Climate: Catalysing the Growth of Climate Tech

Tessa is Co-Founder & CEO of Olio, an app tackling the climate crisis by solving the problem of waste in the home & local community. Olio does this by connecting people with their local community so they can give away rather than throw away their spare food and other household items, and lend and borrow instead of buying brand new. They also have over 100,000 volunteers who collect unsold food from local businesses and redistribute it to the community via the Olio app. Olio has grown to over 7 million users in 63 countries and its impact has been widely recognised, most notably by the United Nations who highlighted Olio as a “beacon” for the world, and by Vivatech who awarded Olio “Next European Unicorn”.

Prior to Olio, Tessa had a 15 year corporate career as a digital Managing Director in the media, retail and financial services sectors, and she met her co-founder Saasha whilst they were studying for their MBAs at Stanford University. Tessa is passionate about the sharing economy as a solution for a sustainable world, and about ‘profit with purpose’ as the next business paradigm.

Tessa’s TED talk about the power of sharing has been watched over 1 million times, and she was awarded the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award for 2023, the longest running award for female business leaders.

Leo Johnson leads PwC’s Disruption practice and Co-Presents the Radio 4 series “FutureProofing”, exploring the impacts of exponential technologies on Business and Society. Formerly at the World Bank, Leo is the co-Founder of the advisory firm Sustainable Finance, now part of the PwC group.  He is the co-author of “Turnaround Challenge: Business and the City of the Future” (Oxford University Press, 2013) and a Visiting Business Fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise & Environment at Oxford University.

Roee is a serial entrepreneur of mission-driven companies. Previously COO and Co-Founder of OpenWeb (valued at $1.5B). Today, he focuses on impacting the race to Net Zero.

Dhiraj is a Co-Founder of Shazam, the mobile music recognition company (acquired by Apple in 2018). He was named one of Europe’s Top 50 technology entrepreneurs by the Financial Times in 2015.

In the course of his career, Dhiraj has served in senior roles in media & entertainment, digital business consulting and the charity sector with Save the Children.

Dhiraj is now focused on innovating for impact, supporting “Tech for Good” startups, particularly in climate tech. He has invested in several women and minority-led startups, and believes in the power of young people as the change-makers of the future.

Tommy Stadlen is a Founding Partner of Giant Ventures, the global venture capital firm backing purpose-driven technology founders.

Tommy was previously Co-Founder & CEO of Swing, an imaging technology company chaired by Twitter founder Biz Stone. In 2017, Swing exited to Microsoft where Tommy held product leadership roles.

Tommy was also Co-Founder and Chairman of the Tailwind group (NYSE: TWNI), three public companies with a combined market cap of over $1bn.

Tommy is the best-selling author of ‘Connect: How Companies Succeed by Engaging Radically With Society’, written with former BP CEO Lord Browne. He is a frequent contributor to media outlets including the New York Times, Financial Times, BBC and Bloomberg.

Tommy is a former McKinsey consultant and previously worked for President Obama. He graduated with First Class honours from Oxford and holds an MSc (Distinction) in Environmental Policy from the London School of Economics. Tommy has been recognised by the Financial Times as a top 50 Global Ally Executive and by Entrepreneur’s ‘Best Companies in America’ award.

Lubomila Jordanova is the co-founder and CEO of Plan A, a leading corporate carbon accounting, decarbonisation, and ESG reporting software solutions provider. Lubomila is also co-founder of the Greentech Alliance, a community of more than 2,000 startups connected to more than 500 advisors from VC, media, and business. She serves as an Advisory Board Member to the Sustainability Board at Chloé. Prior to Plan A, she worked in investment banking and venture capital as well as the fintech industry in Asia and Europe. She has been recognised as Obama Leader Europe 2022, MIT Innovator Under 35 Europe 2022, Marshall Fund Fellow 2022, Top 50 Women in Tech in Germany 2021 (Handelsblatt) and 30 under 30 (Forbes), among others.

Hayden Wood is the Founder and CEO of Beams, a new digital platform making home renovation simpler for homeowners and contractors, and greener for the planet.

A certified B-Corp, Beams manages builds end-to-end, pairs homeowners with vetted contractors, offers award-winning designs and ensures projects stay on track – all while offering sustainable guidance at every step of the journey.

Hayden was previously Co-Founder and CEO of UK energy supplier, Bulb.

Prior to founding Bulb, Hayden studied economics at LSE and spent 10 years as a management consultant, first at Monitor Group and then Bain & Company.

Marta Krupinska is CEO and Co-Founder of the carbon removals market maker CUR8. Founded alongside the renowned climate scientist Dr Gabrielle Walker and backed by Google Ventures, CUR8 is on a mission to enable corporate sustainability leaders, project developers and investors to confidently invest in the high quality carbon removals that will support future market development. Marta formerly founded and exited two fintech startups, Azimo and FreeUp, and was Head of Google for Startups in the UK and co-lead of Google’s Black Founders Fund. Alongside building CUR8 Marta is also Chair of Youth Business International, a global charity working to help young people start their own businesses, and of ACUA Ocean, a marine cleantech startup. Marta is a well known public speaker and has received multiple awards for her work, including from the likes of Forbes (30 under 30 in 2017) and Evening Standard (London’s Most Influential People).

Heidi Lindvall is a tech investor, former startup founder and human rights documentary filmmaker. She founded and is a partner of Pale blue dot, an 180M EUR European climate tech fund investing in diverse founders solving ambition problems.

Will is a Venture Partner at firstminute capital ($350m seed fund backed by 130 unicorn founders) and Norrsken ($500m + multi-stage fund founded by the Klarna co-founder). He is focused on Climate, AI and Deep Tech, and has been actively involved in climate tech for 15 years, most recently as the Founder at Hummingbird Technologies ($25m raised, 70 employees, B Corp, exited to Agreena), and which pioneered the measurement and AI data verification of Regenerative Agriculture from space. Will was formerly a partner and buyside investor at Highclere, a $6bn global hedge fund focused on tech and renewables. Will has completed 30 M&A transactions and has made 25+ angel investments to date across the broader tech space. Will is also a co founder at Black Barn Labs, a robotics and automation roll-up, and a SaaS platform for direct carbon removals (both in stealth). Outside of investment activities, Will is a frequent contributor to media outlets and science bodies, including the Financial Times, the Earthshot Prize, the European Space Agency, Cognition X and Sifted, and is an elected adviser at Technation, The Council for Sustainable Business (a sounding board for DEFRA ministers), Tech UK, Subak, Glowb, The ARK and flox.ai. Will graduated with First Class Honours from the University of Edinburgh and did an MBA at INSEAD in 2015, where he was a scholar. At firstminute, Will works closely with: Verse (ML grid optimisation), Tenet (EV fintech), Volare (insect tech), Alcemy (AI for green cement), Infraspeak (maintenance SaaS), Airly (air pollution SaaS), Phaidra (AI for decarbonised industry), Automata (lab automation), Magrathea Metals (magnesium from sea water), Fork & Good (syn protein), Vitrolabs (lab grown leather), Ramp (crypto fintech), Kapu (African e-retail), Truecircle (recycling AI marketplace).

Michelle You is co-founder and CEO of vetted carbon removal marketplace, Supercritical. At the forefront of the UK’s climate tech ecosystem, Michelle is a former venture partner at LocalGlobe, where she focused on climate investments, and is a member of the TechZero task force. She’s also a repeat entrepreneur with a proven track record. As co-founder of Songkick, she grew the company to over 20m monthly unique users and raised capital from Y Combinator, Index Ventures and Sequoia before exiting to Warner Music Group in 2017.

Louise is the CEO of Volans, the influential advisory think tank. As a successful entrepreneur, she has spent her career working in innovative businesses, pioneering cradle-to-cradle and circular business models. At Volans, she has launched thought leadership initiatives such as Tomorrow's Capitalism Inquiry and the Bankers For NetZero initiative (now a standalone organisation and the UK chapter of the UN-led NetZero Banking Alliance). Louise also works directly with a select group of forward-thinking businesses to help their transformation to success in a regenerative future including Neste, Acciona, ESB (Eire), Selfridges Group, Sage, Handelsbanken.
 
Highly focused on empowering the next generation, Louise is a mentor through Aspire and 1 Million Mentors. She lectures at a number of universities and is also on the Advisory Board for the University of Exeter Business School, the Shizenkan University and the IESE Business School The Future of Capitalism programme. Louise sits on the advisory boards of the Global CO2 Initiative, Neste Advisory Council for Sustainability and New Markets, The UKRI Interdisciplinary Centre for Circular Chemical Economy, the UK CLIMATES Programme on Rare Earth Elements and The Good Growth Company. 
 
Louise also hosts the Green Swans book club whose authors are all at the forefront of some aspect of systems thinking. Visit: volans.com