Meet Nihar Neelakanti, founder Ecosapiens

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Founders: Nihar Neelakanti

Motto: Ecosapiens’ mission is to make carbon offsetting and sustainable practices not only easy but effortless. We’re empowering individuals around the world to make a positive environmental impact in a fun and engaging way, by offering carbon-backed products in the form of digital collectibles that uniquely evolve as users continue to upgrade them to offset more carbon—and they have some perks attached to them. This simultaneously enables us to create a collective of eco-conscious individuals and creatives. While each individual may be drawn to the project for different reasons, they are all united in their contributions to the support of our planet.

Year Founded: 2022

Investors: Boost Ventures, Slow Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and Charles River Ventures.

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Climate Capital: How did you get into climate? Frame the problem you are solving and the market. What made you want to solve this problem?

Neelakanti: I grew up on the west coast and watched wildfires grow larger and more frequent during the course of my life. Not only were these terrifying and saddening, but they made me feel powerless in my ability to make a difference. I remember watching the fear in my parent’s eyes as we evacuated our home – selecting the most important items that we could fit in our car. The climate anxiety I felt then stayed with me throughout my career and eventually led me to Menlo Ventures, where I helped develop the climate thesis, which sparked the idea for Ecosapiens. I founded the platform to empower individuals to make a real difference for our planet and assuage their own climate fears, which are growing at an unprecedented rate.

There are many ways individuals can make a difference for our planet – by volunteering their time, donating money to charitable organizations, or planting a tree in a faraway country. But these are either time-consuming or feel very disconnected from the individual. In other words, if you’re not dedicating large amounts of time, you don’t necessarily feel like you’re a part of the change. The idea with Ecosapiens was to make climate action not only easy but engaging and attractive, even to the non-eco-conscious person. We want to make it so effortless to help the planet that even individuals who aren’t looking to make a positive impact can. 

Climate Capital: What are you building? 

Neelakanti: We’re building a collective that defends the climate through creative technology-driven projects. The first example of this is our digital art collection consisting of 350 unique assets, each backed by carbon credits representing the ability to offset 16 tons of carbon emissions. In essence, buy purchasing a single digital collectible, an individual is offsetting a year’s worth of personal carbon emissions. Owners of these assets can then upgrade them up to 7 times, offsetting an additional two tons of carbon and evolving their Ecosapiens to become more artistically intricate and rare each time. This brings the carbon offset total to 28 tons for a fully leveled-up Ecosapien.

Our digital art is also meant to attract art enthusiasts and collectors both because of its unique design and the perks they can eventually unlock, which include eligibility for automatic airdrops, exclusive invites to certain events such as conferences, dinners with the founders, and more. In order to attract a wider audience, we’re also in the process of creating other carbon-backed products. 

The carbon credits backing our alpha collection of assets are sourced from KOKO Kenya Tropical Forest Protection, an organization working to replace the use of charcoal, a major contributor to deforestation, with sustainable bioethanol cooking fuel through a network of self-service fuel stations. KOKO’s use of clean energy reduces the risk of respiratory diseases and protects forests from being cleared.

Climate Capital: What is next?

Neelakanti: NFTs have been an obvious starting place, but we’d love to expand our offerings to reach a wider audience. We’ve got a few concepts in the hopper that we’re really excited about, but nothing is ready for the public quite yet. Essentially we’re looking to dig into that intersection of climate and culture through other mediums to attract people with different interests–either through new products or via partnerships with big brands who already have solid communities we can tap into. We’re also toying with the idea of a credit card that would have points that would go towards climate causes. There are so many avenues we have left to explore–we’re currently focusing on building out our team so that we can best meet the goals we set for ourselves.

Climate Capital: What are the core elements of the culture you are building at your company?

Neelakanti: Our company culture unites eco-conscious passion, artistic creativity, and intellectual ambition and melds it with the fun, easygoing and positive energy that each and every one of our staff brings. We spend our days chatting about the beauty of art and the environment, how we can protect it, and how we can incentivize others to contribute in ways that are fun and engaging–all while learning about one another over fresh bagels and coffee.

We’re trying to bring that same positive energy to our community. We want to learn more about what is driving members to support our mission and our planet, and we interact with them on platforms like Discord, where we ask for the community’s thoughts on various environmentally focused topics. Ultimately, we want to make our planet greener, but we want to engage others while doing so to make that as fun and rewarding as possible. 

Climate Capital: What challenges did you not expect when starting the company and how are you overcoming them?

Neelakanti: Our first carbon-backed product is an NFT collection. NFTs were once the talk of the town, and everyone wanted to jump on the trend while it was still hot. But for various reasons, they’ve grown to be stigmatized over the past year, which has definitely posed a challenge to our efforts. One of the ways we’re overcoming this is by focusing less on the tech and more on how these collectibles translate into climate action. 

At the end of the day, it shouldn’t matter that our collectibles come in the form of NFTs–that’s really just the technology that is enabling us to back our art with carbon-credits. What matters is that individuals are effecting real-world positive change by purchasing a beautiful piece of art that grants them access to special perks. In other words, what we’re offering is really a medium through which people can make a difference and join a collective of like-minded individuals. Given how fast our initial collection sold out, we’re confident that people care about collectibles that make an impact.

Climate Capital: How can the broader climate community help you on your mission?

Neelakanti: The biggest thing for us right now is building brand awareness and growing our community. The more people we have joining us, the more we get to give back to the environment. The easiest ways to support our project are to follow our social channels–we’re on Twitter, Discord, and Instagram –and to share our posts so that others can learn about our mission and join our community.

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