Will Greene found a climate problem that could fit inside an inbox. Renewable energy projects needed money, and the people arranging that money were working through spreadsheets, emails, and documents. A solar project might be new. The machinery used to finance it could feel decidedly secondhand. Greene helped build Banyan Infrastructure around the possibility that better software could make that work less laborious.
There is a particular kind of patience involved in choosing this problem. The paperwork behind an investment rarely appears in the photograph when the project opens. Nobody gathers around a completed compliance report with a ceremonial pair of scissors. Yet the reports, checks, approvals, and exchanges between institutions help determine whether the project ever reaches its opening day. Greene’s work at Banyan concerned that interval between intention and construction.
His career has since moved to another part of the process. He is now founder and CEO of CoreGrid Power, which connects requirements, suppliers, decisions, and delivery for critical-power projects. The connection between the two companies suggests a recurring interest: finding where a project gets stuck, then giving the people responsible a more usable way to move it along.
A software career meets a financing desk
Greene arrived at infrastructure finance with a background in enterprise technology. He had worked in engineering at Oracle and Twilio. Banyan’s 2020 investor presentation also listed experience at Revel Systems and Krux, alongside an engineering degree from Rice. The presentation described more than two decades spent developing enterprise product strategies, building teams, and working across startups.
That experience met a different sort of knowledge in Amanda Li. She had worked at Generate Capital, where sustainable infrastructure investment meant dealing with the administrative reality of projects. Her account of that work included moving information between documents, email, presentations, and spreadsheets. She had also worked on digital transformations for banks at McKinsey. Automation existed elsewhere in finance; project finance was a less well-served corner.
Banyan, founded in 2018, brought those experiences together. Greene understood the construction of enterprise software. Li understood the work that the software needed to support. Their partnership gave the company a problem with identifiable users and recurring tasks. The opportunity lay in making the working day of a financier, developer, or portfolio manager less dependent on rebuilding the same processes.
The founding partnership is also a useful corrective to the solitary-founder portrait. Banyan’s central proposition depended on understanding both the technology and the investment process. A programmer can organize information elegantly and still miss the obligation that matters to a lender. A financier can recognize an inefficient workflow and still need someone who knows how to build a product around it. The work required both perspectives.
The small-project penalty
Greene’s explanation of the market began with a mismatch in scale. Traditional infrastructure finance could involve very large investments. Renewable infrastructure often meant smaller projects distributed across more places. The financing work did not become proportionately simple just because the project became smaller. Time spent closing and managing an investment could therefore weigh more heavily on the economics.
He made that argument while Banyan raised its Series A in 2022. The company announced $8.2 million in funding. Greene described projects becoming smaller and cheaper while the cost and complexity of lending and investment remained stubborn. The observation gave Banyan a concrete purpose: help institutions manage growing pipelines and portfolios without letting administrative work grow at the same pace.
A spreadsheet is an accommodating invention. It will accept an investment model, a task list, and a reminder to buy lunch with equal dignity. That flexibility has limits when several organizations need to coordinate obligations over the life of a financing arrangement. Each party needs to understand the information, its meaning, and what action follows from it.
Banyan’s approach included digitized workflows, automated data collection, risk monitoring, and contractual compliance. These were tools for work already taking place. The company’s proposition was that performing it more efficiently would help capital reach more projects. The ambition was large; the individual tasks could be wonderfully ordinary.
Shared workflows across a deal’s life. A conceptual illustration, not a measured performance comparison.
Twenty-five million dollars for the work between deals
In March 2023, Banyan announced a $25 million Series B led by Energize Ventures. SE Ventures and Elemental Excelerator joined the round alongside existing investors VoLo Earth Ventures and Ulu Ventures. The company had joined Elemental’s eleventh cohort the previous year. Its work was finding supporters among investors interested in the practical conditions for deploying sustainable infrastructure.
Energize described annual recurring revenue growth of 700 percent since 2022. That was a historical investor-reported figure, tied to a young company and its growth at the time. It belongs beside the funding announcement as evidence of momentum, rather than as a permanent description of the business. A percentage can be vivid without telling the whole story.
Series B led by Energize Ventures, raised during Greene’s tenure as CEO.
Greene’s plans for the money were specific. Banyan had 28 people and expected to more than double its headcount over the following year. Product, engineering, customer success, sales, and other commercial roles were in the hiring picture. These were plans announced at the time, not a retrospective count of positions filled. They show where he expected the next stage of work to happen.
Enterprise software has to survive contact with an actual organization. A financing team needs to adopt it, trust the information it holds, and fit it into existing responsibilities. The customer success and commercial hires therefore belonged to the product’s practical future as much as the engineering hires did. Building the system and getting institutions to use it were connected jobs.
A common language, and a thousand hours
By January 2024, Greene was discussing another layer of the problem: how different participants could understand each other’s data. On the Watts Up podcast, he explored the need for shared definitions and frameworks in project finance. Better information could help developers explain a project’s risk and help financiers evaluate it. Coordination depended on more than putting documents in one place.
“One of the reasons that we haven't deployed enough sustainable infrastructure today is that it's not sufficiently rewarding.”Will Greene · Watts Up conversation, January 2024
The remark puts financial incentives inside his account of climate deployment. Investors need a workable relationship between risk, cost, and return. Better data can support that evaluation. Common frameworks can also help unfamiliar technologies establish a record over time. His argument connects the quality of information with the willingness of institutions to finance a project.
Greene recalled one early customer saving more than 1,000 hours in its first year using Banyan. He said the time savings helped the customer recover the software’s cost within months. It was a particular customer experience, told by the founder, and its value lies in that specificity. Hours saved are a measure a working team can recognize.
There is a human consequence to that number. Experienced people spend their day making judgments, checking information, and meeting obligations. If the repeated preparation takes less time, the next decision has more room. Greene’s software argument is persuasive at this scale: the calendar of a team trying to get useful work finished.
The bank is part of the story
In May 2024, Banyan, Elemental Excelerator, and the Milken Institute announced a partnership to support green banks and community lenders preparing for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The announcement concerned capacity as well as capital: institutions needed systems and shared practices for a growing pipeline. Greene described a connected ecosystem for deploying and recycling investment.
The effort included an emphasis on underserved communities. That gives the administrative question another dimension. A community lender’s ability to manage information and obligations affects how readily it can participate in a larger financing network. The collaboration aimed to supply a platform and industry practices that could support that participation. It was a program-specific effort announced in 2024.
Further partnerships followed during Greene’s CEO tenure. In April 2025, Climate First Bank and Banyan announced work to streamline renewable infrastructure financing. In June, Banyan announced a partnership with the Coalition for Green Capital. The first announcement emphasized transaction workflows and standardized reporting; the second emphasized reporting and coordination across a lending network.
These relationships place Greene’s work among banks, developers, investors, and organizations connecting them. They also explain why a useful software product in this setting has to reach beyond one employee’s screen. Information has to travel between parties. Its usefulness depends on what the next person can do with it.
Following the bottleneck
Outside the financing discussion, Greene has offered a few lighter details. In 2023, he described weekends surfing with his children, along with climbing, hiking, parkour, and an enthusiasm for food. He was interested in cultivated alternatives to meat and fish, and less interested in off-planet colonization than in making Earth habitable. His preferred reading included the Climate Finance Tracker.
He also recalled that his first manager was Marc Benioff. He had not kept in touch. It is a pleasingly unpolished career anecdote: the famous connection recognized in hindsight, rather than carefully maintained for a future biography.
In September 2025, Greene announced a new chapter after building Banyan. He expressed pride in the team and partnerships and an interest in continuing at the intersection of climate, capital, and technology. Building, advising, and investing were among the possibilities he named. His language left the next form of that work open.
The current chapter has a name. The Energy Tech Summit advisory board lists Greene as founder and CEO of CoreGrid Power. The company describes tools for seeing what is ready, what is blocked, and what needs to happen next across critical-power engineering, equipment, suppliers, and delivery. Financing had occupied one part of a project’s journey. Procurement and execution occupy another.
The continuity is an editorial reading of his career, but a concrete one. Both settings involve projects, several organizations, and information that needs to become a decision. Greene’s work follows the gap between having an intention and completing the next required step. A funded project still needs its equipment. An equipment order still needs to arrive. Somewhere in that chain, a person needs a clear answer about what happens next.