Climate Capital Syndicate
Climate Capital Syndicate is a group of founders, execs & developers, led by a team of former founders & domain experts. We invest in climate solutions across geographies, stages & verticals.
Join the syndicate
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Zeina Fayyaz Kim is a Partner with CCS and co-founder of the Diamond List, an annual list of underrated climate startups built on nominations from top-tier climate investors.
Zeina works as Head of Strategy at The Plant, an NYC-based real estate development company that specializes in transformative, adaptive-reuse projects. The Plant's flagship development will see a former coal-fired power plant on the Hudson River restored and revitalized as a global home for climate solutions. Previously, Zeina drove fundraising and M&A at an edtech company, made grants and impact investments, and ran a couple accelerators.
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Nishant Mani is currently the Chief Business Officer at Terra.do, the global climate career platform with the mission to get 100M people working in climate. He serves on the board of organizations such as Climate Cabinet and is an investor in several climate tech companies and funds. He was formerly CMO and an executive leader at successful startups including Yext, Dashlane, and Winc. Before that, Nishant ran online advertising for Capital One's US card business. Outside of climate work, he is a husband, father, and retired DJ spinning the tropics in his head.
As a Partner at Climate Capital Syndicate, Nishant invests in companies focused on rapid deployment and scaling of established decarbonization solutions across sectors.
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Jessica Alter spent the last decade building and running online communities and marketplaces for a wide ranges of audiences from teens to entrepreneurs and top executives to political campaigns. She managed teams that span marketing, product, operations and business development. She loves creating and growing intuitive experiences that solve real-world problems.
Jessica is a 2x founder, previously named 100 Most Creative People in Business by FastCo, and currently a partner at Climate Capital Syndicate.
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Schaffer Ochstein is an investor at Climate Capital, where he sources deals and conducts diligence on startups, including market research, product roadmaps, investment risks, and the use of funds. He hosts the MCJ idea jams to support early-stage companies, where entrepreneurs obtain live feedback on their climate ideas/businesses.
Over the past three years, he built his portfolio of climate tech companies and has joined many great climate-focused communities, such as Climatebase, OPF, MCJ to learn from experts in the space.
Schaffer’s previous work at Capital One and Deloitte centered around understanding where the world is going in fintech and mobility. Now he is taking what he learned at these companies and applying it to climate tech.
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Jennifer is an entrepreneur, climate tech investor, angel investor, technologist, author, keynote speaker, and consultant dedicated to driving innovation and impact. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Huffington Post, Fast Company, Wired, and more.
Jennifer leads and co-instructs Climate Angels, an educational program on climate tech angel investing, with team members, instructors, speakers and mentors from Lowercarbon Capital, MCJ Collective, Climate Capital, Planeteer Capital, CTVC, Earthshot, 500 Startups, Terra.do, Climactic, Voyager, Plug and Play, Gaingels, Elemental Excelerator, and more. https://climateangels.vc
LinkedIn
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Joris van Mens has been a climate investor since 2020. He joined Climate Capital in 2022, working on sourcing, diligence and management of new deals. He co-founded, ran and sold an online solar platform in Mexico and leads global product organizations at Google.
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Sam Runkle is an investor at Climate Capital where he focuses on energy and decarbonization in the built environment. Alongside his investment role, Sam is an operator at Lumen Energy where he leads new initiatives including product and enterprise partnerships.
Previously, Sam was an On Deck Climate Tech fellow, a venture fellow at Alumni Ventures, and a go-to-market leader at both Paylode (enterprise SaaS) and Zeus (proptech marketplace), where he initiated corporate climate programs.
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Alexandra Stieglitz is an experienced entrepreneur and operator. In addition to her work with Climate Capital, Alexandra is an Operating Partner with the Drawdown Fund and a mentor with the Breakthrough Energy Fellows Program and Creative Destruction Labs.
As cofounder/CEO of Pluma, an HR software platform, Alexandra bootstrapped the company to exit with an ROI of 66X.
Prior to Pluma, Alexandra worked in the climate solutions and biotech space. Alexandra has an undergraduate degree in Public Policy with a minor in Environmental Studies from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
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Ian Campbell has been focused on early-stage climate investing since 2020. Before joining Climate Capital, he helped stand up the 2030 Fund at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, supporting MA-based deeptech climate startups. Prior to that, Ian worked on the Systems Innovation team at Indigo Ag, developing business units around agricultural soil carbon sequestration.
Coalescing his work as an early-stage operator and investor, he joined Climate Capital in 2023 to scale fund operations and investment activity.
Portfolio
Carbon and Other
Cambium Carbon (doing for downed trees in cities what Misfit Markets has done for ugly fruit)
Lingrove (high-performance composite product to replace wood)
Rubi Labs (carbon-negative fabric made from carbon emissions)
Phykos (cultivate seaweed and sink it to the bottom of the ocean, durably storing excess carbon dioxide for 1,000 years)
Colossal (world’s first de-extinction company)
POW BIO (scale up fermentation as a service, enabling a new wave of synthetic bio companies to get to market more quickly and cost effectively)
Cemvita ('Microbes-as-a-Service’ platform)
Sway (re-inventing packaging—starting with the plastic bag—to restore and replenish the planet)
Sust (turning lawns into a climate assets)
Concert Bio (Full-stack microbiome optimization platform)
Muddy Machines (Autonomous agricultural robots)
Adaptation
Alt Proteins
Gelatex (uniquely mass-scale and affordable production of edible plant-based nanofibers)
microTerra (creating a novel ingredient that the plant-based food industry critically needs)
Energy
Daanaa (Chip-based technology that allows energy to be transferred freely, safely, and efficiently)
Wildgrid (marketplace for Millennials and Gen Zs to easily find trusted solar providers in their local area)
Impossible Mining (autonomous robots for ecosystem friendly deep sea mining)
Piersica (building next generation solid state batteries)
Plentify (accelerating the energy transition by connecting home appliances to cheaper, cleaner energy)
Pronioa (a physics-based approach to energy storage technology)
Photon Marine (electric outboard propulsion for commercial boat fleets)
Posh Robotics (automates EV battery repurposing and recycling)
Hydrogen
DiviGas (exponentially better polymer chain membrane to separate hydrogen gases)
Verne (high-density, low-cost hydrogen fuel and storage for heavy duty transportation)
Origen (lowest-cost green hydrogen electrolysis)
Transportation & Logistics
Terraline (decarbonizing freight)
Packsmith (decentralized fulfillment)
Dispatch Goods (reverse logistics)
Manufacturing
unspun (scan-to-production system that produces custom fitting clothing with robotic 3D weaving)
Hilos (‘3D printing as a service’)
Passtur (Building the food factories of the future)
Unicorn Biotechnologies (Biomanufacturing platform)
Check size: $40k - $250k via syndicate