Rizome has given us the miracle of growing, using and converting bamboo into structural materials. Fred comes from the energy world and has been looking into energy and biochar, as well as their vital impact on the environment and sustainable technologies.

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David is a real pioneer in the use of bamboo in construction. He is an architect and he has been using bamboo for over 40 years and today, he is going to tell us about his journey and about Rizome, an amazing company that does the entire value chain of growing bamboo forests using carbon funding, converting the material into sustainable construction materials, and also is able to produce biochar as an additional product from the process.

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This company is a high-efficiency, electrical cable company that just achieved a very impressive Series A funding round. Jason has a PhD in Material Science and comes from a very scientific and technical background. He has also been a CEO and CTO of CTC Global, an Industrial company, as well as a Vice President of BAE Systems. We look forward to you tuning into this week’s episode, which is full of engaging insights relating to energy efficiency and sustainable technologies.

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Patricia is a civil engineer by training and she’s had a long career in sustainability. She developed and built wind farms in Eastern Europe and sustainable buildings in South America, before becoming an entrepreneur and investor in the energy transition and impact space.

Today, we’re going to focus on Patricia's work in the negative carbon economy.

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Maria has been an impact investor for almost a decade with a great track record from top institutions like Goldman Sachs Asset Management. She has been involved in all forms of ESG investing, in real assets, private equity, infrastructure as well as carbon removal. Recently, she started her new company Abatable, which is a carbon offsetting procurement platform backed by Y-Combinator.

In this podcast, Maria and I discuss the importance of the Voluntary Carbon Markets as a way to offset the emissions from hard-to-abate sectors of the economy.

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Under the natural economy banner, there is also excitement around technology-enabled businesses (e.g., vertical farming, nature-based construction materials) that produce food and other materials much more efficiently than traditional pathways. These businesses can often be located in farming and forestry communities, thereby bringing high paid jobs to the region.

In this podcast, Jane Morrison-Scott and Martin Valenti from the South of Scotland Enterprise - a regional development organization - talk about how they are supporting Natural Economy projects that help the environment, while bringing jobs and prosperity to local communities. We were also joined by David Farquhar, CEO of Intelligent Growth Solutions, who builds community-based vertical farms that can produce a wide range of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and saplings for local consumption.

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Bhupinder has a distinguished career in genomic research in Harvard Medical School, the Whitehead Institute, and Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research. Bhupinder’s explorations in genomic drug development brought him face-to-face with the challenge of storing and analyzing vast amounts of data.

As Bhupinder uncovered opportunities to improve the data storage and informatics, he realized that applying those insights to improve datacenter efficiency more broadly could produce a billion-dollar business.

In 5 short years, Swiss Vault has developed data storage servers that are able to store 14 times more data per unit volume, and operate 10 times higher energy efficiency than today’s systems. 

Learn more about the growth journey of this extraordinary company by listening to my interview with Bhupinder.

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Microshare deploys sensor-as-a-service solutions into buildings to improve the utilization of the space, create a safer working environment, and increase the energy efficiency of the building. This smart IoT solution has been attracting the attention of many partners and resellers of smart building solutions like Microsoft and Arrow Electronics, as well as bringing in leading impact investors such as Avenue Capital. We’re delighted to have Ron here to tell us more about all the incredible growth story unfolding at Microshare.

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Like many of our impact entrepreneurs, Keith caught the start-up bug mid-way through his professional career. After a series of early roles at US utilities like Progress Energy and Lakeland Electric, Keith impressed as a commercial leader and rose to VP of Infrastructure and Transport of Serco - a $6b managed services company specializing in providing performance and financial expertise to support government and commercial sectors worldwide.

In 2010, Keith struck out into his entrepreneurial career by leading Cadence, an Energy and infrastructure developer, operator and consultancy. As President, Keith oversaw many transformative projects such as a FERC licensed Hydro plant in Alaska, as well as acting as General Manager and CFO at E-Pellets, a developer and operator of Biomass Pellet Plants which produces industrial grade biomass pellets exported to European industrial/utility customers. At E-Pellets, Keith planned, developed and financed a 450,000 MT biomass pellet manufacturing plant as well as delivering the acquisition and expansion of a 150,000 MT pellet plant.

In 2018, Keith joined Enviropower, a developer and operator of Waste-to-Energy gasification systems and Plastics-to-Liquids facilities. As governments become increasingly strict on unsustainable approaches to waste management through the incineration and landfill, Enviropower’s clean gasification technology has a very important role to play in the upcoming Energy transition.

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In the days leading up to COP26, I was privileged to be part of a green finance panel at the COPtimism event in Glasgow. The conference brought together the world’s most purpose driven brands, industry leaders, academics, environmentalists, and finance community with one aim. To drive forward the action that is needed to fix the climate emergency.

After a WWF report in 2019 found that UK banks and asset managers collectively financed projects that emitted 805million tonnes of greenhouse gases, the finance industry needs to evolve if the UK has any chance of meeting its Paris Agreement Targets. But how?

Listen to the episode to find out.

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In the days leading up to COP26, I was privileged to be part of a green finance panel at the COPtimism event in Glasgow. The conference brought together the world’s most purpose driven brands, industry leaders, academics, environmentalists, and finance community with one aim. To drive forward the action that is needed to fix the climate emergency.

After a WWF report in 2019 found that UK banks and asset managers collectively financed projects that emitted 805million tonnes of greenhouse gases, the finance industry needs to evolve if the UK has any chance of meeting its Paris Agreement Targets. But how?

Listen to the episode to find out.

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Over the last few weeks, I've introduced to you some of the most transformative companies I know that are well positioned to become Impact Unicorns and there are more of these discussions to come. Now, many listeners have requested that from time to time, we take a step back from interviewing individual companies to talking about the bigger picture. And so, in this episode, we take one of those opportunities to take a helicopter view of how sustainable investing will unfold. And in particular, I talk about the capital deployment to the ESG movement. And how much of it is actually going into high impact opportunities, like the impact unicorns that we profile on this podcast. The presentation that I will share with you today was first delivered as a keynote to the global chamber, a non-profit organization trying to promote global sustainable development.

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Over the last few weeks, I've introduced to you some of the most transformative companies I know that are well positioned to become Impact Unicorns and there are more of these discussions to come. Now, many listeners have requested that from time to time, we take a step back from interviewing individual companies to talking about the bigger picture. And so, in this episode, we take one of those opportunities to take a helicopter view of how sustainable investing will unfold. And in particular, I talk about the capital deployment to the ESG movement. And how much of it is actually going into high impact opportunities, like the impact unicorns that we profile on this podcast. The presentation that I will share with you today was first delivered as a keynote to the global chamber, a non-profit organization trying to promote global sustainable development.

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In this episode, I am joined by Dr. Christian Thiel, Founder and CEO of EnergyNest, a company with an innovative platform for decarbonizing industrial heating, heating of homes, offices, malls and industrial processes is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. It is also a segment of the economy that is hard to decarbonize, because heating systems are still often set up to be powered directly from the combustion of fossil fuels. And within heating, industrial process heat accounts for 66% of the total carbon footprint. No wonder that Dr. Thiel’s EnergyNest has been generating so much interest among industrial customers by fertilizer plants and refineries, who are keen to use the company's thermal battery to meet their ESG targets for higher temperature industrial processes above 300 to 400 Celsius.

Christian’s passion to generate global impact led him away from the comforts of corporate life to the challenges of entrepreneurship and EnergyNest.

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Christian’s passion to generate global impact led him away from the comforts of corporate life to the challenges of entrepreneurship and EnergyNest.

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In this episode, I am joined by Javier Cavada. Javier is a growth maven of the energy industry and has a knack for popping up in disruptive scenarios. Following an early career as an industrial engineer and university professor in his hometown of Santander, Spain. How he found himself in Finnish energy company Wärtsilä. From 2008, he built that China business before returning to headquarters in Finland, where he rose to President of the energy solutions division and oversaw the transformation of the business from gas fired engines to renewables. But as the pivot to renewables ended cruise control, Javier wasn't one to stay nestled in a steady role managing operations of a global company. In 2018, he joined HighView Power as CEO and president and has led the company through the inflection point from technology development venture to large scale commercial deployment of high views revolutionary long duration energy storage solutions.

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In this episode, I am joined by Andre is the founder and CEO of Novihum, a company that manufactures a soil enhancing product that increases soil organic content and nutrient levels and removes the need to use conventional fertilizers. When used as part of a regenerative agricultural system, Novihum’s decade long scientific trials have shown that its soil enhancer can increase the carbon content and intrinsic fertility of agricultural soils. Andre came to the helm of Novihum from a senior operational investing role at BASF, the global chemicals company. In today's podcast, he will talk about how his passion and concern for soil sustainability around the world helped him make the jump into entrepreneurial life, and how impact businesses like Novihum may soon find tangible financial support from the evolving space of carbon markets.

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In this episode, I am joined by Derek Sutherland, Co-founder and CEO of CTFusion, a company developing magnetic nuclear fusion reactors to be ready for deployment as early as the 2030s. CTFusion’s reactor design could generate 100 megawatts of clean, steady baseload power with the spatial footprint of a large supermarket. If realized, fusion reactors could be the perfect distributed energy solutions to complement the intermittent energy produced by wind and solar power. Even as a schoolboy, Derek was always fascinated magnetism and plasma and has pursued this lifelong passion studying nuclear science and engineering at MIT, followed by a PhD in the University of Washington. He has worked in both the public and private sectors of the fusion industry, with stints at the Los Alamos National Laboratories, as well as companies like general fusion and General Atomics.

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In this episode, I am joined by Detlef Schoen, founder and CEO of new AG, an innovative platform that invests in farms around the world and transforms their practices to be more regenerative and resilient. regenerative agricultural methods, if applied on a global scale, have the potential to sequester Terra tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide into the soil to greatly reduce the use of fertilizers while enhancing soil nutrients and improving the nutritional content of the food that's run. That left started new ag with 40 years of agricultural expertise under his belt. Early in his career, he led Cargill’s European grain business before launching for farming and agricultural trading businesses that have spanned Europe, US, Australia and Africa.

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In this episode, we are joined by George Goldsmith, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Compass Pathways. George is an entrepreneur dedicated in bringing about positive changes in society with particular focus on health and wellbeing. George’s early training and experience was a multi-disciplinary blending of cognitive psychology, clinical psychology and computer science. I am thrilled to welcome George as it’s the first company we're talking to that's in the area of mental health, which is of such great importance these days. 

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In this episode, we are joined by Jon Salazar. Originally a native of Madrid in Spain, john has worked around the world as currently the founder and president at Gazelle wind power in Dubai. Gazelle is developing a new technology to reduce the cost and to increase the durability of floating offshore wind arrays. Floating offshore wind can be deployed at large distances from the coast where the strongest and most consistent winds are to be found.

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In this episode, we are joined by Dave Skibinski. Dave is a Senior Executive and Innovator, building enterprises in developing and expanding markets in the life science and digital health. He's an influential change agent and have been at the forefront of market trends and entrepreneurial endeavors that make a meaningful impact on people's lives, continually seeking out new and innovative ways to bring about positive change.

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In this episode, we are joined by Dave Skibinski. Dave is a Senior Executive and Innovator, building enterprises in developing and expanding markets in the life science and digital health. He's an influential change agent and have been at the forefront of market trends and entrepreneurial endeavors that make a meaningful impact on people's lives, continually seeking out new and innovative ways to bring about positive change.

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In this episode, we are joined by Robert Hokin, Managing Partner at Greenbackers Investment Capital, a Glasgow based venture capital firm backing net zero companies in earth tech, ocean tech and green tech. At the age of 25, he was entrust to the world of restructuring and selling his father's business and has never looked back. He went on to enjoy huge success in growing major business units of large corporations. 

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In this episode, we are joined by Louis Ferro, co-founder and president of Empire State Greenhouses. During this episode, we learn how Louis is working with leading edge technologist, agricultural ecologists, local communities, and a variety of public and private funding sources to develop his ambitious projects. Empire State Greenhouses represents a triumph of public-private partnership and Louis has proven himself to be a master of this art form, an essential capability of building impact unicorns.

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During this episode, we learn how Louis is working with leading edge technologist, agricultural ecologists, local communities, and a variety of public and private funding sources to develop his ambitious projects. Empire State Greenhouses represents a triumph of public-private partnership and Louis has proven himself to be a master of this art form, an essential capability of building impact unicorns.

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In this first episode, we are joined by Glen Martin, Chief Architect at Hyox Space.

During this episode, Glen and I talk about different topics from building the future from aerospace technology, how exposure to different cultures help shape out an entrepreneur, and the exciting future for clean hydrogen and it's impact to future society.

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During this episode, Glen and I talk about different topics from building the future from aerospace technology, how exposure to different cultures help shape out an entrepreneur, and the exciting future for clean hydrogen and it's impact to future society.

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Each week in Impact Unicorns, Indranil unpacks the success stories of entrepreneurial champions from his network, digging deep to find the winning practices that listeners can use.

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