Climate Capital Syndicate
Climate Capital Syndicate is an LP group of climate & tech founders, execs, developers & designers who invest into SPVs led by a team of former founders & domain experts (below).
We invest in climate solutions across geographies, stages & verticals.
See below for Syndicate investments & click here for the full Climate Capital portfolio.
Join the syndicate
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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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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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Katie Durham is an investor at Climate Capital Syndicate focused primarily on energy, electric vehicle, and carbon removal technologies. Prior, Katie was Vice President of Climate at Antenna Group, a global marketing agency, where she oversaw a multi-million dollar client portfolio.
Katie spent the first decade of her career helping climate startups go to market and scale. She led communications at Mosaic, now one of largest financiers of home solar, and was the first employee and head of marketing at Google X spinout, Dandelion.
Alongside her work at Climate Capital, Katie is an MBA Candidate at Columbia Business School, where she received the Feldberg Fellowship, a full-tuition merit scholarship. Katie received her B.A. from Vanderbilt University, where she also received a full-tuition merit scholarship as an Ingram Scholar. Katie has also been honored with the Forte Fellowship for women business and the Udall Scholarship for national environmental leaders. She is based in New York City with her husband and two daughters.
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David Lacklen is an investor at Climate Capital Syndicate focused on energy and grid tech, fintech applications and opportunities around the electrification of our buildings and transport sectors. In 2020, he founded Seed9, where he is currently a General Partner focussed on emerging market startups. He is also an active mentor working with early stage founders participating in accelerator programs run by Techstars, Google and Johns Hopkins.
Previously, David was at Google for 13 years working across sales, product and commercialization roles where he led the launch of advertising products across US, European and Middle East markets. He is currently wrapping up grad school at Johns Hopkins with a Masters degree in Energy Technology and Policy.
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Kirthika Padmanabhan is an investor at Climate Capital Syndicate where she focuses on investments in circular economy and ocean technologies. She plays the dual role of an investor and Operator. She is also currently an Entrepreneur-in-residence at The Nature Conservancy scaling an ocean conservation program.
Prior to this she worked at X, The moonshot factory (prev. called GoogleX) where she helped scale climate technologies and programs in the ocean and circular economy spaces to bring solutions to the climate crisis. Prior to X, she worked a decade at Google (Asia, Europe and US) with multiple business functions (Strategy, Operations, Analytics, Finance, Program Management etc) in Google Ads, Youtube etc. She started her career as a software engineer at a hedge fund. She holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and graduate degree in Management Information Systems with a focus on Finance.
She is active with non-profits in the climate space and works with women@ groups to empower more women into climate solutions.
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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.