A Venture Capitalist’s Take On AI And The Climate Crisis

Name: A Venture Capitalist’s Take On AI And The Climate Crisis
Uploaded: 2025-10-01T17:08:37+00:00
Duration: 12 min 58 s
Channel: Forbes

Forbes

13 hours ago

Planeteer Capital Founding Partner Hannah Friedman joined Forbes Talks from the Under 30 Summit in Columbus, Ohio to discuss the future of green innovation. Friedman delves into early-stage climate tech venture capital, the practical applications of AI in climate solutions, and why founders must solve real problems to build a truly sustainable company.

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00:00Hello, hello. I'm Zoya Hassan and I'm here at the Forbes Under 30 Summit in Columbus, Ohio with the lovely Hannah Friedman. Thank you so much for joining me.

00:11Thanks for having me.

00:12I'm very excited to chat. Tell me about Planeteer and what you do.

00:16Happily. Planeteer Capital is an early stage pre-seed and seed climate tech VC fund that we got off the ground in 2022.

00:23I support as an early stage venture partner, so I get to meet entrepreneurs, recommend investments, and support portfolio companies as they grow.

00:32Is it intentional that Planeteer sounds so similar to Palantir?

00:38We try not to be confused with Palantir. The original idea actually came from my business partner, a wonderful woman by the name of Sophie Burdum.

00:47And we drank an entire bottle of wine trying to come up with a different name.

00:50But the original concept was around, there's so much engineering to do in service of the planet.

00:56And often we actually find other Planeteers who know the old 1980s cartoon.

01:01Okay. Yeah. I was like, maybe it's intentional. Maybe it's like a play, you know.

01:05So tell me, how did you get the idea for this?

01:08Like, where did you see a gap in how climate startups are being funded that made you want to start this?

01:16Yeah. Huge credit to my business partner who conceived of the idea.

01:21And I really came aboard to operationalize the fund as we went from ideas over coffee into launching now a $54 million plus first-time fund.

01:29The original idea was that in the pre-seed stage, when founders are making those very first phone calls to their venture capitalists and thinking about starting the idea,

01:38you have to see the best founders.

01:40And a lot of them were gravitating to my business partner because of a newsletter that she helped get off the ground.

01:45But they also need someone who can invest, set terms as a financial institution and really lead a proper round.

01:53And someone who's climate specialized.

01:55So both my business partner and I, we've built businesses, we've studied sustainability through and through, we've grown companies.

02:01And that specialization of, we intimately understood the industries, the business models, the mishaps that various founders would come across as they tried to scale climate businesses.

02:12Whether that's pure software, data plays, or other hardware-enabled businesses, we were that able to fill that pre-seed specialization gap.

02:20Absolutely. How big are the checks you're writing?

02:23We'll write a check anywhere between $2,500 in the pre-seed stages, kind of up to a million, or up to about $3 million in the seed stages.

02:29What are you seeing in terms of what kinds of startups are, you know, on the path to success?

02:38The ones you've backed, is it mostly software or does it look more hands-on?

02:45You know, what are you backing, essentially?

02:48Great question.

02:49I think a lot of people try to make climate investing about a dichotomy between software and hardware.

02:55And I think that's a really false dichotomy.

02:57Instead, if cleantech 1.0 and original aspects of climate and impact investing, as it was originally called, if that was about mitigation and renewable energy,

03:10then we had this kind of zero interest rate environment that brought about the decarbonization, right, and included things like adaptation in the conversation.

03:18All of it primarily predicated on large corporate involvement and a lot of corporate commitment behind net zero targets and nature-based targets.

03:27I think the next wave, as conceived by my business partner, I think the next wave of what we're looking for is really kind of a two-pronged approach,

03:37which is what are the business models that are going to be able to enable growth and the growth of revenue for all industries going forward as the world gets more volatile and weirder in a climate change reality?

03:51But also, what are the businesses that are going to be able to cut off the tail end of the distribution curve and protect against unmitigated downside risk?

04:00And those are two ways in which we're looking at the future of where the puck is going in order to back startups.

04:05And what you hear in that is sector agnostic, technology agnostic, there's going to be a lot of different players who can enable growth and protect unmitigated downside risk.

04:15Absolutely. You know, as we know, funding towards any impact startup, especially in the climate space, like has been historically low, right?

04:25You're here stepping in to change that.

04:27I want to know, on the startup side of things, are we seeing more and more people start businesses or is there a shortage of climate startups?

04:38I would say there's absolutely no shortage of climate startups.

04:41I think with the younger generations increasingly studying these problems from the get-go, wherever they come from, right?

04:47I'm from Texas.

04:47There's incredibly smart agricultural founders, incredibly smart mechanical, electrical, civil engineers, people who are reconciling with the physical realities of our commodities, our worlds, our supply chains, many of whom here in Ohio as we speak.

05:03But those are the entrepreneurs who I think are also stepping into this climate change reality.

05:08And I think they continue to be a huge source of inspiration for me, but also a huge funnel of founders who want to build dedicated to climate.

05:19Why are you focused on pre-seed so much? What do you think that adds?

05:24Yeah, I think a lot of venture capitalists and historically over time, the venture capital model is like a sledgehammer.

05:30And when you're only holding a sledgehammer, a lot of things start to look like a nail.

05:35And so it's a very powerful tool.

05:37But I think venture capital needs to make money in order to continue to provide its fiduciary return to LPs.

05:44I think that in order to do that in climate, in order to do that when companies have to scale across, build new markets, protect that downside risk,

05:51when they have to reconcile with the realities of hardware and supply chains and commodities,

05:56I think that those businesses require a different type of venture capitalist.

06:00It's not a scale for forever, you know, reach for an IPO moon only at, you know, valuation, you know, to the wind.

06:08I think instead from the fund model that we've built, I think high upfront ownership with that climate specialization early

06:16is really how you as a venture capitalist can make solid returns in your portfolio and really justify the fund model.

06:24And so we built that fund from scratch, partly because we didn't see that portfolio construction, fund construction elsewhere.

06:31Yeah. What was your journey in terms of actually starting the venture capital firm, getting the funds, going to LPs?

06:41Give me a little bit of backstory there.

06:42Yeah. It took longer than we expected it to, but it was an amazing journey.

06:47And we had partners who from the get-go were, they understood the generational transitional challenge that we were,

06:53we are investing behind and the upside that can come from it.

06:56And they were ardent supporters from the, from the start.

06:58I think my background also, I was investing for a number of years in early stage venture capital,

07:03in the circular economy with a firm called Closed Loop Partners and explored many different ways,

07:08explored launching a fund vehicle with other tools in the capital stack, right?

07:12Subordinated debt facilities that could catalytically support the future of infrastructure as we were going to build it.

07:19And I had a number of amazing mentors who really pushed me along the way in the apprenticeship model that is investing.

07:26And we were running discounted cash flows on pre-revenue companies in the seed stage strategy that we were running.

07:31So I think that level of discipline of like, where is this company truly going to commercialize?

07:36What is its wedge in the market?

07:37How does it efficiently get distribution in, in its climate sector?

07:42I think those are some of the fundamentals we, both Sophie and I brought over to Planeteer and have really carried us, carried us forward.

07:49How are you, I'm curious to know how, if at all, you are using AI on the business end of things.

07:55And then I want to know how many companies that you are backing are building things using AI at their core.

08:03Yeah, we absolutely use AI in a bunch of our workflows.

08:06There are some data permissioning concerns when we deal with sensitive information from technologies that are novel and new businesses.

08:12But we've certainly automated as much as we can in the workflow, and it's really enabled a lot of productivity for us.

08:20Interestingly, I also think that the way that AI has enabled more founders to pitch VCs and to kind of bring their ideas in a presentable pitch deck to the market,

08:32I think that's increased the volume of what we're seeing from founders in the market, but it's also decreased the quality.

08:38And I think the founders who come from industry, the founders who still move beyond those kind of initial tools to get cold outreaches and pitch decks in the door,

08:49and who can really activate not only their networks, but more creative ways to get the conceptual fundamentals of their commercialization at the forefront of the story,

08:58that's been really compelling in this age of like, AI has improved the volume, but not necessarily the quality of what we're seeing from our pipeline.

09:07But AI is absolutely transformational to the underpinning of the businesses that we're using.

09:14I think if you're not using AI in some way, shape, or form, you are behind the ball.

09:19However, I've been investing in AI for long before it was having this market moment in which the users and the average retail user has interfaced it in this way.

09:30For example, a long time ago was an investor in a company called Amp Robotics, which was using computer vision to sort the recyclables off a conveyor belt at a materials recovery facility.

09:42It's about as unsexy as unsexy gets when it comes to the smelly, trash-riddled recycling conveyor belts that we had.

09:49But that computer vision was the technology backed by machine learning that was able to help more efficiently and profitably sort recyclables at these facilities.

10:01So AI is not necessarily like new under the sun in some of these climate supply chains.

10:06Absolutely.

10:06And we know how, as you just said, how AI can play into these startups and benefit the planet at the end of the day because you're using it for good.

10:18But what is your take on how AI is impacting the environment and climate change?

10:23We just came from New York Climate Week last week.

10:27I flew directly from here.

10:28And it was almost a rebranded energy and AI Climate Week because AI and data centers are driving so much load growth.

10:38I think a lot of people are talking about that as a problem.

10:40How are we going to create the energy systems, fix the grid in order to supply that energy to those massive consumers, right?

10:49Some companies alone expect to consume more energy with their data center footprint than three times all of New York City.

10:58Like it is a tremendous amount of load growth with very real physical problems for our grid.

11:03However, I think that it's also a huge opportunity because right now, without that growth in the energy system, without that demand willing to buy it and prioritizing speed, sometimes over price, we are able to have renewable energy, geothermal energies, right?

11:19The traditional solar, wind, battery storage, geothermal energies and nuclear have a shot while things like gas turbines for natural gas powered energy generation are on backlog.

11:30So that momentum is really driving forward.

11:33I think a push for clean energy systems, renewable energy systems, even at a time when those are slightly less politically popular.

11:40Absolutely.

11:41We are in a room full of entrepreneurs, a lot of them with, you know, building companies.

11:48Some are already scaled to great extents and some are just getting started.

11:54Leave me with one piece of advice you would give these entrepreneurs about how to build sustainably, how to build a company sustainably.

12:08Have to solve real problems and you have to be obsessed with the customers for whom you are solving those problems.

12:15And I think the companies that, and the founders we back, that are most sustainably equipped for the long term and they have the most energy and uplift and the kind of luck that favors the prepared.

12:29In many ways, they, they do not identify necessarily as an entrepreneur or a founder for the sake of building something amazing and world changing.

12:37They identify with the problem of their customers.

12:40Okay.

12:40Thank you so much for joining me.

12:42So yeah, it was such a pleasure.

12:43Thank you so much.