Daniel Sobek is the co-founder and CEO of 1s1 Energy, a Portola Valley startup turning a chunk of boron chemistry into cheaper, cleaner green hydrogen. An MIT-trained engineer with three degrees from the institute and a habit of starting companies, he spent years in microfluidics and cancer-imaging hardware before betting on electrolyzers. His company's boron-based membranes claim to cut the energy needed to make hydrogen by about 30 percent, and he says they already hit a U.S. Department of Energy efficiency target set for 2031.
Eric Januar is a co-founder and CEO of BANIQL, a Silicon Valley deep-tech startup reinventing how the world pulls nickel and cobalt out of the ground for electric-vehicle batteries. With 12 years in electronics, battery and semiconductor R&D - including a stint at Merck and a prior startup exit - he helped build BEST (the Baniql Extraction SysTem), a low-temperature, low-pressure process that the company says cuts electricity use by roughly 98 percent and reaches 99.7 percent nickel sulfate purity with net-zero toxic waste. BANIQL closed a US$1.6M seed round in 2024 and completed a 100 kg/month pre-pilot plant by year-end.
Eric McShane is the co-founder and CEO of Electroflow Technologies, a San Bruno startup turning dilute saltwater brines into battery-ready lithium with an electrochemical process that collapses a ten-step mining chain into three. A UC Berkeley PhD and former Stanford postdoc, he is betting that the missing ingredient for cheap American batteries (LFP, which is 99% made in China) can be made domestically for 40% less. Electroflow has raised about $13 million from Union Square Ventures, Voyager Ventures and Breakthrough Energy, and reports lithium recovery rates near 96% versus the 40-60% typical of evaporation ponds.
Lukas Hackl is the co-founder and CEO of Aepnus Technology, an Emeryville, California startup building electrolyzers that turn sodium sulfate waste - a salty byproduct piling up across the EV battery supply chain - back into the sulfuric acid and caustic soda that battery makers have to buy. The technology grew out of his UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory PhD work on electrochemical water desalination. After hearing the same waste complaint on road trips from California to Canada, he and co-founder Bilen Akuzum turned a laboratory curiosity into a company that emerged from stealth in 2024 with $8 million in seed funding led by Clean Energy Ventures.
Ranulfo (Randy) Allen is the co-founder and CEO of Still Bright, a New Jersey deep-tech startup using a vanadium-based electrochemical process to pull refined copper out of ore - and out of mine waste - at room temperature and pressure, no smelter required. A Princeton-trained chemical engineer with a Stanford PhD and a Dartmouth MBA, Allen spent years on the other side of the table as a venture investor and startup mentor before deciding to build the thing himself. Still Bright raised an $18.7M seed in 2025 led by Material Impact and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, betting that the looming copper shortage is solvable if you stop burning rock and start running electricity through it.
Ryan DuChanois is the co-founder and CEO of Solidec, a Houston climate-tech startup that spun out of Rice University in 2024. Solidec builds modular reactors that pull molecules from air and water and, using only electricity, make industrial chemicals like hydrogen peroxide on-site - no centralized plants, no long supply chains, no carbon-heavy inputs. A Gates Cambridge Scholar with a Yale PhD and 20 peer-reviewed papers in membrane science, DuChanois traded the academic bench for the factory floor, aiming to abate over a gigaton of carbon emissions a year by reinventing how the world's chemicals are made.
Dioxycle is a French-American climate-tech company building a low-temperature electrolyzer that turns waste CO2, water, and renewable electricity into sustainable ethylene - the world's most-used organic chemical - at a cost competitive with fossil-derived ethylene. Founded in 2021 by electrochemists Sarah Lamaison and David Wakerley, it aims to electrify chemical manufacturing and recycle industrial carbon emissions at gigaton scale.
Eugene Beh is the founder and CEO of Quino Energy, a clean-tech startup commercializing water-based redox flow batteries that store grid-scale renewable energy using quinones - organic molecules dissolved in water. A chemist trained at Harvard and Stanford, he spun the technology out of Harvard's Aziz and Gordon labs and built a single-step, zero-waste manufacturing process that turns coal-tar feedstock into non-flammable battery electrolyte. Before Quino, he was Xerox PARC's most prolific inventor two years running.
Nicholas Flanders is the Co-Founder and CEO of Twelve, a carbon transformation company that converts CO2, water, and renewable electricity into sustainable aviation fuel and carbon-neutral chemicals. A Stanford MBA and former McKinsey consultant, Flanders co-founded Twelve (originally Opus 12) in 2015 alongside scientists Dr. Etosha Cave and Dr. Kendra Kuhl to commercialize breakthrough electrochemical CO2 conversion technology developed at Stanford. The company has raised over $790 million, including a $645 million financing round in 2024 led by TPG Rise Climate, and is building AirPlant One - the world's first commercial-scale e-fuels facility - in Moses Lake, Washington.
Twelve is a carbon transformation company that uses an electrochemical reactor to turn captured CO2, water, and renewable electricity into the same chemicals and fuels usually drilled out of the ground - including E-Jet, a drop-in sustainable aviation fuel. Founded by Stanford-trained electrochemists, it is building the first industrial-scale CO2 electrolyzer plant in Moses Lake, Washington.
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.