Barclay Rogers is the co-founder and CEO of Graphyte, a carbon removal company that turns waste biomass into dense, dehydrated carbon blocks and buries them to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere for over a thousand years. A former environmental lawyer and mechanical engineer turned multi-time agtech and climate founder, he built Graphyte's 'Carbon Casting' process to deliver durable carbon removal at under $100 a ton, an order of magnitude cheaper than direct air capture. The company is backed by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures and runs its first commercial plant in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Rogers also teaches a climate change solutions course as an adjunct professor of law at Tulane University.
Ethan Cohen-Cole is the CEO and Co-Founder of Capture6, a Berkeley-based climate technology Public Benefit Corporation that has cracked one of cleantech's most stubborn puzzles: making carbon removal pay for itself. By integrating direct air capture with desalination brine management, Capture6 turns the costly waste stream of water treatment into a revenue engine - producing fresh water, green chemicals, and permanent CO2 sequestration simultaneously. Before pivoting to climate tech, Cohen-Cole spent 25+ years as a PhD economist, Federal Reserve bank regulator, and finance professor, giving him an unusually rigorous lens on the economics of decarbonization. Capture6 raised a $27.5M Series A in March 2025, backed by Hyundai's ZER01NE Ventures and Tetrad Corporation, bringing total funding to nearly $49M.