The Wharton Current

Join host Ellie McDonald on this episode of The Wharton Current as she welcomes Leshika Samarasinghe, founder and solo GP of Twine Ventures!

Twine Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund that invests in purpose-driven startups focused on healthcare, fintech, and climate technology. With a Harvard Business School degree and early experience at Google and ARPA-E, Leshika shares her unique investor perspective with listeners in this episode. She also shares her inspiring journey, the vision behind Twine Ventures, and her insights on the macro and climatetech VC markets.

Don't miss out on this engaging and informative conversation with Leshika Samarasinghe!

How do you store a lot of zero-carbon energy for cheap? Justin Briggs and his co-founders at Antora Energy believe in a simple answer. Find a cheap and abundant material that can retain a lot of energy in a small volume -- and use zero-carbon electricity to get it really hot.

That's the product that Antora Energy offers: thermal energy storage using blocks of solid carbon. They've raised $50mn in Series A funding as they target scaling their product, focusing on markets in industry. Justin sat down with Ned Downie and Shivani Shikha to talk about:

-- Why the Antora team decided that thermal energy storage was such an appealing product to develop

-- How they see their competitive edge against other thermal energy storage technologies for industrial decarbonization

-- How centering their mission -- stopping climate change -- in raising funds made them more attractive to venture investors

Energy efficiency saves consumers money, and we need deep cuts in home energy use to reach our world’s net-zero goals. How can we get more homeowners to invest in it? That’s the question that drives Lauren Salz. She’s CEO and co-founder of Sealed, an energy and financial technology company that helps homeowners finance home improvements that save on energy costs and emissions too.

Lauren tells us about what makes homeowners invest in energy efficiency(hint: it’s often not about money, and definitely not about climate!) and about how she and her co-founder have built Sealed to fit those motivations. She also walks through how she transitioned from consulting to starting a company and shares stories from her days as a surprisingly well-paid street musician in London.

In this episode, Ned Downie and Ellie McDonald chat with a founder from an area of climatetech that's only starting to get the attention it deserves -- adaptation. Guest Bessie Schwarz is co-founder and CEO of Floodbase, a company that provides near real-time data on flood mapping and flood risk for markets including parametric insurance, risk analysis, and disaster management. They announced a $12mn Series A in late January 2023 led by Lowercarbon Capital.

Bessie talks about what Floodbase brings to insurance, risk, and disaster management markets; what it's like to go from being a community organizer to being a startup founder and climate tech; and how adaptation funding as a space has changed since she and her co-founders started working on this company a decade ago.

The market for carbon capture focuses on large-scale projects -- capture retrofits in heavy industry, say, or enormous facilities to suck carbon directly out of the air. But should we also be capturing carbon inside buildings?

Our guest for this week says yes. Nick Martin is COO of Carbon Reform, a Delaware-based startup developing a modular retrofit device for commercial HVAC systems that scrubs both traditional indoor air pollutants and carbon dioxide. They raised $3mn in seed funding in fall 2022. We discuss with him how their module can save customers money on energy costs, how they're thinking about target markets, and why traditional carbon-capture policy incentives need tweaking to serve decentralized solutions like theirs.

Concrete is the most used material in the world after water -- but an indispensable input, cement, accounts for 8% of global carbon emissions. How do we slash cement's carbon footprint? Join the Current to hear thoughts on this from Ian Riley, CEO of the World Cement Association, a global trade body for the cement industry. Ian is a cement industry veteran whose C-suite experience includes a stint in China, the country producing more than half of the world's cement. We talk about how urban mining and local materials sourcing can support cement decarbonization, why stranded assets are a real concern for the sector, and how China is thinking about emissions in cement sector policy.

Join us on The Wharton Current as we sit down with Sara Harari, Associate Director of Innovation and Strategic Advisor to the President at Connecticut Green Bank. Sara discusses the future of clean technologies and how state-level green banks are driving investment in sustainable infrastructure and technology. We also delve into the intricacies of the Inflation Reduction Act, Sara's role as co-chair of the Connecticut Hydrogen Task Force, and the importance of diversity and equity within the climate space.

The Wharton Current welcomes Christine Harada, Wharton alum and Executive Director of the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council, to discuss the implementation of the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill and the IRA. Along the way we get political and even a bit philosophical, discussing her career, the value of working in the public sector, and her perspective on the importance of being engaged in civic life as a business leader.

For our final episode of 2022, we welcome Sarah Jewett, Director of Strategy at Fervo Energy, a startup working on next-generation geothermal. Fervo brings drilling innovations from oil and gas to make geothermal a real option for 24-7 zero-carbon power.

Sarah walks us through the oil & gas drilling technologies that Fervo is leveraging, and the opportunities for geothermal to bring the oil and gas workforce into the clean-energy transition. She breaks down where geothermal belongs in the clean-power supply stack and how the IRA can help give geothermal the subsidy support that has helped solar and wind scale.

This week, the Current teams up with the Wharton Sustainable Business Club to talk with Alex LaPlaza, partner at major cleantech VC Lowercarbon Capital. He talks with hosts Ned Downie and Nehali Jain about how standing on the rim of an active volcano helped convince him to work on climate; why Lowercarbon is investing big-time in carbon removal; and why he thinks adaptation is a overlooked and undervalued area for investment. He's also got some interesting reflections on why he went into venture, and what you should consider if you're looking at that space.