Greentown Boston’s 2025 Climatetech Summit Explores the Power of ‘And’ in Scaling Tech

Greentown Boston’s Climatetech Summit dove into Massachusetts’s legacy of innovation and how it can be a springboard for future climate impact, job creation, and collaboration.

The event celebrated climate and energy entrepreneurs, highlighting their technologies and illuminating pathways for industry-wide collaboration. It brought together hundreds of entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, investors, policymakers, and other climate champions, featured a speaking program with top climate leaders—including a keynote fireside chat with Secretary of the Executive Office of Economic Development for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Eric Paley and GE Vernova Chief Technology Officer Krishna Jonnalagadda.

A startup showcase offered attendees the chance to network with our incredible Greentown Boston startups and see their work in the prototyping lab.

Check out details of the summit below!

Greentown Boston’s Climatetech Summit kicked off with opening remarks from Greentown member Shiv Bhakta—the event’s emcee and CEO of Active Surfaces—and Greentown CEO Georgina Campbell Flatter.

Bhakta shared his story of growing at Greentown, from innovating within the prototyping lab to participating in ACCEL and Greentown Go Build 2023.

“The first accelerator that took a bet on me was ACCEL,” Bhakta said. “We were just two guys with a prototype of a small solar panel. Greentown is what allowed us to build the corporate relationships and personal development to go from lab to field.”

Flatter emphasized the power of “and” in building and commercializing climatetech: energy and climate, innovation and scale, prosperity for the planet and people.

“The ‘and’ is where possibility expands,” she said. “Innovation does not happen alone—it happens together. We’re here because entrepreneurs matter. We’re here not just to cheer them on, but to fuel them.”

Flatter then welcomed onstage the event’s keynote speakers: Secretary of the Executive Office of Economic Development for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Eric Paley and GE Vernova Chief Technology Officer Krishna Jonnalagadda. In a fireside chat moderated by Flatter, Paley and Jonnalagadda discussed Massachusetts and GE Vernova’s shared legacies of invention. They also looked forward, exploring how leadership, innovation, and public-private collaboration are driving a modern revolution in clean energy and economic transformation.

Reflecting on the immense challenge of the American Revolution, Paley said, “The ideas that change the world take extraordinary perseverance. And that’s in the DNA of Massachusetts.”

“If you look at the history of innovation, there are so many things that happened through public-private partnerships,” Jonnalagadda said. “There’s a huge role for government to play in incubating innovation, and also for government to provide the right environment.”

Then came a book launch for Disciplined Entrepreneurship for Climate and Energy Ventures: 24 Steps to Build Solutions for People and the Planet. Veteran entrepreneur Bill Aulet, climatetech expert Ben Soltoff, and the faculty behind MIT’s esteemed Climate & Energy Ventures course (Tod Hynes, Francis O’Sullivan, and Libby Wayman) introduced this new edition of their bestselling book—the first version focused on climate ventures—and led a discussion with NONA Technologies CEO and Co-founder Bruce Crawford, a Greentown alum who has leveraged the framework.

Next up was the first set of lightning pitches from six Greentown startups:

Mithril Technologies, whose reshapable, mesh antenna reflectors enable advanced and resilient satellite communications, weather monitoring, and Earth sensing in geosynchronous orbit.
Climative, whose AI-driven solution assesses buildings and produces retrofit advice at the building level for whole cities, provinces, and states.
CLS Wind, whose self-erecting system allows for multiple wind-turbine installations without the need for large, heavy, and expensive cranes, reducing installation time and costs.
MicroEra Power, developer and manufacturer of THERMAplus, a hardware and software solution for smart thermal-energy storage for buildings.
eSki Watercraft, whose electric personal watercraft meet the demands of rental businesses while setting a new standard in environmental responsibility.
Gaia AI, which uses drones, LiDAR, and computer vision to collect high-quality biomass data in forests—helping landowners, project developers, and investors understand the carbon stock and timber content of their land and offering data to carbon-credit buyers.

Net Zero Insights then took the stage to showcase key findings from its U.S. Clean Energy & Industrial Innovation report, including the trend of fewer early-stage deals and more later-stage deals and states’ ability to “amplify or counteract the national agenda.”

In a lighthearted, rapid-answer session moderated by Climate Salon Founder Victoria Pisini, two Greentown members—Glimpse CEO Eric Moch and Dottir Labs CEO Nili Persits—revealed the ups and downs of their journey to commercialization. They introduced their tech as if to a first grader, answered what role they should have hired for first, and shared what they considered naming their companies.

The Honourable Bernadette Jordan, Consul General of Canada in Boston, introduced the next segment: a live podcast recording of Latitude Media’s Open Circuit, hosted by Jigar Shah, Katherine Hamilton, and Stephen Lacey. The group dug into what recent elections show about the affordability of electricity and how founders should think about exits.

The next group of startup lightning pitches featured:

Onvector, which leverages non-chemical water treatment using plasma to rid water of PFAS and more.
Harmony Desalting, whose batch-reverse-osmosis process uses a variable-pressure bladder to enable more energy- and cost-efficient desalination for any kind of water.
HKG Energy, developer of proprietary silicon materials that help increase battery energy density by 80 percent, at 40 percent reduced cost, to power the next generation of EVs, energy-storage systems, and electrified transportation.
Loop CO₂, which transforms CO₂ into sustainable polymers, targeting industries including polyurethane and thermoplastic polyurethanes.
Diffraqtion, maker of revolutionary AI cameras that can build the world’s largest, ultra-high-resolution satellite network for observation at less than 1 percent of the cost of today’s satellites.
Biospheric AI, a data-driven energy-forecasting company producing high-resolution, building-level demand forecasts for electricity, heating, and natural gas.

The panel “AI and Climate: A Partnership in Need of a Rebrand” dove into the nuances of how AI can be a tool for accelerating the energy transition—from enabling technologies to decarbonize diverse sectors, to creating market appetite for energy abundance, to integrating clean-energy power sources.

Speakers included:

Climate Change AI Co-founder and Chair Priya L. Donti
New Mantle Technologies Co-founder and CEO Charles Gertler (a Greentown member)
Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship Senior Lecturer Tod Hynes
Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s Chief Climate Officer Galen Nelson (moderator)

The final group of startup lightning pitches included:

Prophet AI, whose AI-based poultry-health-monitoring system aims to create a 2 percent reduction in chicken mortality in the United States—saving the industry $600M in revenue, avoiding the waste of 2 MMT of CO₂ emissions, and preventing 180 million chicken deaths annually, according to estimates from the startup.
PV Nano Cell, which advances single-crystal, nano conductive pastes and inks to lead metallization in solar-cells technologies.
Reframe Systems, which is scaling offsite construction of zero-carbon buildings with volumetric modules manufactured using advanced robotic microfactories.
Respire Energy, which is redefining energy storage with a safe, low-cost, and long-duration metal-air battery designed for microgrids.
SolarMantle, developer of a state-of-the-art advanced material that passively cools structures by reflecting and emitting heat into outer space.
WhaleSpotter, which makes a marine electronic device that combines thermal imaging, AI, and human intelligence to detect marine mammals at great enough distance to avoid them.

Greentown’s Head of Philanthropy Stacey Harris and Flatter closed out the speaking portion, sharing about Greentown’s #FuelTheFuture philanthropic campaign.

While the audience broke for lunch, a group came together for a special Climate Salon focused on accelerating pilot deployments. Climate Salon Founder Victoria Pisini guided the discussion-based session, where four Greentown members pitched their pilot needs to investors, corporates, and community-based organizations and sourced feedback on deployment challenges.

Then came one of our favorite parts of the Climatetech Summit: the Startup Showcase, an opportunity for attendees to speak directly with our climatetech entrepreneurs, see their technologies in the prototyping lab, and make valuable connections. Learn about our startups innovating across the key greenhouse-gas-emitting sectors—agriculture, buildings, electricity, manufacturing, and transportation—and on resiliency and adaptation.

The Greentown Boston Climatetech Summit 2025 wrapped up with an evening of networking. We’d like to send a huge thank you to the speakers, sponsors, and all attendees who joined us for this year’s event!

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