield. Deployed across roughly 19 countries, six continents and more than 20 crop types, Arable serves customers from Driscoll's and Treasury Wine Estates to Valley Irrigation.
ClimateAi
ClimateAi is a San Francisco-based climate-tech company that builds an AI-powered climate resilience platform. Founded at Stanford in 2017 by Himanshu Gupta and Max Evans, its ClimateLens platform combines patented machine-learning models with physics-based climate and weather data to forecast risk from weeks to decades ahead. Food, agriculture, and water-dependent companies - including Dole, Suntory, Oatly and McCain - use it to protect sourcing, planting, and procurement decisions against a more volatile climate.
Terranova
Terranova is a Berkeley-born climate-tech and robotics startup building car-sized autonomous robots that inject a wood-waste slurry deep underground to lift flood-prone land out of harm's way - no seawalls, no surface disruption. A single 'mothership' coordinating three injection rovers can raise about one acre by one foot per day, while the buried biomass becomes a durable carbon sink that can be sold as carbon credits. Founded by UC Berkeley mechanical engineer Laurence Allen to save his hometown of San Rafael, California, the company raised a $7M seed round in November 2025 and plans its first San Rafael pilots in 2026.
Verdi
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.