From Campus to Company: ClimateHaven on Yale’s Next Wave of Climate Founders

innovation

In a recent Accelerate Yale webinar, ClimateHaven leadership offered the Yale alumni community a candid look at where climate tech stands today and where it may be heading. The era of selling "green" as a moral premium has faded. What comes next will be built by founders whose products are simply better, faster, and cheaper than the high-carbon incumbents they aim to replace. 

 

The session focused on “the next wave of ventures innovating the physical economy” and addressed three core questions: which sectors are generating the most momentum in climate tech, what it takes for founders to make the leap from campus to company, and how Yale alumni can get involved as mentors, investors, or collaborators. ClimateHaven has backed more than 40 startups in New Haven over its first three years, connecting founders to capital, expertise, and a growing network of strategic partners. 

 

The panelists 

  • Ellen Su-Marquez ’13 (moderator) – Board member, Accelerate Yale 

  • Ryan Dings – President & Board member, ClimateHaven 

  • Kiko Wong ’22 – Investor & Founding team member, ClimateHaven 

 

Setting the table on ClimateHaven 

 

Dings opened with a primer on the organization itself. ClimateHaven was formed in late 2022 as an independent 501(c)(3), supported by the University and several other funders. Based at 770 Chapel Street, its mandate is to advance entrepreneurship that improves planetary health, enhances the physical world, and helps commercialize research from Yale’s labs. Roughly 85 to 90 percent of the founders that ClimateHaven works with are Yale undergraduate or graduate students navigating the “campus to market” transition, alongside a smaller cohort of Yale alum operators and select founders from the broader Northeast and beyond. 

 

The work, Dings emphasized, is hands-on. ClimateHaven helps first-time founders tackle a long list of “firsts”: first technical or commercial co-founder, first paying customer, first capital raise, and the milestones needed to grow enterprise value without diluting the founding team into oblivion. 

 

A “big tent” definition of climate tech 

 

Both Dings and Wong rejected a narrow definition of climate tech focused only on physical green commodities. Their framing rests on three pillars: planetary health (durability, efficiency, long-term resilience); economic resilience (supply chains, manufacturing, energy systems, infrastructure); and frontier science (translating research into deployable companies). 

 

Wong illustrated the breadth with a portfolio example: a pure-play software company building maintenance logistics for the trucking industry. It sounds nothing like climate tech. However, as trucking electrifies and moves toward autonomy, eliminating downtime in a sector long ignored by Silicon Valley becomes a meaningful emissions lever. “This industry has been massively overlooked by Silicon Valley, has been massively overlooked by Wall Street,” Wong said, “but there is so much margin, so much inefficiency.” 

 

The macro reset: from consensus bets to non-consensus opportunity 

 

The most candid stretch of the conversation was Dings’ diagnosis of where climate tech has been and where it is going. Looking back to 2015–2016, he described how net-zero commitments from countries, corporations, and municipalities sent up “flares”. These are market signals that draw capital into consensus bets on green cement, green steel, green electrons, and electric vehicles. The implicit assumption was that buyers would pay a “green premium” because they had to. 

 

By 2024–2025, he pointed out that moral underpinning had eroded as inflation reshaped the conversation, and the tailwinds disappeared. However, Dings reframed it as an entrepreneurial opening. “Climate tech continues, and it’s going to continue in a non-consensus way,” he said, with outsized payoffs available to founders and investors willing to do the harder work. 

 

What's exciting now: AI, autonomy, and electrification 

 

When Su-Marquez asked which markets the panelists were most enthusiastic about, Dings pointed to a tightly linked cluster of trends: artificial intelligence, autonomy, and electrification. 

 

Autonomy, in particular, may prove to be a bigger driver of decarbonization than the green commodities that defined the last cycle. Dings noted that autonomous vehicles, drones, and robots will overwhelmingly run on electrons rather than diesel, pulling emissions down even when climate is not the headline reason for adoption. He described this as the heart of an emerging “electro tech” movement, powered by now-commoditized clean generation like solar and wind, as well as next-generation sources including fusion, modular fission, and geothermal. 

 

The third leg, Dings added, is agentic AI applied to industrial inefficiency. Significant carbon can be cut, he argued, simply by squeezing waste out of supply chains, manufacturing, and energy systems. 

 

Wong then zoomed out, framing electrification as the next step in a long evolution of how humans generate and use energy. Civilization moved from biomass to coal, then to oil, then to natural gas, and now to electrons. The throughline, in his view, is not ideology but thermodynamic efficiency. Each transition has succeeded because it offered a better way to move energy through the economy. 

 

“The planet is not your customer” 

 

A theme the panelists returned to throughout the conversation: founders need to build businesses, not projects. 

 

“The planet is not your customer,” Dings said. “The planet could be a beneficiary of your work. It should be a beneficiary of your work. But ultimately, a person is going to be your customer.”  

 

Wong added that customer acquisition is one of the hardest problems ClimateHaven helps founders solve. The organization often leverages its team’s networks and builds bespoke top-of-funnel business development tools, increasingly with AI assistance, for each portfolio company. 

 

Founders to watch and the New Haven ecosystem 

 

Dings highlighted several alumni of ClimateHaven's work. 

 

CREW Carbon was among the first. Originally positioned as a carbon removal company, the team has found significant growth in water and water technology, raised both a seed and Series A, and closed close to $50 million in contracts with the Frontier Climate Fund. Oxylus Energy, which is working in sustainable aviation fuel, raised a seed round and was recently awarded a multi-million-dollar federal grant. Verustruct, founded by Yale SOM alumnus Nick Callegari, closed a successful pre-seed round in 3D printing and is now building in the New York metro area as it prepares for a seed round and commercial expansion. 

 

Turning to the local ecosystem, Wong, who recently moved back to New Haven from San Francisco, described a step-change in both the volume and quality of student founders compared with five years ago. He pointed to Yale Ventures, which launched in 2022 under Josh Geballe and is located at 101 College Street, alongside active student groups, dense informal networks of engineers, and the broader Connecticut innovation infrastructure. “Our ecosystem is small, but it is mighty,” he said, “and it definitely punches above its weight class.” 

 

How alumni can engage 

 

Asked by a startup and venture lawyer in the audience how the broader Yale alumni community can plug in, Dings offered four concrete pathways. First, alumni can follow ClimateHaven on LinkedIn and subscribe to the newsletter to stay connected to the organization’s events and founders. Second, alumni with specialized expertise, whether in a particular industry, corporate or financing law, or investing, can reach out to offer mentorship and guidance to ClimateHaven’s founders. Third, those who are able can visit the New Haven space to meet founders and the ClimateHaven team in person. And fourth, alumni can support ClimateHaven’s Future Climate Fellows campaign, which funds the Yale fellows and interns who work alongside its founders on research and company-building projects. 

 

For founders outside the Yale orbit, Dings was generous in pointing toward peer organizations: Greentown Labs and The Engine in Boston, Urban Future Lab, Newlab, and SOSV HAX in New York, LACI in Los Angeles, mHub in Chicago, and Greentown’s Houston location.  

 

Looking ahead 

 

Both speakers closed on a note of conviction about what is happening on Yale’s campus right now. Dings said he believes there are “decacorn founders” currently building in stealth at Yale, and Wong observed that the ecosystem is “just continuing to grow right now,” with significantly more students building companies than even five years ago. 

 

For the climate community, the takeaway was clear. The easy capital is gone, the moral tailwinds have softened, and that is precisely why this moment matters.