Jess Adkins is a Caltech chemical oceanographer turned founder-CEO of Calcarea, a climate-tech startup that bolts a limestone-and-seawater reactor onto cargo ships to scrub up to half their CO2 and lock it away as ocean bicarbonate. After two decades studying how the deep ocean naturally buffers carbon, he spun his lab science out of the garage during COVID to attack shipping's gigatonne-a-year emissions problem at a fraction of the cost of atmospheric capture.
Caleb Kruse is Chief of Staff at Midjourney, the AI image-generation company, where he helps ship product updates and runs the engine room. Before generative AI, he pointed machine learning at the planet itself: at Earthrise Media he led the technical builds of Global Plastic Watch and Amazon Mining Watch, using satellite data to spot ocean-bound plastic and illegal gold mining in near real time. He studied oceanography at Stanford, led the machine learning teams at Leap Motion, and is a National Geographic Explorer who once drove an ice cream truck 8,600 miles across America to hand out 13,000 scoops and talk to kids about conservation.