By Jessica Wickham, Tompkins Weekly

In October, Chloe Capital, a seed-stage venture capital firm that invests in women-led innovation companies, announced its partnership with Cornell University and NYSERDA to help climate tech innovators “launch and advance solutions to the world’s climate crisis,” according to a recent release.

The result of the partnership is a program called Diversity In ClimateTech, and its business accelerator was held Oct. 27. At the accelerator, held in Ithaca, five women-led climate tech companies were selected, based on their potential impact, to pitch and secure business deals, with over $500,000 in investments being offered.

“Out of 300-plus applicants that met the program criteria, the five finalists selected were ones that showed both experience and early success in the niche market where their solution is needed,” said Kathryn Cartini, Chloe Capital co-founder and partner, in the release.

Dorrit Lowsen, co-founder of Change Finance, received a $250,000 investment. Her company produces “performance-oriented investment products that seek to promote a more just and sustainable world,” according to the release.

SaLisa Berrien, founder and CEO of COI Energy, received a $200,000 investment.

“COI Energy is changing the face of energy with its digital energy management that detects and eliminates energy waste in buildings and repurposes that waste for good,” she said in the release. “We use machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict energy behaviors and make corrections to avoid waste.”

While Diversity In ClimateTech only began earlier this year, Chloe Capital and Cornell’s work in the climate tech space goes way back. Elisa Miller-Out, Chloe Capital co-founder and managing partner, said that Chloe Capital staff members have been “researching, actively mentoring, participating in accelerators, incubators, competitions, in the climate tech space for nearly a decade now.”

“We’ve been doing that work in our careers even prior to Chloe Capital,” she said. “And so, it was [a] natural fit for us to leverage those relationships that we’ve been building for years, with Cornell, with NYSERDA, through all the programming that they’ve done across New York state and across the Southern Tier where this program is based. It was a natural fit for us to then, with Chloe Capital, put this together to do a diversity and climate tech program.”

At Cornell, the feeling is mutual, as Andrea Katherine Ippolito, director of Women Engineers Cornell (W.E. Cornell), explained. Katherine Ippolito is also the founder of SimpliFed, a company focused on infant feeding, both chestfeeding and formula feeding. W.E. Cornell is a program out of the Center for Regional Economic Advancement at Cornell University (CREA).

“W.E. Cornell’s goal is to create an on-ramp for STEM women to pursue entrepreneurship,” she said. “And so, the beginning of this program is a climate-tech-focused track of the W.E. Cornell program, where we go through an ideation process with them, we arm them with resources, we teach them and educate them on how to start your own company and test assumptions surrounding who’s your customer, what they care about and what your revenue model looks like.”

For Katherine Ippolito and Miller-Out, the importance of the Diversity In ClimateTech program is vast.

“We are in a climate crisis in the world right now,” Katherine Ippolito said. “And when you look at the innovation in climate technology, especially some of the newer entrants into this space, especially on the startup side, they are, for the most part, being run by males. And if we are going to tackle the climate crisis that we are in right now, we need to better take advantage of half our population and support them in their entrepreneurial journey to create new innovations and implement those new innovations to make an impact to tackle the crisis we’re facing.”

Katherine Ippolito and Miller-Out both spoke highly of this year’s investment winners. Miller-Out highlighted Berrien, who has already seen tremendous growth in her company despite it being relatively new.

“Seeing Black female founders with millions in contracts, millions in revenue, millions in funding is a whole new world because we’re coming from a place where Black female founders, in the data, in the investment world have received historically less than .1% of the funding and access to capital,” Miller-Out said. “So, it’s really exciting to see what can happen when you have a founder who has access to capital and resources and then is making full use of that and really scaling a huge company that’s going to be a tremendous force in both our region as well as the world moving forward.”

Miller-Out said that beyond the individual benefit for the entrepreneurs in the Diversity In ClimateTech program and the worldwide benefit of fighting climate change, there’s another big plus to this new program — creating role models.

“Seeing all those role models and mentorship is a key part of the Chloe Capital movement and how we build this ecosystem for underrepresented founders, for women, for nonbinary, for BIPOC founders,” Miller-Out said. “Part of how we build that is by these role models and women lifting other women up through this process.”

Now that the business accelerator is over, the next step in the Diversity In ClimateTech is to connect the selected companies with resources in their community like vendors “and embedding these companies more deeply in our community in different ways that are really meaningful to everyone and that helps with the economic development of the region,” Miller-Out said.

The selected applicants in Diversity In ClimateTech have all made great progress with their businesses since starting, which Katherine Ippolito is indicative of a shift in the common narrative regarding investing in female founders.

“There’s this unfortunate narrative that sometimes out there [that] investing in female founders is impact investing or philanthropic in nature,” she said. “Investing in female founders, those that are making an impact, is what’s good for business. And so, I would say that we’re seeing tremendous interest in the space in those that are making incredible impact and those that are making profit in the process. You can do good while also doing well, from a business standpoint, as well. And that’s the merger of what we’re really trying to accomplish.”

Though challenges caused by the pandemic continue for some business owners, generally speaking, Katherine Ippolito said that the entrepreneurial ecosystem is “thriving” right now. She said she hopes to see more entrepreneurs coming to the county thanks to the Diversity In ClimateTech and other similar programs.

“With the recent announcement of what is happening with Ithaca being a pioneer in the United States with getting to carbon neutrality, and especially with our building space, that’s attracting a lot of attention from elsewhere across the country to Ithaca,” she said. “Ithaca and Tompkins County is open for business for entrepreneurs and innovators, especially diverse innovators. We have such a supportive community here, and come innovate here because we have a platform to allow you to go a lot further faster.”

Still, Katherine Ippolito recognizes that many women are struggling due to “playing double duty,” meaning having full-time jobs and being expected to be the main caretakers.

“We’re having the great resignation happen across the United States because we don’t have access to child care and these types of things,” she said. “So, my whole standpoint on this is that if we can get better social infrastructure, such as universal child care support, paid parental leave, we can better retain women that want to be retained, we can better retain them in the workforce, and this also opens up opportunity for them to be able to innovate and lead companies.”

Chloe Capital and W.E. Cornell continue to work to support women entrepreneurs through a variety of services, investments and programs. For more information about the Diversity In ClimateTech program, visit its website at chloecapital.com/climatetech. Learn more about Chloe Capital at chloecapital.com and about W.E. Cornell at crea.cornell.edu/project/w-e-cornell.

Jessica Wickham is the managing editor of Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to them at editorial@vizellamedia.com.