What Went Right

Anil Achyuta is a partner on the Frontier team at Energy Impact Partners, where he makes early-stage deep tech bets across energy and climate. EIP was founded in 2015 around a coalition of utilities and industrials who now supply two thirds of its capital, giving its portfolio companies a route into the incumbents they need to sell to. He joins Terhi and Allison to talk about why the companies that deliver tend to solve an infrastructure choke point nobody was watching, where he sees real returns forming now, and the bet he wishes EIP had made sooner.

Sven Przywarra is co-founder and co-CEO of LiveEO, which turns satellite data into insight for the grid, pipeline and railway operators that run critical infrastructure, serving customers on six continents from its base in Berlin. He started the company in 2018 after building Europe’s largest event series for the space sector, where he met his co-founder Daniel Seidel. He joins Terhi and Allison to talk about landing a first enterprise customer in six months in an industry known for taking years, the decision to commission LiveEO’s own satellite constellation after years of buying imagery from commercial satellite operators, and how he and Daniel have run the company as co-CEOs for nearly a decade.

Hudson Hollister is co-founder and CEO of HData, the AI platform for energy regulation, bringing utilities, regulators and the wider energy ecosystem onto one system of record. He joined the SEC twenty years ago and was on staff through the global financial crisis, then spent twelve years passing a law to drag financial regulatory reporting out of the PDF era. He joins Terhi and Allison to talk about why almost every dollar of US energy infrastructure investment has to pass through a regulatory process, how large language models overturned the approach he had spent a decade and a half advocating, and what it takes to earn the trust of the most cautious buyers in the industry.

Michelle You is co-founder and CEO of Supercritical, the leading carbon removal marketplace that helps companies like Microsoft and Virgin Atlantic buy vetted, high-quality carbon removals. Before becoming a climate founder, she built music startup Songkick to over 20 million monthly unique users, raised capital from Y Combinator and Sequoia, and exited to Warner Music Group. She joins Terhi and Allison to talk about the wake-up call that pulled her into climate, what carried over from building one marketplace into a completely different sector, and what it takes to build at startup speed toward a problem measured in decades.