global-south
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Kurt Tsuo
Kurt Tsuo is the Chief Business Officer of Varaha, a Gurugram-based carbon removal company building high-integrity credits with smallholder farmers across Asia and Africa. A Harvard-trained economist who spent seven years in agriculture before it was a climate headline, he has built business lines at the Gates Foundation, Farmer's Business Network, ProducePay, and Breakthrough Energy, and co-founded the carbon storage startup Graphyte. His through-line is unglamorous and stubborn: make the economics of fixing carbon work for the people who actually grow food.
Varaha
Varaha is an India-based climate-tech company that builds high-integrity carbon removal projects in the Global South. Working with roughly 170,000 smallholder farmers across about 1.7 million acres, it generates verified carbon credits through four pathways - regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, biochar, and enhanced rock weathering - and quantifies the results with a measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) platform powered by remote sensing, machine learning and field science. Its credits are bought by buyers like Google, Microsoft, Lufthansa and Swiss Re.
Sheba Najmi
Sheba Najmi is a Stanford-trained UX leader, civic technologist, and founder of Code for Pakistan — the country's first civic tech nonprofit. Over two decades she has shaped digital products for hundreds of millions of users (Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn, FreeWill) while simultaneously running a parallel mission: using open-source technology to make Pakistani government services work for ordinary people. Her work has served 2.1 million citizens, trained 600 government officials, and opened 6,000 public datasets. In 2024 she received the HUM Women Leaders Award for her contributions to civic innovation in Pakistan.