Companies to Watch: Climate Tech Startups Helping NYC — and the Globe — Go Green
A climate tech riddle for you: What do you get when you mix New York’s legally mandated decarbonization goals with 8.4 million residents, add in the countless residential and commercial buildings that define the skyline, and top it off with a growing climate tech infrastructure and a wealth of opportunities?
Answer: A city that is ripe for climate tech disruption and innovation.
It’s no mystery then why there are over 400 climate tech companies in NYC that have collectively raised $3 billion+ since 2021.
The future of climate tech in NYC is bright:
By 2040, NYC’s green economy will host 400,000 jobs, generate $56 billion in annual earnings, and contribute $89 billion to the GDP, according to NYC Economic Development Corporation.
That’s partly due to a variety of NYCEDC’s Green Economy initiatives, like the climate tech pilot program at the Brooklyn Army Terminal (BAT) in Sunset Park, designed to support startups that are piloting their products.
Plus, a new Climate Innovation Hub at BAT will grow NYC’s climate tech ecosystem by serving over 150 startups over 10 years.
This year, Climate Week NYC will host over 1,000 events, the most in its 16-year history.
With Climate Week NYC underway, we spoke with four founders of NYC-based climate tech companies who are innovating to help NYC — and the globe — go green.
For this edition of Companies to Watch, meet:
Alex Cooper (founder of Pathways)
Keeley Erhardt, PhD (founder of Strobe)
Garrett Boudinot (founder of Vycarb)
Laura Rosenshine (founder of WATS)
Pathways
“[New York’s] blend of talent and grit is unmatched. As we’ve grown our team, we’ve been able to into an incredible pool of talent — smart, ambitious folks with expertise across disciplines, excited to build something great.”
What does your company do? What problem is it working to solve?
Pathways is building the data layer for sustainable manufacturing. We partner with building material manufacturers (think: concrete, steel, wood) to create a digital twin of their manufacturing process.
On top of that platform, we’ve built a number of workflows. For example, manufacturers can generate Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), which are like the environmental nutrition facts for their products. These third party verified reports are required for manufacturers to bid on a number of infrastructure projects, ranging from DOT projects in the city, to the “hyperscaler” data centers across the country.
A question we like to ask every founder — why New York?
New York’s energy is unlike any other city in the world. Leise and I have worked in a number of different places — Boston, SF, LA, London, Copenhagen — but New York’s spirit is unique. When we first started Pathways, we benefited from being a part of a community of builders and early stage entrepreneurs, navigating the same early stage challenges and questions.
And the blend of talent and grit is unmatched. As we’ve grown our team, we’ve been able to into an incredible pool of talent — smart, ambitious folks with expertise across disciplines, excited to build something great.
Finally, New York is particularly well suited as we work at the intersection of climate and manufacturing, serving markets across North America, Europe, and the Middle East. New York’s the heart of it all.
There are other companies working on sustainability and reporting. What’s the thing Pathways does that you think really sets you apart?
We’re unique in a few ways. We serve material manufacturers, an industry that is a huge driver of emissions but has had relatively limited technology built specifically for its need. And we’re building our tools to solve the hardest problems — ingesting, structuring, and modeling the data from various data sources, ranging from exports from procurement softwares to images of fueling invoices.
We’ve also brought a user-first design principle to our software. Too often, legacy manufacturing software is merely functional. It can be complex, cumbersome, and unintuitive. We succeed when our users feel like they know how to use our software well and feel empowered by it.
Collecting and making sense of all that data can’t be easy. What’s been the hardest part so far, and how have you worked through it?
We’ve built a number of tools to make it easy to deal with data once we get it, in whatever format it’s in. However, if customers don’t know what data they need or where to find it, then we can’t onboard them. Over the past several months, we’ve built tools and a team focused on making the onboarding experience clearer, helping our customers find data and keep track of what’s outstanding.
When you started Pathways back in 2022, what was the original vision, and has it changed at all since then? Where do you see it going in the next few years?
Pathways began out of Leise and my graduate work at Harvard and MIT. We began by focusing on the 40% of global CO2 that comes from the built world, before narrowing in on the challenges and opportunities in building material manufacturing. Since the beginning, we’ve tried to build our business using first principles, focusing on problems that are painful for our customers and aligned with our mission.
Our platform can serve as a foundational data layer for all manufacturing processes. Over the next few years, Pathways will be able to serve any type of manufacturer in any country. But I also expect that the types of workflows users build on our data layer will grow as well, from sustainability focused reporting today, to all sorts of product-specific transparency insights.
What are your self-care routines to recharge while still being heads down building a company?
Two answers:
1. I try to begin my day with at least 15-30 minutes of sitting and reading with a cup of coffee before opening up my laptop. It’s not a lot, but especially when I have early meetings with European partners, it allows my mind to wake up and open on something that’s not work before diving in.
2. Regular feedback is critical. This may sound like a weird answer for self-care, but creating the space to honestly share (or vent) outside of the stress of day-to-day delivery is an invaluable pressure release valve for cofounders and teammates alike.
Time for some New York-themed rapid fire questions — where’s your favorite place to grab a slice of pizza in New York?
DOP in Park Slope.
Where’s your favorite coffee shop in New York?
Enso coffee in Park Slope.
Do you have a favorite spot to escape the noise of the city?
Prospect Park. It’s Brooklyn’s backyard for a reason. Running, walking, picnicking, concerts. It’s perfect for all occasions.
What’s one piece of advice – that you’ve shared or was shared with you – on building a startup in New York City?
Find a community that you can rely on in those earliest days. Building a business can be lonely, take advantage of the community that’s here in NYC!
Strobe
“New York is at the forefront of the energy transition, showcasing both the challenges and opportunities of modernizing America’s grid.”
What does your company do? What problem is it working to solve?
Strobe is building America’s modern power plant.
Our platform orchestrates batteries, buildings, EVs, and onsite generation into a distributed fleet to deliver reliable power where it’s needed. As demand grows (PJM projects ~21% by 2030) and transmission lags, reliability must come from fast, flexible capacity close to load.
Electricity costs have surged 35% since 2020. Strobe unlocks underutilized distributed energy resources (DERs) — from cold-storage compressors to rooftop solar and standby CHP — so businesses can cut costs, earn new revenue, adopt solar, storage, and EVs faster, and help stabilize the grid. In short: we turn skyrocketing demand and costs into a scalable, decentralized opportunity where everyone can be part of the solution.
A question we like to ask every founder — why New York?
New York is at the forefront of the energy transition, showcasing both the challenges and opportunities of modernizing America’s grid. Nowhere are the extremes more visible: downstate electricity costs are among the nation’s highest, driven by the difficulty of moving power from upstate plants through constrained transmission lines into NYC. That makes local, flexible capacity especially valuable.
At the same time, the state’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) initiative has opened wholesale markets — once reserved for utility-scale plants — to distributed resources for the first time. This lets Strobe prove our thesis: the modern power plant is distributed, software-defined, and close to load. We’re proud to be among the first to operationalize this vision in New York.
What’s been the biggest surprise since starting Strobe, or something you didn’t see coming?
How primitive most “distributed power plants” still are. In New York, many large batteries only cycle once a day for a few summer weeks, helping during peak stress but sitting idle the rest of the year. In reality, these assets could deliver value year-round, often running multiple daily cycles profitably, but they’re walled off from true market economics.
To unlock that potential, we had to build an end-to-end stack — from project scoping and device control (DERMS) to AI-driven forecasting, optimization, and direct market operations. We expected complexity; we didn’t expect to rebuild so many missing pieces. The upside is enormous: with better software and market access, DERs can run safely, often, and profitably as true power plants.
Where do you see the energy market going in the next 5-10 years, and where does Strobe fit in?
The grid will necessarily become more distributed. Centralized plants won’t come online fast enough to meet demand, nor are they the best way to solve our challenges. Soon it won’t just be datacenters with captive power plants, it will be every building. Ad-hoc incentives will fade as solar and batteries become fully price-competitive (in most cases, they already are), and DERs will proliferate.
What’s missing are the systems to unlock this market-driven future: dynamic price discovery, forecasting, scheduling, dispatch, and settlement for distributed assets. That’s the role Strobe plays. Once scaled, the grid will become truly bi-directional, resilient, and localized.
How do you build trust with people who might not know much about energy markets?
If you can help someone make sense of their electricity bill, you earn trust fast. In New York, bills are up ~45% since 2020, yet few realize costs hinge not just on how much energy you use, but when. Demand charges and coincident peaks drive big costs, yet few know what they are. More than one customer has joked, “I guess it really does take a PhD to understand this.”
We simplify it, showing businesses how their actions affect costs in real time and taking over operations to cut them — whether by smarter equipment use (e.g. shifting charging or precooling storage), better use of existing assets (e.g. dispatching standby CHP), or adding new ones (solar, storage). Customers see the impact instantly. Transparency builds trust and shows they’re not helpless.
What are your self-care routines to recharge while still being heads down building a company?
The easy answer? Orthopedic chairs. But really, even with a schedule that’s probably closer to 9-9-6 than not, I try to save Sundays to recharge. That usually means catching up with friends and family, and keeping alive the Sunday roast tradition my husband and I picked up in London. There’s something therapeutic about wandering for ingredients, cooking a big meal, and lingering at the table before diving back into the software factory on Monday.
Time for some New York-themed rapid fire questions — where’s your favorite place to grab a slice of pizza in New York?
Our office is in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, so Pizza Yard is my go-to. But if I’ve got time, L’Industrie in Williamsburg. The line’s long, but mostly worth it.
Where’s your favorite coffee shop in New York?
Rhythm Zero in Greenpoint. Somehow they’ve made a nearly all-brown aesthetic work. It’s tucked by the water, and the cold brew is very smooth.
Do you have a favorite spot to escape the noise of the city?
The Hudson Valley. We’ve got customers up there, so we’ll spend the day deploying hardware and mapping energy infrastructure, then crash at an Airbnb nearby. We just picked up a rooftop tent, so I’m excited to test it out on future trips.
What’s one piece of advice – that you’ve shared or was shared with you – on building a startup in New York City?
One of our NYC-based investors, Peter Boyce, has been a great friend and mentor. His advice: put yourself out there and get woven into the city. New York feels massive, but it’s really a small community. Whether it’s other founders swapping tips or the DER crowd talking grid challenges. Everything moves faster (and easier) when you’ve got friends, supporters, and advocates. Word travels fast in the city that never sleeps, so it pays to be part of the conversation.
Vycarb
“Being [in NYC] has allowed us to quickly integrate across complex infrastructure, policy, and applications critical for climate solutions at a level that few cities can offer.”
What does your company do? What problem is it working to solve?
Vycarb builds carbon capture and storage technology systems that safely, permanently, and measurably store CO2 using water.
There are very few options for permanently storing CO2, and while the ocean naturally absorbs and stores atmospheric CO2 by converting it to stable dissolved carbon molecules like bicarbonate, the natural process is slow, and attempts to accelerate it have trouble demonstrating — verifying and measuring — exactly how much carbon is actually stored. We’ve developed a closed system approach to accelerate, control, and measure the conversion of CO2 to stable bicarbonate, with a chemical processing system and sensor, to unlock the massive and permanent ocean carbon sink for industrial applications.
We are currently demonstrating and optimizing the process at our pilot in the East River at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and planning scaled applications to provide a low-cost solution to permanently store CO2 across a wide range of settings.
A question we like to ask every founder — why New York?
New York has been a leader in stimulating climate tech development, from state-wide groups like NYSERDA to city-based clean tech development initiatives at groups like EDC. I served on the NY State Climate Impacts Assessment and ran a carbon removal research program at Cornell. My starting the company was really enabled when I received one of the inaugural Activate NY Fellowships, funded in part by NYSERDA and unlocking a wide range of local partnerships and opportunities.
NYC has terrific programs and has built a unique ecosystem for testing and scaling climate technology, and we’ve benefitted from that, piloting at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Governors Island, and getting support from groups like Newlab and Activate, helping prove and scale our technology across both urbanized and natural settings. Being here has allowed us to quickly integrate across complex infrastructure, policy, and applications critical for climate solutions at a level that few cities can offer.
There are a lot of carbon capture ideas out there. What makes Vycarb different from the rest?
Most carbon capture and storage approaches are energy-intensive, expensive, geographically limited, and difficult to scale. Vycarb’s technology accelerates a natural carbon capture and storage process, helping to overcome those limitations by leveraging abundant water to convert CO2 into stable bicarbonate, safely stored for tens of thousands of years.
Our system works on industrial sites or near water sources, with real-time sensors that optimize and measure storage directly. Deployment requires only CO2, water, and local alkalinity, making it flexible and scalable. We serve sectors from cement to aluminum, ethanol, and bioenergy, and can operate as a technology provider, project developer, or carbon services partner, combining permanence, measurability, cost-effectiveness, and commercial flexibility.
If everything goes right, what does Vycarb look like 10 years from now?
We have the potential to be the largest carbon capture and storage solution on the planet, with a uniquely flexible approach that can serve a wide range of sectors and geographies. In ten years, we plan to have our systems operating globally, embedded in ports, harbors, and industrial facilities. Our systems will capture billions of tons of CO2 per year, converting it into stable bicarbonate and generating high-quality, verifiable carbon credits across incentive mechanisms.
Our current pilot in the East River demonstrates carbon storage durability, safety, ecological benefits, and real-time measurement, and we’re already using that to unlock our next deployments in diverse sectors and geographies. Over the next decade, we aim to create a trusted, scalable, and permanent carbon removal network that industries can rely on to decarbonize hard-to-abate emissions.
What are the main technical or logistical constraints when moving from your early real-world deployments to large scale, global deployments? How do you plan to overcome them?
Technically, we need reactors and sensors to operate reliably across diverse water chemistries and conditions, optimizing mineral dosing and standardizing measurement software. Logistically, every site requires water, a CO2 source, and nearby alkalinity, plus supply chain and permitting coordination.
A lot of our work now is testing various inputs into our technology to design a universally-applicable and self-optimizing system, and coordinating alkaline mineral inputs for our next projects where CO2 and water are already co-located, and expanding our partnership base across major industry players to more quickly scale and integrate into industrial settings.
What are your self-care routines to recharge while still being heads down building a company?
If I’m not working, I’m outside — running, hiking, hunting, and fishing — with my wife, daughter, plot hound, and friends. Building the company is fast paced and requires a ton of travel and time behind screens, and being outside is a nice foil to that to recharge and connect with the ecosystems I started Vycarb to protect.
Time for some New York-themed rapid fire questions — where’s your favorite place to grab a slice of pizza in New York?
There’s a great place right by our office in the Navy Yard — Il Porto — with wood fired pizza and great wine. Not the standard “NY Slice” and hot take that’s why I like it.
Where’s your favorite coffee shop in New York?
I love Brooklyn Coffee Roasters — also right by the office — and if I’m posted up at a coffee shop for meetings, it’s Devocion.
Do you have a favorite spot to escape the noise of the city?
Honestly our pilot site at the Navy Yard is back on a less-traveled dock with a stellar sunset view of the skyline, right on the water, and I’ll often go out there after work to just look out on the water and decompress. While most of the Vycarb team probably sees that as a hectic spot of constant work, I’m fortunate enough to just enjoy it as a place to be proud of what we’re accomplishing and dream about where we go from here.
What’s one piece of advice — that you’ve shared or was shared with you — on building a startup in New York City?
They say if you can do it in New York you can do it anywhere — but I think even better is that if you need something anywhere, you can find it in New York. Investors, customers, talent, resources — wherever you want to scale to and grow towards, the resources to do it are right here, so look local and take advantage of it!
WATS
“If we can make waste data work in New York — the toughest sandbox — we can scale it anywhere.”
What does your company do? What problem is it working to solve?
WATS is a B2B SaaS platform that makes waste a trackable utility. We help multi-site organizations like real estate owners and airports replace manual data aggregation and vendor reports with standardized, automated processes. Our purpose-built software ingests and analyzes waste vendor invoices and operational data to provide accurate insights, cost savings, and compliance-ready reporting.
A question we like to ask every founder — why New York?
New York is ground zero for the waste challenge: dense, vertical, no curbside space intentionally planned for waste. Regulations shift every few years, with Local Law 199 reshaping the commercial system and composting mandates layering on top. WATS is based here, with deep ties to real estate, sustainability, and tech. If we can make waste data work in New York — the toughest sandbox — we can scale it anywhere.
What’s the hardest part about getting different organizations (real estate, airports, etc.) to change from spreadsheets / manual tracking to using a platform like WATS?
The hardest part is shifting mindsets. Most stakeholders are used to one-off, annual “check-the-box” reporting, not treating waste as a utility that can be measured, optimized, and improved monthly — like water or energy.
Because we’re building a new product in a new category, we have to teach that waste isn’t just garbage; it’s measurable opportunity. Helping leaders see waste as a manageable utility, not a compliance exercise, is the uphill battle. But that’s also the reason we’re here: unlocking the business value hidden in waste.
How do you balance building new features vs. making sure existing users are having a smooth experience?
We find this balance by anchoring to both customer needs and our long-term vision. Clients come to us for simplifying waste data management, and we make sure that experience is seamless.
At the same time, our mission is to help them reduce and divert more waste, which requires introducing new features that push the industry forward. It’s a constant dance — listening closely to feedback while layering in our expertise as waste nerds — so every improvement not only makes today smoother but also moves users closer to a true circular economy.
With all the data you collect, what are some insights you see that surprise people once they start tracking waste more rigorously?
Because waste isn’t metered, clients often rely on separate invoices and tonnage reports — so they’re shocked by how inconsistent the numbers are. Invoices often hide inaccuracies or inflated diversion rates, meaning real cost savings sit in plain sight. WATS flags these mismatches automatically, protecting budgets and uncovering truth in the data.
Another surprise? Time savings. What once took hours of document wrangling and manual data entry disappears, freeing teams to focus on actually improving diversion and advancing sustainability goals instead of just calculating them. Focusing on impact, not inputs.
What’s next on the roadmap that you’re excited about? Any features or expansions you think will really move the needle for your users?
We’re about to release a redesigned data flagging system that makes it far easier for users to track what’s expected, what’s been submitted, what’s in review, and what’s been ingested and is readily available on the WATS metrics dashboard.
Next up is contract-to-invoice analysis — a feature that checks invoices against negotiated hauler rates to catch errors automatically. Both are huge steps in turning waste from an operational headache into a transparent, cost-controlled utility that is managed monthly not annually.
What are your self-care routines to recharge while still being heads down building a company?
Startup life doesn’t leave much space, so I sneak in self-care where I can — trying new restaurants, running or biking to work (so I don’t do work on my phone on the subway), and walking my dog in the park, who is ironically terrified of trash trucks.
Sometimes I’ll treat myself to a massage or work remotely from a new spot for a reset. I’m a Virgo, so “relaxing” isn’t really in my DNA — I find clarity by keeping busy, whether it’s moving, planning, or just switching scenes. It’s not a perfect balance, but it keeps me moving forward.
Time for some New York-themed rapid fire questions — where’s your favorite place to grab a slice of pizza in New York?
I tend to hit my local spot in Park Slope, Union Street Pizza. When we moved in we did a pizza tasting of the four closest spots, they were the winner then and still are now!
Where’s your favorite coffee shop in New York?
My local spot in Park Slope is Velvette (they have two locations in my neighborhood), and both allow laptops. An obvious requirement for a founder.
Do you have a favorite spot to escape the noise of the city?
Prospect Park — I am lucky to live so close. In addition to walking there, we can throw down a blanket and hang.
What’s one piece of advice – that you’ve shared or was shared with you – on building a startup in New York City?
Very early on, (too early for us to be having pitch meetings, but what did we know at the time), a VC asked if we had considered joining an accelerator (which we hadn’t).
Getting accepted into a startup accelerator was game-changing. As non-technical founders from the waste industry, the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (followed by MassChallenge Decarbonization Accelerator) gave us a crash course in startup life and connected us to mentors, angels and VCs, and fellow founders. Those relationships — early investors who believed in us, peers we can call for advice — are essential. As our story goes, that very early conversation came back around, and that investor led our pre-seed and seed rounds.
