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In 2007, during a “surge” of troops sent to Iraq during the ongoing war, Venkatesan Murali was enjoying driving his BMW convertible with his 14-year-old son when his son hit him with: “They’re going to war for oil, and you’re driving a gas guzzler.”
Murali says his “itch” for climate action started there. He subsequently swapped his BMW for a hybrid Toyota Prius, and a few years later launched Merlin Solar, in 2012, with former Intel colleague Bob Brainard.
The company builds solar panels that can travel literally anywhere. They have peel-and-stick panels for roofs where you can’t drill holes—like on data centers, which can’t risk water leaks. Merlin has even built solar panels that can go on drones and on trucks to power things like their air-conditioning units. Its earliest major client was the U.S. military, via partner companies, and Merlin just announced a $31 million Series B fundraise. The company plans to use the funds to increase production capacity and for general scaling up, said a spokesperson.
Murali says one of the biggest differences between working at Intel and running his solar panel company is overcoming skepticism. “I didn’t have to convince anyone they needed a microprocessor,” he says. “This is the hardest business I’ve ever been in, but it’s so damn worth it. I remember getting up in the morning and going like, ‘How am I going to spend my day?’” and he didn’t want to spend it making semiconductors.
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Solar panels
Delia RodrÃguez has taken a different approach to innovation in solar panel technology.
Solar farms and agriculture both need a lot of land, and RodrÃguez is working to solve this issue with vertical solar panels, which, research shows, tend to perform better than the traditional, flat ones. Her Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup, Eki Labs, partners with farmers to put vertical solar panels on their land so they can still grow crops. They can then sell the electricity to companies, municipalities, or other farmers.
Several years ago, when RodrÃguez was working in finance at Procter & Gamble, she realized the high-flying deals she was doing with the likes of Amazon were not taking environmental factors into consideration to a great extent. She switched to a sustainability focus at P&G, and then moved to impact accelerator Ashoka. She was inspired to launch her company after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and subsequent energy crisis in Europe. RodrÃguez created her startup with the help of Harvard Innovation Labs ($20,000) and two fellowships from MIT ($50,000).
Eki’s panels use less than 5 percent of the space in a given property, RodrÃguez says. And the panels, which face both east and west, maximize electricity in the morning and afternoon, not just noon and afternoon, like traditional, south-facing, horizontal panels. They subsequently have higher yields and allow for short crops to grow.
RodrÃguez comes from a family that has been farming land in northern Spain since at least the 1800s, so building a company like this came naturally, so to speak, she says: “I’m very connected to the land. I was like, ‘I think we shouldn’t stop producing food for energy. I guess we should do both.’”
Water conservation
Devon Wright thought he would plant the orchard himself. After selling his startup, Turnstyle Solutions, to Yelp in 2017, Wright bought property in Occidental, California, in 2019, that had room for a small fruit-growing operation. After the pandemic, while continuing to work at Yelp, he moved to his weekend property full time, and finally tried his hand at agriculture, planting apples, pears, peaches, and plums.
One day, he left the irrigation valves on by accident—and he ran out of water. Wright’s property is not connected to a municipal water source, so it runs on groundwater (rain that soaks into the ground) that is pulled from the earth into a tank. Once the tank runs dry, you can’t take a shower or wash a dish until it fills up again, he says.
After running out of water several times because of simple forgetfulness and line breakage, Wright began to wonder if other farmers in the area were struggling with flimsy irrigation valves with no automatic off switches. It turned out many of them were. Normally, clog and leak detection is done by a person going around in their truck checking the irrigation systems with their eyes. “It’s backbreaking labor, going from valve to valve to valve,” Wright says.
In 2022, his research led him to found Lumo, which provides farmers with patented first-of-its-kind smart irrigation valves. They have built-in timers and automatically detect leaks or clogged filters, Wright says. Two patents, hardware tech development, and $5 million in pre-seed and $7 million in seed funding later, Lumo now has clients that include five of the biggest grape growers in the U.S., which piloted his tech in a few of their fields and are now customers.
Textile recycling
Everywhere Apparel, a facilitator of textile circularity with plans to expand into other industries and products, partners with factories and brands to make recycled cotton apparel. It also turns cotton waste and T-shirts into various types of textiles, among other things.
“Building systems on top of existing industrial infrastructure is how we are going to scale quickly enough to address climate change,” says Max Citron, co-founder and CTO.
It’s easier to scale if you don’t need a special machine to do it, so Everywhere Apparel adapts commonly-in-use textile machines to deal with recycled materials. Recycled cotton products typically have shorter thread lengths, for example, than fresh cotton ones, so the company reconfigures the machines to manage those sorts of issues. This speeds up the recycling process.
And Everywhere Apparel doesn’t own the facilities, so “it’s an extremely lean business model,” Citron adds.
The brand was started because fellow co-founders Irys Kornbluth (now COO) and Nick Benavides (now CEO) were working at an indie record label—started by Benavides and Citron—around 2017. They found they could not provide artists with 100 percent recycled cotton T-shirts to sell.
Everywhere Apparel now sells them and other “blank” apparel and printed clothing. The company also allows customers, with a QR code, to send garments back to it to recycle for free, though they declined to share how customers have taken advantage of this program. Kornbluth says the company also does bulk waste pickups.
Everywhere Apparel has worked with Coach, Chappell Roan, and Urban Outfitters, and has raised $5.5 million in venture funding, says Kornbluth.
But the plan is huge. “We want to change the whole world,” says Benavides, who was also a co-founder of the fintech app Robinhood. He says he sees the company in the same terms. When an early version of Robinhood was created in 2011, the idea of a commission-free brokerage was ludicrous. Now, it’s ubiquitous. And the founders say the circular economy is the next big thing.
“It’s the new industrial revolution,” Citron adds. To his point, research from the National Institute of Standards and Technology shows just 15 percent of clothing is recycled.
Tree planting
Carbon Counts makes a mobile game, EverForest, that supports environmental donations. The company, founded by Michael Libenson, Vikram Sahai, and Brett Jenks in 2020, dedicates a portion of its revenue toward planting real trees. “I’m trying to help save the world,” Libenson says.
Users who play the puzzle adventure game are greeted by a purple fairy with a green outfit and yellow-and-red-highlighted hair. Meant to personify Mother Nature, the fairy tells users, “Get to Player Level 6 to plant your first real tree!” EverForest has under 100,000 users at this point, but it’s “just getting going,” Libenson says. Carbon Counts has raised about $10 million in capital.
While most of that has gone to build the app, some of that has gone to plant trees. Were the venture capitalists OK with that? “You can’t go from planting zero trees a month to planting millions of trees a month,” Libenson says. “You’ve got to kind of build up that operational capability.” They partner with nonprofits in Kenya and other parts of Africa that are already planting trees, he adds.
One of the next steps: a huge social media push to get users on the app, such as for TikTok—to bring Gen-Z into the effort to game, do good, and talk about it. “People like to be helpers,” Libenson says. “People also like to be seen as helpers.”