Portrait Series
Movers & Shakers in the Boston Climate Tech Community
These are portraits of people helping move Boston's climate tech community forward on the ground. This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are many others doing this work who deserve to be part of this series, and I hope to feature more of them as it continues.
Jeevan Ramapriya runs the Commonwealth's official international investment office, the first call for foreign delegations and global companies sizing up Massachusetts as a US market entry point.
Jeevan Ramapriya
Executive Director, Massachusetts Office of International Trade and Investment
"The Healey administration is making Massachusetts the climate innovation hub for the world. We're looking to work with investors, entrepreneurs, and businesses from all over to help us get there. We need their ideas, their expertise, their capital."
Tom Burton chairs the Sustainable Energy & Infrastructure Practice at Mintz, one of the nation's first clean energy legal practices, founded in 2004. His team has completed more than 800 transactions totaling over $40 billion across the energy transition.
"As a smaller city in the US, Boston punches way above its weight across every area that matters — talent, innovation, culture. Innovation and science here are not just alive, they are absolutely alive and well."
Tom Burton
Chair, Sustainable Energy & Infrastructure Practice, Mintz
Dan Goldman has been investing in early stage climate technology since 2005, longer than almost any fund in the country. Clean Energy Ventures manages $415 million with seven portfolio companies in the Boston area alone.
"Massachusetts has huge advantages having all three combined — the policy environment, the universities generating significant new technologies, and the incubators that cultivate those technologies and get them to commercial scale. That creates a really strong ecosystem."
Dan Goldman
Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Clean Energy Ventures
Galen is a Climate Finance Fellow in the Massachusetts Governor’s Office of Climate, Innovation and Resilience (OCIR) where he is focused on exploring a variety of novel approaches to financing public and private sector climate mitigation and resilience projects drawing on his broad knowledge of the energy transition, climate technology markets, and clean energy and climate policy and program design and management experience at the municipal and state levels.
"What really sets this region apart is a culture of generosity. More mature companies mentoring earlier stage ones, utilities talking to startups, experienced entrepreneurs helping newer ones find their footing. That spirit is what strengthens our innovation ecosystem here."
Galen Nelson
Climate Finance Fellow - Governor's Office of Climate, Innovation, and Resilience · Full-time
Kristen Craft connects Boston's climate founders to capital at Fidelity Private Shares, one of the few institutional platforms purpose-built to help early stage companies professionalize their fundraising and get in front of the right investors.
"I deeply believe this is the best place to start a company and the best place to grow a company. Even for founders who live elsewhere, Boston is such a great place to visit, tap into the incredible intellect here, and get to know this community."
Kristen Craft
Director, Ecosystem Development, Fidelity Private Shares
Sorin Grama co-founded Greentown Labs, now North America's largest cleantech incubator, and is doing it again with Transaera, a Boston-built company rewriting the energy efficiency of air conditioning with a materials science breakthrough from MIT.
"Boston is really good for companies doing hard things — hard tech. You can tap into an amazing talent pool with MIT, Harvard, Tufts, Northeastern. We were able to build big hardware here. I really don't think I could do this anywhere else."
Sorin Grama
Co-Founder & CEO, Transaera
Victoria Pisini founded Climate Salon to do something simple and rare: put thinkers, founders, investors, and policymakers in the same room to build connections across Boston's climate ecosystem.
"We bring in experts who stand up and say: this is what's keeping me up at night. If you want to help me solve it, come sit at my table. Leave your title at the door and focus on what needs to get done."
Victoria Pisini
Founder, Climate Salon
Barry Reaves shapes workforce strategy across New England for the Alliance for Climate Transition, connecting climate tech companies to talent in communities the industry has not historically reached.
Barry Reaves
VP, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice, Alliance for Climate Transition
"If I had $10 million, I'd put a Greentown Labs type of organization in Roxbury, Chelsea, Lawrence, Springfield, and Worcester. Climate tech for all, not just for some. Because we need those inventions and products to help all of our communities."
Sukanya Punthambaker, PhD co-founded Breaking out of the Wyss Institute at Harvard, engineering a microorganism that degrades up to 90% of plastic types into carbon dioxide and water.
"Microbes have evolved over millions of years with the ability to break down plastics into smaller pieces. We are using that natural ability and making them more efficient. Plastics are everywhere, in every human organ including the brain. This is the next massive problem."
Sukanya Punthambaker, PhD
Co-Founder & CEO, Breaking
Rob Stoner spent 15 years at the MIT Energy Initiative, the last year as its director, before leaving to build GeoRedox in Cambridge.
" In a curious way, with its high energy costs, and one of the least energy intensive economies in the US, Massachusetts provides a natural platform for energy technology and policy innovation. We’re used to paying for energy, and our service-based economy thrives despite our lack of low cost fossil resources - we’re the only state in the Union that actually imports LNG! Inventing low carbon energy solutions isn’t just about thinking globally here - it’s a matter of immediate economic necessity."
Rob Stoner
President, GeoRedox
Georgie Campbell Flatter runs Greentown Labs, the world's largest climate and energy incubator, with 130,000 square feet across Boston and Houston and a community of 675 startups that have built there.
"Boston and Massachusetts is one of the best places for building and scaling companies that are making the world a better place. Entrepreneurship is hard — hard is fun for our community — but entrepreneurship is hard, and so community matters."
Georgie Campbell-Flatter
CEO, Greentown Labs
Carlos Araque founded Quaise to unlock geothermal energy at depths and temperatures previously unreachable, using millimeter wave technology developed at MIT's plasma science and fusion center. The company is now building its first gigawatt-scale project in the Western United States
"Boston is a very unique city. I came here for school, came back 20 years later to do venture capital, and that eventually led me to Quaise. The technology we're developing comes straight from MIT — and now we're building the first gigawatt scaling geothermal project in the Western United States."
Carlos Araque
Co-Founder & CEO, Quaise
Cameron Halliday co-founded Mantle to capture CO2 emissions from heavy industrial assets, enabling decarbonization without shutting down the industries that power society. The company operates projects across North America and Singapore from its Boston base.
Cameron Halliday
Co-Founder & CEO, Mantel Capture
"A lot of our projects are in very remote places — Trophy, Quebec, Saskatchewan, Texas, Singapore. But all of the industry know-how and brain power sits here in Boston. We love being part of this ecosystem and using it as a hub as we go and do that work."
Jordan Forrester is co-founder of the Africa Climate Accelerator, building bridges between Boston's deep tech ecosystem and emerging climate markets in Africa
"I'm grateful to have grown up in Boston. Although I'm doing a lot of work in Africa, trying to build bridges across ecosystems — Boston is an amazing flywheel. Students, entrepreneurs, people in policy all come together to create a special cocktail of people building new things and going from zero to one."
Jordan Forester
Co-Founder, Africa Climate Accelerator
