8 Startups Using Design to Create Climate Solutions
As the world grapples with the urgent challenge of climate change, design is crucial in driving effective action. Today, more startups are leading the charge, with climate tech investments reaching $70 billion in 2023. From cutting-edge materials that replace plastic to home electrification tools, climate-focused technologists and scientists are developing breakthrough technologies to tackle diverse climate challenges. Many are partnering with talented designers to achieve their missions.
It’s the biggest existential threat and challenge facing our generation and future generations. When you think about our mission of using design to improve the world, there’s no greater problem space than helping solve our climate crisis.Enrique Allen, Co-founder, Designer Fund
If you’re looking to break into climate tech, where should you start? After exploring our Designer's Guide to Climate Tech, you might be searching for the right company that aligns with your skills and interests. We’ve got you covered. Below, we profile eight Designer Fund portfolio companies using design to address climate change in creative and strategic ways. Read on to discover the climate tech companies you should know about—and some of them are even hiring right now.
👇 Click on any of the links below to skip directly to each company
Ambrook
⛰️ Headquarters: New York, NY / Remote
🚀 Company size: 11-50 employees
🗓️ Year founded: 2020
😀 Co-Founders: Mackenzie Burnett, Jeff Anders, Dan Schlosser
🚜 Sector: Fintech, American Industry
🔗 Website: ambrook.com
Profitable sustainability across the industrial supply chain
Ambrook is building the financial layer that makes sustainability profitable across the industrial supply chain. The team began with a focus on agriculture, recognizing that farms and ranches have an outsized environmental impact—yet they often lack the financial insights needed to persevere in a changing climate.
Agriculture has served as the ideal lighthouse industry, as agricultural operations are not just entities that grow crops or raise livestock; they are also grocers, distributors, processors, manufacturers, hospitality providers, developers, construction companies, and more. This diversity in agriculture reflects a broader need across the American industrial supply chain for a modern financial platform that empowers operators with the data needed to build generational businesses, aligning increased prosperity with improved stewardship of natural resources.
Working in climate tech engenders control and optimism. It can be difficult to stomach the growing climate catastrophes in our country, from flash flooding in Vermont to wildfires in California. Despite the increasing frequency of climate events and impacts, there are limitless ideas, from moonshots to pragmatic solutions, that can only be realized through the skill sets of technologists. Design is a skill set that transforms bold, intangible ideas into clear roadmaps for progress.Ali Aas, Creative Director, Ambrook
Design enables derisking
Ambrook is building a product with a wide surface area for the most complex operations in the most complex industries. And the stakes are high—there is zero tolerance for error when dealing with the accuracy of financial data and the movement of money.
Design enables Ambrook to comprehensively derisk the trickiest aspects of our product through UX research and product explorations, while simultaneously inspiring the team to build beyond the baseline set by the incumbents and define the standard for what a modern ERP can be.
Design has been a part of Ambrook since the very beginning, with Head of Design Jeff Anders as one of three co-founders. The design team has grown to three full-time members, adding Ali Aas as Creative Director and Calvin Ku as a Product Designer. Additionally, Ambrook contracts with graphic designer and illustrator Adam Dixon.
Together, we create systems to enable everyone to be involved in design and product decisions, from engineering to operations. Our design system was set up in the first week of Ambrook’s existence and has been evolving ever since, as outlined in our "How Engineers Design” blog post. We also do ongoing design training, team-wide feedback sessions and brainstorms, and permissive access to tooling like Figma. By distributing design competencies and decisions, we ensure that every detail has an extremely high quality bar for our audience, even those that the core designers don’t directly touch.Jeff Anders, Co-founder & Head of Design, Ambrook
Copper
🌉 Headquarters: Berkeley, CA
🚀 Company size: 11-50
🗓️ Year founded: 2022
😀 Co-Founders: Sam Calisch, Tucker Gilman, Weldon Kennedy, Eric Wilhelm, Josh Land
🏠 Sector: Home Electrification
🔗 Website: copperhome.com
Clearing the air
Founded by a team of entrepreneurs, inventors, and activists, Copper is on a mission to combat climate change by making it easier for people to electrify their homes—starting with the stove. The problem is substantial: 45 million homes in the U.S. still rely on gas cooking appliances, contributing to 13% of childhood asthma cases. In response, they recently launched their debut product, Charlie, an induction range with a built-in battery designed to simplify the transition from gas to electric while minimizing the need for costly electrical upgrades.
Copper is advancing sustainability by reducing reliance on fossil fuels and enhancing energy resilience. By facilitating the shift from gas to electric cooking, they're helping cut down on indoor pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and benzene. The battery-integrated appliances also contribute to grid stability by charging during periods of abundant renewable energy and avoiding peak times, which supports clean energy use and addresses the complex challenge of renewable grid balancing.
To broadly scale the adoption of induction and home electrification, we need to design products that are approachable and intuitive. They need to pay homage to history, while pointing to a hopeful electric future. It’s not just efficiency and performance specs that matter. To bring these products into our homes, we have to love them too.Sam Calisch, Founder & CEO, Copper
No compromise on design
Copper’s design philosophy is rooted in quality, thoughtfulness, and warmth, ensuring that their products not only solve problems but also enhance daily life. The team prioritized user feedback from the very beginning to create solutions that are both functional and beautiful. When developing their induction stove, they talked to chefs, home cooks, and even children to understand what would make their product truly user-friendly. The result was a stove that ditches impersonal touchscreen buttons for classic walnut wood knobs that feel more intuitive and satisfying to use.
Design is at the heart of everything we do at Copper. It's our driving force for addressing real user problems with thoughtful and creative solutions.Sam Calisch, Founder & CEO, Copper
Euclid Power
🌉 Headquarters: New York, NY
🚀 Company size: 101-200
🗓️ Year founded: 2021
😀 Co-Founders: Brian DeMaio, Jacob Sandry, Ryan Guay
🌱 Sector: Clean Energy
🔗 Website: euclidpower.com
Streamlining the clean energy transition
In 2024, nearly all new capacity added to the U.S. electric grid will be renewable, led by solar and storage, with over $300 billion invested in the energy transition in 2023. Integrating these additions into the grid is a Herculean, multi-year effort, involving extensive documentation, permits, contracts, financial models, and reports. Euclid's platform, comprising software and services, centralizes these data points, enabling developers and investors to resolve risks, manage their teams, and advance projects from a single interface.
Renewable energy leaders are driving this transformation, powering the electrification of industries from transport to real estate, meeting the rising demand of a growing population, and replacing dirty energy sources. Euclid streamlines their efforts by eliminating error-prone Excel worksheets, long email chains, and messy data rooms, allowing them to move faster and more efficiently. Currently, more than 500 projects are being managed through Euclid, underscoring its vital role in the clean energy transition.
Designing the energy system of the future
Design is central to the company’s mission, as it helps build paradigm-shifting tools that transform a highly manual and spreadsheet-oriented industry. Designers at Euclid will have the opportunity to work closely with the product and founding teams, learning more about the renewable energy development process while designing tools that make complex information easily digestible.
Design at Euclid is about helping renewable energy developers collect, manage, and track all of the pieces of information that are crucial for moving their projects forward. Our team bakes in the knowledge and workflows needed for energy projects into the design of the software so that when people use Euclid, they are more efficient, make fewer mistakes, and feel assured that they are tracking everything that needs tracking. Through good design, Euclid helps accelerate the world's transition to clean energy.Minjeong Kim, Staff Designer, Euclid
Ever.green
🌉 Headquarters: Seattle, WA
🚀 Company size: 1-10
🗓️ Year founded: 2021
😀 Co-Founders: Cris Eugster, Michael Leggett
🌱 Sector: Green Investing
🔗 Website: ever.green
A meaningful marketplace
Ever.green is a marketplace for transferable tax credits and high-impact RECs. Accessible to corporate buyers of all sizes, these sales make more new clean energy projects happen. Companies like Atlassian, REI, Autodesk, Brooks Running, Stripe, and more come to Ever.green to upgrade how they meet their sustainability goals, invest in new renewable energy projects, and show leadership in the climate fight.
Ever.green is redefining how companies procure green energy attributes to ensure there is both broad participation and meaningful impact. Bringing material contracted cash flow to a project can reduce project risk and in many cases make the difference of the project happening in the first place. An early success for Ever.green involved bringing 15 companies together to help repower a 55 MW wind farm which had operational risk and was also at the mercy of volatile wholesale power prices.
We all know design is more than the pixels and words—it is the art of identifying and solving the biggest problems. What bigger problem is there than climate change? And yet it can be overwhelming to figure out where to dig in. There is no substitute for rolling up your sleeves, studying a slice of the larger picture, talking to people, and figuring out how to make it 10x better for someone.Michael Leggett, Co-Founder & CPO, Ever.green
Rooted in design
Ever.green co-founder Michael Leggett spent 15 years as a UX designer. For Michael and his team, design is more than just pixels and words, it’s the art of identifying and solving the biggest problems.
Design thinking permeates every level of our business from high level strategy to everything we build.Michael Leggett, Co-Founder & CPO, Ever.green
Kopperfield
🌉 Headquarters: Remote
🚀 Company size: 11-50
🗓️ Year founded: 2021
😀 Co-Founders: Mark Wong, Jesse Vaughan
🏠 Sector: Electrification, Contractor Tools
🔗 Website: kopperfield.com
Accelerating residential electrification
Around 40% of greenhouse gas emissions are driven by consumer vehicles and home appliances including heating, cooling, cooking, and cleaning. Transitioning all the devices in and around our homes to all-electric products is critical to driving down emissions, but residential electrification suffers from high soft costs, as much as 15% to 65% of total project costs. This is largely due to inefficient contractor workflows and high friction for consumers.
To help with this, Kopperfield provides software tools to residential electrical, HVAC, and solar contractors that save time and increase conversion, while accelerating the movement towards home electrification. Residential contractors including electricians, HVAC technicians, and solar installers are on the front lines driving the adoption of cleaner technologies—with better software that supports their work, the whole industry gets moved forward.
Design is a core part of our theory of change. We’ve seen first-hand that design can meaningfully influence consumer and business decisions.Jesse Vaughan, Co-founder, Kopperfield
Delight in the details
Great design is core to Kopperfield’s strategy. Contractors and the homeowners they serve have rarely been treated to well-designed software products, and Kopperfield sees an opportunity to improve the customer experience and delight both contractors and their customers through design.
The Kopperfield brand is a celebration of our electric future and an invitation to step into it today. Our brand idea—Power to you—put empowerment at the heart of it. Building on that foundation, we opted for an electrifying, can’t-miss color palette and set our elements on a visible grid as a playful nod to the transformation of our energy grid and our world.Danielle LaRoy & Jessica Strelioff, Co-founders, Goodside
Lumen Energy
🌉 Headquarters: San Francisco, CA / Remote
🚀 Company size: 11-50
🗓️ Year founded: 2020
😀 Co-Founders: Peter Light, David Coen
🌱 Sector: Clean Energy, Commercial Real Estate
🔗 Website: gelumen.com
Using design to accelerate decarbonization
Investors, tenants, and regulators are increasingly pressuring the commercial real estate sector to decarbonize. However, the path to sustainability has been fraught with confusion, sluggish progress, and costly consulting reports that typically focus on one building at a time and often go unused. With buildings being responsible for an estimated 35% of US greenhouse gas emissions, they represent an immense opportunity to transition to cleaner energy sources. Lumen Energy provides simple, fully-financed solutions for commercial property owners to adopt clean energy with ease.
With a combination of cutting-edge data science, software, and deep sector expertise, Lumen Energy is making on-site clean energy accessible to commercial real estate owners, accelerating the transition toward sustainable energy. Lumen Energy’s proprietary pricing engine can remotely assess building features, utility bills, roof quality, credit, permitting, grid prices, and other constraints.
I’ve learned that the industry often sees solar transactions as inherently challenging—and they certainly can be. However, at Lumen Energy, we believe that good design can streamline the process and encourage broader solar adoption. By creating more straightforward clean energy financing and implementation software, my goal is for our design to establish the benchmark for what excellent solar transaction software should be.Kamini Iyer, Founding Designer, Lumen Energy
Demystifying complex technologies
With great product design, Lumen Energy strives to translate that complexity into a simple, delightful experience that results in immediately actionable offers. Honest and transparent conversations drive potential customers to the platform and Lumen Energy’s strong brand design builds trust, demystifies confusing information, and helps build connections.
Good design is crucial to accelerating decarbonization. Success requires demystifying complex technologies and processes for users, and nowhere is this more true than at Lumen Energy. Today, our entire team is deeply involved in the design process and we hope that we continue to push the boundaries on what is possible with great design.Dave Coen, Co-founder, Lumen Energy
Learn more about how the team at Lumen Energy thinks about design.
Sway
🌉 Headquarters: San Leandro, CA
🚀 Company size: 1-10
🗓️ Year founded: 2020
😀 Co-Founders: Julia Marsh, Matt Mayes, Leland Maschmeyer
📦 Sector: Sustainable Packaging
🔗 Website: swaythefuture.com
Swaying the future of plastics
Thin film plastics are ubiquitous in our daily lives, and they’re only becoming more prominent. Currently, 83% of brands use flexible plastic packaging, with 160,000 plastic bags created every second. Less than 3% of flexible plastic is recycled, meaning the vast majority ends up in landfills, nature, and our communities.
Sway is a material innovation startup creating and scaling seaweed-based, home compostable replacements for plastic packaging. Their patented products match the vital performance attributes of conventional plastics and are designed to plug into existing manufacturing, enabling scale and massive impact. With seaweed-basic plastics, Sway has the opportunity to shift entire supply chains towards that future, driving down demand for harmful petrochemicals while actively healing natural systems from sea to soil.
Sway isn’t just designing next-generation materials. We’re part of a broader movement designing for holistic systems change. Our vision is of a regenerative reality for the next generation, where healthy ecosystems and communities are prioritized.Julia Marsh, Co-founder & CEO, Sway
The team is staying busy. Just a few years into their journey, Sway has already patented three seaweed-based technologies, launched stock offerings of their packaging materials, partnered with brands on packaging pilots, won an array of awards, including the 2023 Tom Ford Plastic Innovation Prize, and are well on their way towards commercialization—starting with the Sway Innovation Coalition launching new Seaweed Polybags this fall 2024.
Design can divert waste
Sway sees the power of regenerative design to divert materials from waste. On average across a variety of products, 80% of environmental waste is determined at the design stage. Designers can use their power for good—to enable behavior change towards responsible consumption, to implement and scale circular materials, to optimize business models and partnerships to minimize environmental impact and improve the health of ecosystems.
Sway exists to create a future where plastic has the power to replenish the planet, rather than pollute.Alyssa Pace, Communications Lead, Sway
Zero Acre Farms
🌳 Headquarters: San Mateo, CA / Remote
🚀 Company size: 11-50
🗓️ Year founded: 2020
😀 Co-Founders: Jeff Nobbs, Steve del Cardayre, Jay Keasling
🍳 Sector: Food
🔗 Website: zeroacre.com
Rethinking the oils we cook with
Vegetable oils, a $232B market, are one of the most consumed foods in the world, yet they are causally linked to serious health problems while devastating the environment through deforestation. Zero Acre Farms hopes to transition the world away from harmful seed oils and towards more sustainable and healthy solutions with a cleaner, all-purpose cooking oil that doesn’t require deforestation.
Their goal isn’t just to create a new, healthier product in a legacy category—it’s to drive a movement and radically shift behavior. By advocating for a reduction in seed oil consumption, they aim to improve both human health and the environment.
For anyone, not just designers, "work" is a lot more fun when it's making a difference in the world and making a positive impact on an important problem. There are lots of important problems to solve, and climate tech is one of the biggest ones.Jeff Nobbs, Co-founder, Zero Acre Farms
Building a movement based in brand
Zero Acre Farms isn’t just looking to create a new, healthier product in a legacy category—it’s seeking to radically shift behavior and build a movement with their cultured oil that has a 10x smaller environmental footprint than vegetable oil.
Great brand design and compelling marketing are central to the success of Zero Acre’s efforts, on top of creating a better, more delicious product. Zero Acre Farms’ primary design goals are to explain the problem clearly, and inspire people to take action. Building trust in this space can be complicated with false health claims flooding people’s feeds.
To combat all the misinformation, Zero Acre Farms is deploying actionable, accurate, science-backed information in order to spread the word.
Get involved
Whether it's designing lower carbon footprint software or using data visualizations to ignite behavior change, the opportunities to address climate change through design are endless. As a designer, you have the opportunity to meaningfully accelerate climate action by bringing your skills to the table. To view more mission-driven companies in our portfolio, view our job board.