Sudip Mukhopadhyay is the CEO and co-founder of AirMyne, a Berkeley-based climate-tech company building liquid-solvent Direct Air Capture (DAC) machines that pull carbon dioxide straight out of the sky. A chemist and engineer with more than two decades in industrial R&D, he co-invented the low-global-warming car refrigerant 1234yf during a 16-year run at Honeywell, where he rose from engineer to corporate fellow and director of innovation. He launched AirMyne in 2022 with co-founder Mark Cyffka through Y Combinator, raising $6.9M in seed funding and a strategic investment from Japanese energy giant ENEOS, with the bet that cheap low-temperature heat (including geothermal) can make carbon removal affordable at industrial scale.
Heirloom Carbon Technologies is a San Francisco-based direct air capture company that uses limestone's natural CO2-absorbing properties to pull carbon dioxide permanently out of the atmosphere. Their process accelerates a geological phenomenon that normally takes thousands of years into a 3-day cycle: calcium oxide powder absorbs CO2 from ambient air, becomes limestone, gets heated in a renewable-energy-powered electric kiln to release the captured CO2, and repeats. The captured CO2 is then stored permanently underground or embedded in concrete. Founded in 2020, Heirloom opened America's first commercial DAC facility in Tracy, California in November 2023 and has raised over $354 million to expand capacity toward their goal of removing 1 billion tons of CO2 by 2035.
Omni Design Technologies builds high-performance, ultra-low-power semiconductor IP - the data converters and mixed-signal blocks that move information between the analog and digital worlds. Its Swift family of ADCs, DACs and analog front-ends sits inside SoCs for AI infrastructure, 5G/6G, Wi-Fi 7, automotive lidar/radar, satellite links, and quantum control, fabricated on processes from 28nm down to advanced FinFET nodes.
Spiritus is a climate-tech company building passive Direct Air Capture (DAC) systems - stacked trays of sorbent pellets arranged in modular 'Carbon Orchards' - that aim to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere for under $100 per ton, roughly a tenfold cost reduction over conventional DAC.
Charles Cadieu is a serial entrepreneur and computational neuroscientist-turned-climate-tech founder. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Spiritus, a direct air capture company aiming to slash the cost of carbon removal to $100 per ton - down from the current $600-$1,000 industry standard. Before Spiritus, Cadieu founded Caption Health (AI-guided cardiac ultrasound, acquired by GE HealthCare in 2023) and IQ Engines (AI image recognition, acquired by Yahoo!/Flickr in 2013). Holding a PhD from UC Berkeley and degrees from MIT, he bridges deep academic roots in neural networks with a track record of building and exiting companies that redefine their industries.
Kush Gulati is the Co-founder, President, and CEO of Omni Design Technologies, a Milpitas-based semiconductor IP company he founded in 2015. A serial entrepreneur on his fifth venture, he holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and has spent over two decades pioneering ultra-low power analog circuit design. His proprietary SWIFT technology powers data conversion IP used in 5G, autonomous vehicles, AI infrastructure, satellite communications, and LiDAR applications by tier-one customers worldwide. Omni Design raised a $35M+ Series A in September 2025.