Built for Earth

Ammobia is enabling low cost clean ammonia production through their Haber-Bosch 2.0 technology - a low-capex, flexible ammonia production process. Karen Baert founded Ammobia in 2022 during her time at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Previously, she spent time with Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the GSB Impact Fund, Bain Consulting, and multiple climate tech startups include Germany-based e...

TS Conductor is tackling one of the biggest challenges associated with the energy transition: modernizing the grid. TS has developed a novel high-performance conductor that can increase the amount of current carried on transmission lines by up to 3x, leading to a 40% reduction in line energy losses. Jason Huang is CEO of TS Conductor. Before starting TS Conductor in 2018, Jason worked with U.S. go...

Nium is using novel nanotechnology to decarbonize and decentralize the most polluting chemical industrial process on the planet: ammonia production. Lewis Jenkins is co-founder and CEO of Nium. He is a serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in launching and scaling businesses across more than 20 countries. In 2022, he joined Carbon 13, the venture builder for the climate emergency in...

Protect Our Winters (POW) is one of the world's largest communities of outdoor enthusiasts including professional athletes, scientists, and creatives, who all leverage their love for the outdoors to drive climate action.  Erin Sprague is CEO of Protect Our Winters. She has previously led major divisions at various outdoor fitness companies, started her own non-profit called In the Running, and...

Copper is developing battery-equipped appliances, where a battery and an appliance are coupled into one. Copper just released, Charlie, the world's first energy storage equipped induction range. Sam Calisch is co-founder and CEO of Copper. Previously, Sam helped start Rewiring America, a nonprofit focused on electrification, where he was the head of Special Projects. He is a MIT PhD, a former...

Quilt is building a smaller, smarter, more efficient, and more beautiful heat pump system to drastically reduce emissions coming from the home. Paul Lambert is co-founder and CEO of Quilt. Through his career he has taken mission-driven startups from 0 to 1 and led product development at some of the top companies in the world – most recently leading Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator. In this ep...

Found Energy is decarbonizing heavy industry by extracting clean energy from aluminum metal. Found's aluminum-thermal power systems are compact and modular, allowing energy to be extracted at double the energy density of diesel and at a competitive cost. Peter Godart, co-founder and CEO of Found Energy, is a former NASA scientist and MIT PhD whose background in developing aluminum-powered rock...

Aigen is aiming to revolutionize agriculture with a pesticide-free, solar-powered robotics platform. Kenny alongside his co-founder, Richard Wurden, launched Aigen in late 2021 and since then have quickly become one of the hottest start-ups in ag and climate. Kenny Lee is co-founder and CEO of Aigen. He is a multi-time founder with a previous successful exit of a cybersecurity startup. Most recent...

The Farmlink Project rescues surplus produce from farms and delivers it to communities around the country.  Alongside other college students around the country, Ben Collier started the Farmlink Project during the pandemic while he was studying applied mathematics at Brown. Now, Farmlink has moved over 165M lbs of food, preventing over 200,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions while also delivering over...

Charm Industrial is a leading carbon removal company that is leveraging earth’s natural carbon capture process to put gigatons of sequestered carbon back underground. Harris Cohn is Head of Sales at Charm. Previously, he led business development and sales for leading climate technology companies including ClearTrace Technologies and Carbon Lighthouse. Earlier in his career, he spent time at Bloom...

DexMat is a climate tech moonshot company creating high-performance materials for a low-carbon world. Its flagship product, Galvorn, is carbon-negative at scale, 10x stronger than steel, half the weight of aluminum, and more conductive than copper. Prior to DexMat, Bryan built the world’s largest climate tech acceleration venture, Third Derivative, in under two years as CEO, driving over $1.5 bill...

Swati Mylavarapu is founder and managing partner of Incite.org where she invests catalytic capital and provides guidance to start-ups and non-profits developing world-positive innovation across climate tech, health tech, and social impact. Prior to founding Incite, Swati spent years working in the early stage technology industry as both an investor and an entrepreneur. She has been a Partner at Kl...

Kate Gordon most recently served as Senior Advisor to the US Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, where she led initiatives to help drive a more sustainable and inclusive energy transition. Prior to her time in Washington, she served as Senior Climate Policy Advisor to Governor Gavin Newsom and helped develop some of the most forward looking policies at the state level. She is now a visiting sc...

Matt Rogers is the co-founder and CEO of Mill , a new way to keep food waste in the food system. Reducing food waste from households presents one of the greatest opportunities for individuals to reduce their climate impact. Matt started his career at Apple where he was one of the first engineers on the iPhone. He then co-founded Nest, the first learning thermostat to help households reduce their e...

Sylvatex is an advanced materials technology company that is innovating the active materials and processes for lithium-ion battery cathode production that drastically reduce the associated greenhouse gas emissions. Virginia Irwin Klausmeier is President and CEO of Sylvatex (SVX). With her background in chemistry and engineering, Virginia launched the company in 2014 and has been leading the techni...

Avalanche Energy is developing modular fusion micro-reactors to create scaleable carbon-free power. Brian Riordan is co-founder and COO of Avalanche. Before launching Avalanche Energy in 2018, Brian was a leader in the  aerospace industry as a lead launch System architect at Blue Origin. Before his time at Blue Origin, Brian focused his work on subsea mining. In this episode we cover... The differ...

Novalith is creating carbon-negative lithium by using carbon dioxide to unlock the mineral from hard rock while sequestering the harmful greenhouse gas. Steven Vassiloudis, CEO of Novalith, is an experienced chemical engineer who has led scaling efforts for numerous clean tech start-ups. He is also a director of Kemplant, a provider of equipment for lithium and battery chemical industries. Christi...

Bedrock is transforming the heating and cooling of buildings, using geothermal energy to radically reduce costs for people and the environment. Joselyn Lai is an experienced entrepreneur having spent nearly all of her career scaling purpose-driven start-ups. In early 2022, she launched Bedrock, one of the hottest companies in climate tech, having just announced a $8.5M seed fundraising round to ac...

ElectricFish is building distributed energy storage powered by software to accelerate energy equity through extreme-fast electric vehicle charging and backup. Anurag Kamal is a mechanical engineer, battery researcher turned energy entrepreneur. Before starting ElectricFish, he worked with the BMW Group technology office and Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he research lithium-ion battery cells....

Orbital Mining is bringing renewable energy to the moon in hopes to power lunar mining operations that would enable deep space exploration.  Orbital Mining launched just over a year ago and have quickly gained traction with the most respected space agencies. Orbital has already won $600,000 in funding from NASA in an on-going competition to bring power to the moon. Prior to launching Orbital, Ken...

Travertine Technologies captures and permanently sequesters atmospheric carbon dioxide through mineralization, while simultaneously upcycling sulfuric waste for sustainable chemical production. Dr. Laura Lammers launched Travertine in early 2022, with a vision to scale the company to achieve gigatons of carbon removal. Previously, she dedicated a significant portion of her career to leading-edge a...

Windfall Bio is a nature-based agricultural technology company that harnesses methane-eating microbes to transform the harmful greenhouse gas into organic soil nutrients. Dr. Josh Silverman is the Founder and CEO of Windfall. After having focused on methane for over 15 years, he founded the company in late 2022, and quickly raised $9 million to commercialize their methane-to-organic fertilizer sol...

Vesta is harnessing the power of the oceans to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with olivine sand. Vesta has been featured across leading academic journals and media outlets as well as the Bill Gates-inspired documentary Solving for Zero. Kelly Erhart is President and Co-founder of Vesta . She has focused much of her career on commercializing sustainable technologies including role...

Dr. Morgan Bazilian is a world-renowned expert in energy-related international affairs, policy, and investments. Currently, he is the Director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. Previously, he was the lead energy specialist at the World Bank, a senior diplomat at the United Nations, and the European Union’s lead negotiator on low-carbon technology at the UN c...

Thank you to everyone who has been a part of Season 1 of Built for Earth. Whether you’re a student, investor, supporter, founder, or simply an earth-lover, we hope Built for Earth has been, and will continue to be, a worthwhile listening and learning experience. This episode is an opportunity to hear from all 12 of our innovators from Season 1 in a crash-course of business, climate, and life wisdo...