Cool Climate Collective

Our Thesis

Welcome to The Collective 🌲👐🌲

We bring together investors and operators beyond who are at the intersection of climate and technology to accelerate solutions to climate change.

Our collective members have built companies like Tesla, Stripe, Google, TikTok, Meta, Instagram, DoorDash, Twitter, Slack, Square, and Airtable.

Ways to interact with The Collective:

Join the Syndicate (and invest $1k-$50k+ via SPVs into climate tech startups we collectively source and diligence)
Participate in our Investment Committees (we match scientific, domain and industry experts to join ad-hoc investment committees)
Learn about the Fund (get broad diversified exposure into an early-stage climate tech portfolio)
Pitch Your Startup (for us to put $100k-$250k into your funding round)
Mentor Climate Startups (and support founders working to better the planet)
Co-Invest with Us (and let's share our favorite climate startups)
Have other ideas? Contact us (we are constantly incubating new initiatives and collectively spinning them out, learn more)

🌎🔥⌛️ Our Manifesto ⌛️🔥🌎

Climate change is a **problem of atoms and systems**… and solving it is the greatest wealth-creation window of our lifetimes.

Our north star is clear:

Prevent compounding externalities. We back technologies that shift entire value chains, not just knock a ton of CO₂ off a ledger.
Scale what thrives in extremes. If a solution works in deserts, monsoons, or policy vacuums, it can scale anywhere.
Move at founder speed. Pre-Seed / Seed checks ($100k–$350k) and a rapid, ad-hoc IC mean capital and operator support land when they’re most catalytic.
Deliver co-benefits. Every deal must punch above its carbon weight; whether it’s lower costs, create jobs, de-risk supply chains, improve public health.
Think in generations. We design for lasting societal resilience; regardless of the short-term election or hype cycle.

Backed by a decade of building, scaling, and investing, we hunt the boldest early-stage teams, those poised to reduce, remove, or adapt at system scale. Then we give them more than capital: IP support, go-to-market, talent, and policy navigation.

💡 For a deeper read into our investment thesis, refer to Mehrad's original climate investing framework.

We don’t have time for incrementalism. We need hundreds more climate startups… born fast, funded early, and built to endure.

“Even as we race to get to net zero, the climate math tells us that we must also accelerate the development and deployment of solutions that can be carbon negative.” — Elon Musk (yea, that same guy)

We leverage the collective network to engage in the due diligence process with their expertise. We co-invest with smart people and we look for strong indicators of execution, especially within the team and traction. Then we support founders with our pool of experienced operators, The Collective.

And with that, we welcome you to the Cool Climate Collective. Let's save the planet with Climate Tech, together.

Sincerely, your friendly climate investors

Mehrad & Tristan

🌲👐🌲

PS — Join us in accelerating climate solutions.

Mehrad was the former Program Director of Terra's Climate Change for VCs program and has been involved in various programming at MENA-based accelerators. He’s built deep relationships in the academic and scientific communities at prestigious universities and research groups exploring the frontier technologies of Climate solutions. As an operator, he has worn many hats, from Founder to Growth Marketer, where he has built and sold products from D2C e-commerce, EdTech and micro-SaaS.

LinkedIn | Twitter

Tristan has spent the last decade building, selling, and investing in startups and is bent on spending the next decade dedicated to fixing our climate problem. He's been a VC at 500 Startups where he directed $30M in funding, an EIR at Google for Startups, listed at Forbes 30 Under 30, a Terra ClimateTech VC Fellow, and a mentor at hundreds of accelerator programs, including Techstars, Katapult Climate, and Norrsken Impact. He’s also built and sold 2 startups at the intersection of impact and technology.