The Future of ClimateTech: A Discussion with CEOs and Leaders Charting the Course

Rachael’s interest in Venture Capital began in Tel Aviv while working at Pitango, Israel’s first and largest VC fund. Here, Rachael worked on their nascent Impact Investing fund and discovered the role technology and entrepreneurs hold in driving systemic shifts in sustainability and socioeconomic equity. Rachael received a grant from Northwestern University and the Gates foundation to return to Israel to study sustainable food systems. Returning to Northwestern, Rachael co-founded a profitable business which expanded to serve 100+ universities. This experience was complemented with 2.5 years at Accenture, where Rachael consulted multinational companies on their 5-year technology innovation strategy, examining global trends and emerging technologies. Throughout this time, Rachael’s continued passion for the VC space was reinforced by working with Accenture’s corporate venture arm, attending a variety of conferences, and serving as a mentor for a sustainable food accelerator.

Erik has worked with both traditional venture investors and corporate venture teams during his career. He has deep experience evaluating opportunities, structuring investments and advising management on value creation. Previously, he helped build the strategy and make investments for the PGA TOUR’s corporate ventures group. Erik began his career with Deloitte Consulting where he focused on corporate strategy and M&A engagements. He holds a BA from the University of Texas at Austin where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with High Honors. He has an MBA in Finance from Kellogg.

Kentaro Kawamori was the youngest Chief Digital Officer ever at a Fortune 500 company before starting Persefoni – he serves as CEO and Co-Founder. His career has focused on the software space and includes time spent as a Cloud Strategy Consultant at Accenture and a Venture Partner focused on early-stage SaaS companies

Before co-founding Kettle, Nat previously led Ushahidi, the world’s largest open-source data platform for crisis response. Here he helped scale the Ushahidi platform to over 200 countries gathering over 10M first-hand reports. Previous to that he was a Presidential Innovation Fellow for Open Data, and then the first Chief Data Officer of the US Agency for International Development, where he helped open up and analyze large data sets for humanitarian response.

Jack Roswell is the Co-founder and CEO of Perennial. Previously, he worked with researchers at the University of Virginia and the Peruvian Ministry of Culture to perform sub-soil imaging work at archaeological sites. Jack has a background in remote sensing and spectroscopy as a former researcher at Brown University.