It wasn’t until Ben Eidelson became a father that he decided to shift his career from fintech to climate change. The 36-year-old, who lives in Seattle with his wife and two children, founded startups that were acquired by Stripe and Google. But when his daughter was born in 2018, his priorities changed.

“I didn’t have answers for the 17-year-old version of her that I was modeling in my mind about why I just kept working on fintech APIs,” Eidelson says.

Starting in June 2023, he launched three projects: a how-to guide for climate-tech software, a podcast called Climate Papa and, earlier this year, a venture fund. Armed with $5 million, Stepchange aims to back 30 to 35 startups focused on bridging the gap between green technology such as EVs and heat pumps and the people and companies that need it.

Stepchange’s first five investments include Bayou Energy, a Seattle startup that helps clean energy companies access customer data; Line.Build, which connects contractors with decarbonization incentives; and itselectric, which improves urban access to curbside EV chargers by helping homeowners install public chargers outside their properties.

Eidelson sees a clear throughline in his professional pivot. Platforms such as Uber and Airbnb speak to software’s power to change how people live—why not bring that power to bear on green tech? “We’ve done 100 years of amazing physics to get the solar panels to work, and get them cheap,” he says. “‘OK, should I get them?’ That is a software problem, to answer that question.”

For decades, energy producers relied on makeshift approaches to identify methane leaks, like throwing a tarp over a pipe to see if it bubbled. More recently, scientists have used satellites to pinpoint emitters of the potent greenhouse gas, which often escapes from oil, gas and coal operations. Caroline Alden has a more granular solution: She wants to geo-fence oil and gas wells using lasers and mirrors to detect the tiniest leaks at the speed of light.

The technology developed at LongPath Technologies Inc., where Alden is chief scientist and one of four co-founders, may offer the cheapest path to deep emissions cuts for oil and gas companies. After deploying its first commercial project in 2020, LongPath this year received a $189 million commitment from the US Department of Energy, which will enable it to build infrastructure for real-time monitoring of methane emissions across 25 million acres of oil and gas production in six states.

The system works like this: A gimbal-mounted laser head is placed on top of a tower and shoots beams of light at baseball-size mirrors stationed around a hydrocarbon production site. Because methane absorbs light in the shortwave infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, if the light bounces back missing that wavelength, it means there’s a leak. There are nominal installation costs to put the mirrors in place, but after that operators can subscribe to the service for as little as $100 a month.

For Alden, who started her career studying warming temperatures’ impact on glaciers, the shift to tracking emissions was a pragmatic one. “About 128 billion cubic feet of gas came out of the ground in the US today,” she says of the world’s largest producer of natural gas. “It should have been monitored for methane leaks.”

Like many climate tech investors, Tom Chi had an epiphany: In 2011 he witnessed the coral reef near his home in Hawaii bleach in a matter of two months. “It had a really deep effect on me and reset all my timelines of how I was thinking about climate,” he says.

After a series of conversations with scientists, Chi decided to take action. He quit his job at Alphabet’s famed moonshot factory X, where he was a founding member, and embarked on an 18-month sabbatical to explore “the front lines” of climate change: Alaska glaciers calving at an unprecedented rate, Southeast Asian rainforests being cut down for palm oil plantations, slash-and-burn operations to transform parts of the Amazon for cattle farming.

Chi determined that the most effective use of his time would be spreading bets across a range of solutions. So after a few years at venture capital firms Crosslink Capital and Hack VC, in 2020 he launched his own, At One Ventures, which now has a combined $525 million across its two funds. At One invests in startups working in four key areas: air, water, soil and biodiversity. Its early targets include battery recycler Ascend Elements; Dalan Animal Health, which developed a vaccine for honeybees; and Colossal Biosciences, the startup best known for attempting to resurrect the wooly mammoth.

In an investing landscape full of what Chi describes as “white dudes who went to Stanford,” he says At One’s diverse and majority-female deal team is part of what sets the firm apart. At One’s dealmakers might not have the most years in venture capital or the biggest name recognition, Chi says, but they’re the clearest thinkers in the game.

At barely 22, Xiye Bastida is already an activist, founder, speaker and writer. This year she adds both “graduate” and “film producer” to that list, as she completes her degree at the University of Pennsylvania and embarks on a tour to promote The Way of the Whale (working title), a documentary in which she appears on-screen as a narrator and is also credited as a co-writer and executive producer.

The Way of the Whale, which premiered in June at the Hollywood Climate Summit, follows Bastida as she tracks the migration of gray whales from Mexico northward to their Arctic feeding grounds. The project stemmed in part from her frustration with documentary interviews that lean on just a few seconds of voice-over—she wanted to do something deeper. “My main goal with all my activism is to change the narrative, to show the world that humans and nature have to coexist, with all the implications that come with that,” she says.

In 2020, Bastida became co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Re-Earth Initiative, which today operates in 27 countries and last year raised $1 million to fund grassroots activism. No matter what she’s working on, she likes to think in line with an Indigenous belief known as the Seven Generations Principle; seven generations is you plus three generations on either side. That means “I’m thinking about the wisdom of my great-grandmother,” she says, “and the stability of my great-grandchild.”

As chemical oceanographers at the University of Washington, Alex Gagnon and Julian Sachs saw firsthand how climate change is devastating coral reefs. As the founders of Banyu Carbon, they developed a unique technology to remove the atmospheric carbon dioxide that’s harming marine life.

Banyu aims to extract millions of tons of CO₂ with a process that uses sunlight and seawater to avoid the astronomical energy demands and cost of other carbon capture approaches. The key is a synthetic molecule called a photoacid. When exposed to sunlight, the photoacid releases acidifying protons that are temporarily transferred to seawater pumped into a tank. There, the photoacid transforms dissolved CO₂ in the water into a gas that can be safely stored. The decarbonized seawater is returned to the ocean, where it draws down CO₂ from the atmosphere.

“We both care passionately about the impacts of chemistry on marine life,” says Gagnon. “We’re not dumping anything into the ocean, we’re not trying to change ocean chemistry.” If anything, they say, Banyu’s tech could help marine life as the decarbonized seawater would be less acidic.

Sachs says Banyu’s founding in 2022 was aimed at capitalizing on techniques developed during an eight-year research project on the effects of acidification on coral reefs in Polynesia. “During that research we realized we could use some of the same approaches to do scalable carbon removal from surface ocean water,” he says.

So far, Gagnon and Sachs have demonstrated their technology in the laboratory. This summer Banyu is set to begin a field trial at a University of Washington research station in the San Juan Islands. Next up would be a commercial demonstration project, most likely along the Gulf of Mexico.

Julie Pullen is well aware of the dangers posed by climate change: She witnessed them firsthand as an ocean scientist and educated others about them as a professor of subjects ranging from oceanography to nuclear security. Armed with $117 million and her encyclopedic knowledge of the sea, she’s now helping build a network of companies focused on solutions for the 70% of the planet that’s covered in water.

Pullen is a founding partner at Boston-based Propeller, which backs early-stage startups that treat the ocean as a fix for global warming and not just a victim of it. Ocean activities can provide nearly a third of the carbon reductions the climate needs, she says; even if the rest of the world is still catching on to it, “the blue economy is huge.”

Working with the firm’s inaugural fund, Pullen has helped identify and invest in companies that are building cleaner boats, improving ocean health, and monitoring and sucking carbon dioxide from the air using seawater and sunlight. Propeller also runs what it calls an Ocean MBA program to help scientists take their research from “cool idea in a lab” to viable company.

Pullen’s background often makes her the person in the room who can talk science and business simultaneously. She has also fostered relationships with leading US marine research organizations such as Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Those linkups give the startups Propeller invests in access to the top minds in their fields. In the year ahead, Pullen’s goal is to take Propeller’s research network global.

Cleaning up the climate footprint of the global apparel industry will cost an estimated $1 trillion. But where, exactly, will that money come from? As intelligence director at the Transformers Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for little-known players in the denim supply chain, Kim van der Weerd is prodding clothing companies to think differently about this crucial question.

Right now, she says, most brands and retailers approach decarbonization as someone else’s problem. It’s up to fabric producers and denim mills to somehow make dramatic emissions cuts by implementing efficiency and renewable energy projects, even as brands continue to push down on prices. “Not only are suppliers being asked to foot the bill for this, they’re also being asked to assume all of the risk and uncertainty,” she says.

Van der Weerd brings a unique perspective to the problem. After graduating from the London School of Economics with a master’s degree in human rights, she wanted to help solve the abuses rife in global supply chains. She realized, however, that she really didn’t know enough about the production of goods—“The idea of a garment factory was a black box”—so she took a job managing a garment factory in Cambodia. Four years later, she resigned and started the podcast Manufactured, which explores sustainability in the fashion industry. In 2022 she joined Transformers Foundation, which is financed by the denim supply chain and represents everyone from cotton farmers to jeans factories.

There are some very important steps that brands and retailers can take toward decarbonization, Van der Weerd says, including paying higher prices and entering into longer-term agreements with suppliers that invest in greener production. After all, she says, “producers shouldn’t be the ones footing the bill for this and assuming all of the project risk.”

Floods are the most common and most widely destructive natural catastrophes, causing an average of $50 billion in global economic damages annually. To support insurance products in an increasingly inundated world, Bessie Schwarz and Floodbase, the public benefit corporation she co-founded, are pioneering ways to use satellites to track floods more effectively.

The challenge is that 90% of the 1.8 billion people who are highly susceptible to floods live in low- and middle-income countries where there are few flood gauges—and sometimes none at all. Insurance products are rare because the lack of data makes risk prediction difficult.

Schwartz met her co-founder, Dr. Beth Tellman, while both were studying for master’s degrees at Yale. It was there they built the first iteration of a platform that combined satellite observations with hydrological and meteorological data to generate near-real-time flood maps. Google gave them money to build out the prototype; eventually, they secured venture capital funding and officially launched as Floodbase in 2023.

At first, the startup’s tool was used by governments and the United Nations to predict flooding, get people out of the way and target aid effectively. But the model has evolved. Now the company not only warns of risk but provides a dozen insurance products for flood risk that isn’t traditionally covered.

“We are dedicated to closing the insurance gap” in the developing world and beyond, Schwarz says. “The technology is very global, as is the financial product: We are paying you out when we see a certain amount of water on your property.”

In partnership with other organizations, Floodbase offers parametric flood insurance in countries as varied as Malawi, Mozambique and the US. The growth plan is to create flood-risk products for an even more diverse set of stakeholders, including in Asia and Latin America.

Ben Schuler’s mission is one step removed from reinventing the wheel: He wants to reinvent the motor.

The modern alternating-current motor was commercialized by Nikola Tesla in the 1880s and hasn’t changed all that much since. Today more than half of the world’s electricity is used to power motors, which rely on wound copper wires and iron.

Schuler’s eight-year-old company, Texas-based Infinitum, prints copper onto circuit boards instead, dramatically reducing the metal needed, cutting the motor’s weight in half and improving efficiency. So much so that Infinitum’s motors have won a slew of awards, and the company raked in $185 million in its latest round of fundraising last year.

Leveling up motor efficiency will help renewable energy go further. Electric cars and heat pumps are two obvious targets for Infinitum, which has also installed its motors in more than a dozen data centers—specifically, in the fans that keep servers cool.

While motors are usually invisible, Infinitum’s are painted fire-engine red to help them stand out. On their own, each one is a small climate win, creating what Schuler says is “incremental change.” But what he’s after is the “astronomical impact” his ruby-hued machines can have when they hum along together.

In July, Infinitum will fire up a second factory in Saltillo, Mexico, that will allow the company to double its production capacity to 200,000 motors by the end of this year. Since launching the first factory in Tijuana, Schuler says it’s a “cut and paste” process to build more, which should keep Infinitum competitive against incumbent manufacturers’ 100-year head start. Schuler is confident the savings his technology delivers can ultimately win the race.

Avinash Persaud studied economics, traded bonds on Wall Street, created new rules for international banking after the financial crisis and taught business at a London college. That was all before he turned his attention to climate finance, and specifically how to make more money available for climate projects in developing countries.

In 2022, for example, Persaud secured a “pause clause” for his debt-laden home country of Barbados. If the island gets hit by a hurricane—the storms are getting more ferocious as the planet warms—it will be able to temporarily suspend loan repayments and put that money toward recovery efforts. Persaud then parlayed his success into helping other climate-vulnerable countries copy the clause in their own loan arrangements.

“A lot of my work is around the allocation of scarce resources,” he says. “There just isn’t as much money in helping deal with the climate problem as people think, which means you have to be very focused.”

Persaud is a bit of a policy polymath: He can communicate dry but important topics clearly, originate new ideas and shepherd their practical implementation. His days as a trader, for example, taught him how crucial it is to have guarantees for currency exchange rates if a developing country wants to court Western investors. So he designed a plan for the guarantee system; less than two years later, he’s now at the Inter-American Development Bank working to implement a $5.4 billion currency-exchange guarantee program for the Brazilian government.

With a knack for simplifying complicated problems, Persaud is already noodling on his next ideas for moving money to the developing world. “The way my mind works is that I know there’s a space to be filled,” he says. “But it will take me a year of listening to people and thinking about it to come up with an idea.

Kate Marvel hated math and physics in high school, an inauspicious start for one of the US’s most prominent climate scientists.

It took an undergraduate astronomy class for her to realize that physics was more than “balls going down an inclined plane and coefficients of friction or whatever”—it was about black holes and the Big Bang. “I was like, this is physics?” she says. The subject filled her with awe.

One University of Cambridge Ph.D. in theoretical cosmology later, Marvel landed a Stanford fellowship encouraging her to study anything that touches both science and policy. It was there, while casting around for something to work on, that a late giant of climate science, Stephen Schneider, told her: “What are you, stupid? Go do climate science!”

Marvel did exactly that, with gigs at the Carnegie Institution for Science, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Project Drawdown, a climate mitigation project. She recently rejoined the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is separately working on a book, Human Nature, due out next year. Her work has shown that we’ll never run out of wind, that climate change has intensified precipitation and that 80% of the 21st century so far has brought historically unusual drought conditions. A lead author of the fifth US National Climate Assessment, she also contributed to authoritative work on how fast the world may warm and why some models are more “hot” than others.

“What we’re missing is this notion that climate science is still science. It’s still about finding out things,” Marvel says. “It’s not about preaching. It’s not about telling people what to do, what not to do. It’s about learning things about this incredible planet that we live on.”

As a college student in Uganda in 2019, Vanessa Nakate brought Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future campaign to Africa, beginning with lone protests outside her country’s Parliament. Now 27 and newly married to a fellow climate activist and longtime friend, Nakate is ready to start writing the next chapter of her career.

That chapter will start with a stint in Georgia this summer as part of the Mandela Washington Fellowship, a program for young African leaders. After that, she’s planning to get a master’s degree in public policy (university TBD) and in the meantime is juggling appearances, policy meetings, interviews and her own activism efforts with the Rise Up Movement and the Tard Foundation, a Christian climate organization

With five years of activism under her belt, Nakate’s goal is to complement her existing experience with a better understanding of policy and leadership. The transition from a youth activist to a young adult can be tricky, she says. Other activists have had to leave the arena because of financial or family pressures that Nakate is hoping to avoid by learning how to change things from within the system. “I want to have the knowledge as well to be able to influence not just on the outside, but also in the rooms where decisions are being made,” she says.

Fresh perspective may also come from living in the US, where per capita emissions are more than 100 times higher than in Uganda. The six weeks Nakate is about to spend in Georgia will also be the first time she’s lived abroad. “I know that I’ll probably go through some culture shock,” she says. “Since I’m newly married, I’ll obviously miss my husband a lot. But I’m certain we’ll figure it out.”