climate
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The 9,000-Person Firm That Runs the Government's Least Glamorous Machinery
It started in 1969 as a fund for inner-city businesses. Today ICF models the power grid, rebuilds towns after storms, and quietly runs some of the federal programs you have never heard of.
Mango Materials
Mango Materials is a biomanufacturing company that converts waste methane - the same gas that vents from landfills and wastewater plants - into biodegradable polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) pellets sold under the YOPP brand. The pellets replace conventional plastics in fibers, films, rigid goods, and 3D-printing feedstock, and they fully biodegrade in soil, freshwater, and marine environments.
Tenet - EV Financing
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.
Muon Space
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.
Perfect Day
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
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
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
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.