Bryce Jones is the CEO and co-founder of Flash Forest, a Toronto-based cleantech startup that uses autonomous drones, AI, GIS mapping and biodegradable seed pods to replant forests faster and more cheaply than traditional hand-planting. A former tree planter and biology graduate from British Columbia, Jones launched Flash Forest in 2019 after seeing how far reforestation methods lagged behind industrial logging technology. The company's stated goal is to plant one billion trees by 2028, with a focus on land that is unsafe or uneconomical for human crews, including post-wildfire terrain.
Maggie McCullough is the CEO and founder of PolicyMap, the Philadelphia-based mapping and data-visualization platform she launched in 2008. A former White House budget-office staffer turned housing researcher, she built PolicyMap after struggling to fit maps and data into her own policy work, betting that anyone should be able to make a map as easily as they shop online. The platform now serves universities, banks, health systems, nonprofits and governments, layering thousands of public and proprietary datasets into one searchable map. In December 2023 the company closed a $3 million Series A led by its former parent, the Reinvestment Fund.
Neno Duplan is the founder and CEO of Locus Technologies, a Mountain View-based company he bootstrapped in 1997 to become one of the world's first cloud-based environmental, health, and safety (EHS) software providers. Born in Croatia and trained as a civil engineer, Duplan earned his Ph.D. at the University of Zagreb, an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon, and advanced management training at Stanford. He pioneered the commercial SaaS model for environmental data management - deploying the world's first such product in 1999 - and has spent nearly three decades helping governments, utilities, and corporations track, manage, and report their environmental footprints. With more than 30 technical papers published, 11,000+ active users, and a 98% customer renewal rate, Duplan has built Locus into a durable, self-funded software company at the intersection of environmental science and enterprise technology.