Episodes
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Anastasia Pavlovic is the co-founder of Eion, a carbon removal company that accelerates Earth's natural rock weathering process to lock away CO₂—permanently. Eion works with farmers to deploy enhanced rock weathering (ERW) in agricultural fields, creating a carbon sink disguised as soil amendment, with benefits to landowners and climate alike. Anastasia joined the podcast from Detroit to talk about carbon, kids, and the importance of remembering to eat.
In this episode we talked about:
🪨 How volcanic rock dust turns farms into carbon capture sites (and why the best rocks might be in Norway)
🌽 How Eion aligns climate goals with farm economics
🚢 The surprising math that makes ocean shipping rock across the Atlantic more carbon-efficient than it sounds
💰 Why climate tech founders need to think like infrastructure financiers and not just software bros
📉 How Anastasia regulates the highs and lows of startup life—with a side of mac & cheese#Climatetech #CarbonRemoval #Agtech
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
📈 B2B content to create and capture leads: book 30 minutes with Tom for free at grizzle.io/climate
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Nemailla Bonturi is the co-founder of ÄIO, an Estonian startup fermenting fats and oils from yeast instead of palm oil or animal products. A Brazilian scientist-turned-founder, Nemailla now works at the intersection of synthetic biology, circular economy, and baked goods—with an in-house chef, of course.
In this episode we talked about:
🧫 How a “very special yeast” turns sawdust and stale bread into palm oil alternatives
🌍 Why Estonia is a unicorn factory
🥐 A plant-based butter that could make your croissant carbon neutral
🧴 Turning leftover dairy and tea leaves into moisturizers and lip balms
🧠 Mental health, therapy, and the importance of shutting your laptop at 6pm
📺 Why The X-Files may be the most pro-climate tech show of the 1990s#fermentationtech #climatetech #circularbioeconomy
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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Missing episodes?
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Eugene Beh is the founder of Quino Energy, where he’s commercializing organic flow batteries that are safer, cheaper, and more scalable than their vanadium and lithium-ion cousins. With a background in physics and chemistry from Harvard and Stanford, Eugene has traded academic labs for chemical plants—and he’s betting that petroleum byproducts might just be the unlikely hero of long-duration energy storage.
In this episode we talked about:
🔋 Why Quino's aqueous organic flow batteries don’t catch fire, unlike lithium-ion
💰 How Eugene expects his electrolytes to undercut vanadium on cost—possibly this year
🏗️ Why reusing tank infrastructure could slash battery installation costs
🌍 What makes Quino’s batteries geopolitically boring, and why that’s a good thing
🏥 Why hospitals, factories, and AI-fueled data centers might be early adopters
🛢️ And how coal tar and clothing dye might save us from an electrified future dominated by flammable batteries#climatetech #energystorage #batterytech
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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Selina Tobaccowala is a Silicon Valley veteran turned climate entrepreneur. With hits like Evite, Ticketmaster, and SurveyMonkey on her resume, she’s now taking aim at one of the biggest sources of residential emissions: energy inefficiency. Through her startup HomeBoost, she’s making home energy assessments as simple as scanning your walls with your phone.
In this episode we talked about:
🔍 How HomeBoost uses AI and thermal imagery to let you run your own home energy audit
💡 Why the humble HVAC filter swap can cut 10% off your energy bill
🧠 Lessons from 20+ years in tech—from dot-com “eyeballs” to today’s LTV/CAC gospel
🛠️ What consumer tech folks can (and should) bring to climatetech
📉 Why climate investing is down, and why some founders might just be labeling things wrong#climatetech #energytransition #founderstory
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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Leise Sandeman is co-founder of Pathways, a company using AI to make heavy manufacturing more sustainable. Based in Copenhagen, she brings deep expertise in steel production and AI to the challenge of industrial decarbonization.
In this episode we talked about:
🏭 How Pathways is building the data layer for sustainable manufacturing, with their software now deployed across hundreds of plants
⚡ The current reality where sustainability teams spend 90% of their time collecting data and only 10% implementing changes
🤝 The "playground" mindset of being a first-time founder and the importance of co-founder trust
🌍 Taking a strong stance on being a "single planet society" while working with diverse perspectives across regions like Texas
#ClimateTech #manufacturing #sustainability #EPD #LCA
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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Eric Rubenstein is an oil and gas banker turned climate tech investor based in Houston. As founder of New Climate Ventures, he focuses on bridging the gap between traditional energy and climate innovation, bringing a pragmatic perspective shaped by his background in finance and fossil fuels.
In this episode we talked about:
🌡️ The critical need for more power generation capacity and why we need both renewable and reliable energy sources with built-in redundancy
📊 How the ability to measure and monitor carbon impacts drove Eric's interest in technologies like carbon capture, bioplastics, and carbon utilization
🔄 Practical advice for professionals looking to transition into climate tech, emphasizing gradual, deliberate steps and community engagement
🍸 How to turn CO2 into vodka
#climatetech #carbontech #energytransition #renewableenergy
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
📈 B2B content to create and capture leads: book 30 minutes with Tom for free at grizzle.io/climate
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Julia Bialetska is the founder of S.Lab, a Ukrainian company creating sustainable packaging solutions from agricultural waste.
In this episode we talked about:
🌱 How S.Lab transforms agricultural waste into packaging that can be used in food, pharmaceuticals, electronics, furniture and fashion
📊 The impact of EU regulations requiring all packaging to be recyclable or reusable by 2030, and why that means companies are rushing to find sustainable alternatives
⚙️ The parallels between today's sustainable materials evolution and the plastic revolution of the last century
🇺🇦 The resilience of Ukrainian startups operating during wartime and the growing recognition they're receiving globally
💰 S. Lab’s impressive pipeline worth approximately 20 million euros in monthly revenue and their current fundraising round of 2.5 million euros
#ClimateTech #SustainablePackaging #Packaging #Mycelium
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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Jannik De Winter is an investor at PT1, a Berlin-based VC focused on greening the built environment. He recently co-authored a white paper on adaptation tech—the technologies we’ll need now that we’ve officially blown past 1.5°C. We talked about why climate resilience is an investment opportunity, not just a government expense, and why adaptation tech is still so poorly defined.
We touched on:
🔥 How climate adaptation tech is more than just seawalls and sandbags—it includes urban cooling, climate risk modeling, and even giving EV batteries a second life
💰 The trillion-dollar adaptation funding gap and why most of it isn’t coming from the private sector (yet)
🌍 Why Europe, and especially Germany, is ahead on adaptation policy, and what that means for startups and investors
🚰 The wild inefficiencies in water infrastructure—40% of Italy’s piped water just disappears—and the startups trying to fix it
🛰️ AI-powered disaster detection, from wildfire monitoring via satellite to real-time flood tracking
🎙️ PT1’s upcoming event on adaptation tech in Berlin, plus their podcast series diving into specific adaptation challenges#AdaptationTech #ClimateFinance #ClimateTech
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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Chris Bernkopf is the founder of Podero, a tech company that helps utilities balance power loads by controlling distributed energy resources like heat pumps, batteries, and EVs. Fresh off a major fundraising round, he's building his remote-first team to expand across Europe while delivering 25% energy savings to customers.
In this episode we talked about:
🔌 How Podero's software enables utilities to aggregate and trade power from customer-owned devices on energy markets
🌏 How growing up watching the same YouTube videos creates a global tribe of like-minded founders
🎯 The value of focused mentorship through programs like Y Combinator in developing founder mindset
💰 Why closing a funding round is just the beginning - it's "registering for the marathon, not finishing it"
🏗️ Building a remote-first company culture with quarterly offsites, virtual coffee chats, and camera-on meetings
#climatetech #energytech #cleanenergy
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
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Jess Clemans is an investor at noa, a VC that is raising its second €250M fund focused on making the built environment more sustainable.
In this episode we talked about:
🎯 Why noa prioritizes founder quality over business ideas or market attractiveness when making investment decisions
💰 How customer acquisition costs for solar installations can reach an eye-watering $10k, while local SMBs achieve much lower costs through word-of-mouth
👷 The critical shortage of skilled labor for solar installation in Europe and innovative approaches to address this through upskilling programs
#climatetech #solarenergy #venturecapital #builtenvironment
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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Matthew Krayton directs communications and engagement for MACH2, the Mid-Atlantic Clean Hydrogen Hub. As someone who both works in-depth on the policy side but who is also focused on execution, Matt is working to establish regional clean hydrogen hubs across several states. 🇺🇸
In this episode we talked about:
🏭 How the Mid-Atlantic region's existing industrial infrastructure, including unused pipelines, could be repurposed for hydrogen transport
💼 The hub's goal to create over 20,000 new jobs, many of them union positions, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25 million tons annually
🌊 The critical role of renewable energy development, particularly offshore wind, in scaling clean hydrogen production
⚡ The importance of IRA tax credits in making clean hydrogen economically viable at scale
#CleanHydrogen #CleanTech #ClimateTech #Hydrogen
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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Rob van Straten is CEO of Skytree, a direct air capture company addressing CO2 shortages while removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
In this episode we talked about:
🌱 How Skytree's direct air capture technology helps greenhouses meet their CO2 needs while contributing to carbon removal
🏗️ The challenge of scaling DAC to gigaton levels - requiring 300 container ships worth of units with current technology
💰 Why carbon removal is already economically viable, but needs a wider cost gap with emissions to drive adoption
🌎 The reality that climate change threatens humanity more than the planet itself, which has survived previous climate disasters
#climatetech #directaircapture #carboncapture
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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It’s the holidays and, in the spirit of sharing, I swapped episodes with Tarmo Virki, founder and host of NatureBacked podcast in Tallinn. I’m airing one of my favourite of his interviews: his conversation with Jana Budkovskaja, CEO of Beamline Acccelerator.
They talked about:
🌲 Jana's evolution from aspiring panda-rescuer to cleantech accelerator founder
🔬 Why deep tech startups need non-equity funding in their early stages to bridge the gap between lab and market
♨️ An innovative project using abandoned mines for low-temperature heating systems in the Estonian village of Kiikla
🚀 Why startups, not governments or corporations, are best positioned to drive climate innovation
#climatetech #cleantech #deeptech #baltics
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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Andreas Sedlmayr is co-founder and co-CEO of Instagrid, makers of portable power stations for mobile workforces with heavy power needs. His company has grown from €500k to €30M+ in revenue and recently achieved B Corp certification while expanding into North America.
In this episode we talked about:
☠️ Why diesel and gas generators are silent killers
🇩🇪 What it means to revive Germany’s strong tradition of industrial innovation
🇺🇸 Why hiring local leadership was crucial for US expansion and how cultural nuances matter more than you might think
💼 How to expand smartly after raising $95 million
🌱 Why achieving B Corp certification was important to prove their commitment to social and environmental best practices
#climatetech #cleanenergy #sustainabletech #batteries
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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"I was sitting at a cafe in Prague with my headphones on and just laughing like a crazy person." -Ryan, watching Matt’s TEDx talk.
Matt Winning is an environmental researcher and stand-up comedian who combines his expertise in climate change with humor to engage audiences.
In this episode we talked about:
🌍 How climate change became Matt's focus due to its urgency and lack of widespread attention
🎭 Using comedy as a tool to start conversations about climate change and make people comfortable discussing the topic
📚 Matt's book "Hot Mess" and its portrayal of climate action as a choose-your-own-adventure
🔬 The importance of active decision-making in addressing climate change at all levels
🎤 Matt's upcoming projects, including a new comedy show and a children's book about climate change
#Standup #Comedy #Climate #ClimateTech
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
📈 B2B content to create and capture leads: book 30 minutes with Tom for free at grizzle.io/climate
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Yossi Quint is the founder and CEO of Ark Biotech, a startup focused on computational bioprocessing in the cultivated meat industry.
In this episode we talked about:
🧬 Ark's role in accelerating the development of cultivated meat products
🏭 How the bioeconomy could reshape traditional geographic advantages in food production
🌍 The global landscape of cultivated meat regulation and its impact on industry growth
🇺🇸 The potential consequences of state-level bans on cultivated meat in the US
💼 The decision to pursue entrepreneurship over activism for maximum impact
#CultivatedMeat #CleanMeat #AltProteins #BioProcessing #ClimateTech
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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Jessica Droujko is a passionate kayaker and lover of rivers. So it’s fitting that she should combine that passion and her PhD from ETH Zürich to launch Riverkin, a startup that monitors river health.
In this episode we talked about:
🌊 How rivers shape landscapes and their importance in global ecosystems
🔬 How Riverkin monitors water levels and sediment flows
🏞️ Jessica's adventures on some of the world's most interesting rivers, including the Boiling River in Peru
🚣♀️ The balance between responsible tourism and river conservation. Think: Grand Canyon
🌍 The River Collective's mission to create changemakers through events like the Students for Rivers camp
🔌 Opportunities for citizen science in river monitoring through mini hydrological stations
#ClimateTech #Rivers #Water
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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Max Boykoff is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado. His research focuses on the cultural dimensions of climate change, with a particular interest in how media and various stakeholders communicate about the issue.
In this episode we talked about:
☯️ How firsthand experiences of climate events can contrast with media coverage
🎭 The power of comedy in connecting people to climate change information and ideas
🌏 Cultural perspectives on climate change ranging from Singapore and Jerusalem
🎬 The climate-themed standup comedy video competition he runs
👥 His excitement around younger generations' engagement with climate issues
#ClimateComedy #ClimateEducation #ClimateTech
More:Climate comedy work from Inside the Greenhouse at CU Boulder
The 10th annual climate comedy video competition
The Media and Climate Change Observatory🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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Marissa Beatty is the co-founder and CEO of Turnover Labs, a startup developing technology to convert CO2 into valuable chemicals. With a background in chemical engineering and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, Marissa is tackling the challenge of carbon utilization in the petrochemical industry.
In this episode we talked about:
🧪 Turnover Labs' approach to converting CO2 into useful chemical building blocks
💼 The challenges and opportunities for female founders in the climate tech space
💰 How Marissa secured backing from notable climate tech investors for her pre-seed round
🔬 The importance of corporate partnerships in developing and scaling carbon utilization technologies
🎯 Turnover Labs' strategy for narrowing their focus and identifying potential customers
🤝 Why I’m missing out by not going to Climate Week NYC
#CarbonUtilization #CleanChemistry #ClimateTech #netzero
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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Jessica Burley is an investor at Planet A Ventures, a €160 million fund pioneering a science-based approach to venture capital. Jessica is passionate about impact measurement and, as she says: "If there's not a significant positive environmental impact, the deal is off.”
In this episode we talked about:
🔬 Planet A Ventures' use of life cycle assessments to evaluate potential investments
🚫 The fund's in-house science team's veto power on deals lacking significant environmental impact
🤝 Collaboration with Speedinvest and Norrsken VC to create a climate hardware playbook
📊 The importance of impact measurement for businesses to demonstrate sustainability claims
🌡️ How climate risk is increasingly becoming a business risk
🚀 Her optimism in climate tech thanks to transformative technologies and dedicated talent
#VC #Hardware #Sustainability #Investing #ClimateTech
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
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