direct-air-capture
(8)
Andrew Jones
Andrew Jones is the co-founder and CEO of Carba, a Minneapolis-based carbon-removal startup that turns waste biomass into a durable, charcoal-like biocarbon and buries it to lock away CO2 for more than 1,000 years. A chemical engineer with a PhD from UC Berkeley, Jones invented Carba's patented low-energy pyrolysis and storage process and describes the work as 'reversing the coal mining process.' He previously founded and exited Activated Research Company, and has steered Carba from a 2021 lab idea to a working molten-salt reactor at a Burnsville landfill, a multi-year carbon-credit deal with Microsoft, and a goal of removing a gigaton of CO2 a year.
Sudip Mukhopadhyay
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.
Joshuah Stolaroff
Joshuah Stolaroff is the co-founder and CEO of Mote, a Los Angeles clean energy company turning woody waste into renewable hydrogen while permanently burying the carbon. A Carnegie Mellon-trained engineer who built one of the first working prototypes for pulling CO2 straight out of the air, he spent eleven years running the carbon capture program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before co-authoring 'Getting to Neutral,' the report that launched the Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage (BiCRS) approach now at the heart of Mote. His aim is blunt: reduce and remove a billion tons of carbon by 2035.
Shashank Samala
Shashank Samala is the CEO and Co-Founder of Heirloom, the company operating America's first commercial direct air capture facility. A serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Tempo Automation (raising $100M+ for aerospace-grade electronics manufacturing), he pivoted to carbon removal after a stint as Entrepreneur in Residence at Carbon180. At Heirloom, he's building limestone-based DAC technology to remove one billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2035, targeting a cost of $50 per ton. The company has raised $354M total, including a $150M Series B in December 2024, and is building two new DAC facilities in Louisiana with combined annual capacity of nearly 320,000 tons.
Zack Bloom
Zack Bloom is a co-founder of Heirloom Carbon Technologies, the company behind America's first commercial direct air capture facility in Tracy, California. A software engineer turned climate entrepreneur, Bloom previously co-founded Eager - a cloud app marketplace acquired by Cloudflare in 2016 - and served as Director of Product at Cloudflare overseeing Workers, Storage, and Tunnel. In 2020, he pivoted from internet infrastructure to atmospheric infrastructure, co-founding Heirloom alongside Shashank Samala and Noah McQueen. The company has since raised over $354M in total funding, opened its first facility, and secured contracts with Microsoft, Stripe, Shopify, Meta, and JPMorgan.
Darren Bonnstetter
Darren Bonnstetter is the CEO of Conexiom, a Vancouver-based AI-native platform automating sales order processing for manufacturers and distributors. Appointed in August 2025, he brings a rare blend of mechanical engineering rigor (Iowa State, Stanford MS, Harvard MBA), turnaround consulting at AlixPartners, and climate-tech entrepreneurship - having co-founded and led 280 Earth, a Google X spinout that raised $50M to capture carbon using industrial waste heat. At Conexiom, he leads a 210-person company serving 16 of the top 20 distributors globally, with $170M in total funding backed by Warburg Pincus, Luminate Capital Partners, and ICONIQ Capital.
Ethan Cohen-Cole
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.
Charles Cadieu
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.