Find your impact-driven cofounder
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The first 6 weeks (Phase 1) of our programme is dedicated to you finding a cofounder. 

You’ll join a diverse cohort of 60+ talented, purpose-driven individuals, all looking for a cofounder, and be supported to team up with the right match for you.
If you are a commercial founder, then you’ll be exploring teams and ideas with founders with technical backgrounds in engineering, chemistry, data science, or software development. If you are technical, your startup will go much further, much faster with a seasoned, well-connected commercial founder.
Across our first two cohorts, over 90% of Carbon13 founders successfully joined a team in Phase 1.
Carbon13 is the only venture builder for the climate where you can do this.
"It would have taken me years to meet 50 exceptionally talented and passionate founders who are determined to solve the climate crisis and Carbon13 did it in just a few weeks"
Sarah Montgomery
CEO Infyos – Cohort 1

60+ founders. 10 million tonnes.

Founders who join Carbon13’s Venture Builder are diverse in thought, background, experience and ideas, yet are united under common goal: to save the climate by building a startup with the potential to reduce emissions by 10 million tonnes per annum. 
Finding a cofounder can be the biggest challenge for starting a Net Zero venture, one which stops many founders getting their ideas off the ground. It’s difficult to break out of industry silos and find that one person who’s not only committed to saving the climate, but who has the complementary skills and networks you need.
Engineers often only know engineers. Scientists often only know scientists. Operators often only know operators.
Carbon13 brings all these people together. We knock down silos and give you the conditions for generative diversity, so you can build a truly innovative team.
What’s more, if you’re going to place your trust in a cofounder, you want to know they’re good enough for the challenge. Every member of a Carbon13 cohort has undergone a competitive and rigorous application process because we know that saving the climate is the biggest challenge of our lifetimes, and we’ll need the best people working on the solutions.
Learn more through our introductory webinars

Generate the innovation the climate needs, together.

If you have a technical background, you will be supported by experts to ensure you reach your full carbon reduction potential whilst bringing you together with commercial founders who have the skills to refine your idea, bring a venture to market and gain your first customer.

For founders with a commercial background, you will meet technical individuals with experience and ideas in sectors across the economy, to partner with and make your drive to help protect the planet a reality.

Formal and informal networking sessions, supported by our range of external partners, entrepreneurs in residence, domain experts and the Carbon13 core team, are held for you during Phase 1 to ensure you build the strongest possible venture team.

Take a look at our founders below, to discover their teaming journeys with Carbon13.

Kelly Price

Cofounder and CEO - Agreed Earth

Tauseef Ali

Founder - Cohort 2

Amyas Phillips

CTO - offgrid.finance

Jonathan Bean

Cofounder and CEO - Materials Nexus

Will Honey

Cofounder - Windfinity

Paul Young

Founder - Cohort 2

Sarah Montgomery

Cofounder and CEO - Infyos

Neel Shah

Cofounder and CEO - PuriFire Labs

Ask us anything

Do you have a specific question about our Venture Builder or Carbon13 in general? Get in touch via email at: [email protected].

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Kelly Price

Cofounder and CEO – Agreed Earth

Kelly is an innovator, a freethinker, a great market researcher, brand consultant, business developer and overall, a positive energy force.
She loves nothing more than finding ways to tackle problems and joined Carbon13 to find her “tribe”: like-minded people also fuelled by the determination to tackle the climate emergency through entrepreneurship.
Through this Carbon13 tribe, she met cofounders Sarah Power and Reed Walker. Together they are working to accelerate the adoption of regenerative farming practices to reduce global carbon emissions and improve the profitability of the farms themselves through their venture: Agreed Earth.
Kelly has said: “Finding my co-founders through Carbon13 felt like meeting long-lost friends. We were immediately drawn together by a common love of nature and a desire to help farmers. Exploring the ways we could tackle these problems using our combined background felt like working on a jigsaw puzzle, and the end result is a beautiful mosaic harnessing the best of our strengths and experience.”
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Tauseef Ali

Founder – Cohort 2

Tauseef joined Carbon13 with a background in software engineering specifically in computer vision, deep learning, and AI. Following his exit from venture “20Face” providing facial recognition technologies and solutions, he started to explore how technology can be used to improve lives and create a positive impact.
Tauseef decided to then pursue building a start-up to tackle the climate emergency with Carbon13.
“As the world’s population is continuously increasing, we need to reduce the food waste and increase yield from the same size of land. I want to help tackle this challenge by optimising crop yields through AI and machine learning.”
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Amyas Phillips

CTO – offgrid.finance

Amyas is an engineer and entrepreneur who has led numerous SaaS and IoT product developments from concept to production. Past projects include British Gas’s Hive home energy controls system, Arm’s Pelion IoT device management SaaS, and IAR System’s cybersecurity solution.
Amyas joined Carbon13 with a desire to make the world a better place:
“There is finally a consensus in the world that change has to come and some are starting to try to make that change. I joined Carbon13 to catalyse that change and Carbon13 is here to catalyse us.”
Amyas found his co-founders, Tim Chambers and Paulina Sokolova through the programme, to build offgrid.finance. Together they work with low-emission and productive-use technology companies to finance their SME customers and increase sales.
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Jonathan Bean

Cofounder and CEO – Materials Nexus

Jonathan’s career has focused on both the theoretical and practical behaviour of materials. Following an internship at Airbus, designing, and building equipment to evaluate new aircraft components, his PhD research at the University of York was on advanced modelling of polycrystalline materials.
Jonathan says: “Joining Carbon13 was a breath of fresh air as it enabled me to execute much faster than any other time in my career. One of the biggest parts of a company is the team and finding others with a similar vision has transformed my business from idea into reality.”

He is now building the venture, Materials Nexus, alongside his Carbon13 cohort members, Nic Stirk and Jon Pillow, along with Robert Forrest. Materials Nexus are working to revolutionise how new low-carbon materials are discovered and developed using their AI platform.

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Will Honey

Cofounder – Windfinity

Will joined Carbon13 with a background working as an innovation consultant with top companies and brands including Nike, Cadbury’s, and Gillette. Will wanted to tackle bigger issues facing the world: climate change – and dedicate his engineering and innovation skills towards pursuing and driving forward solutions for the climate crisis.
Will met and teamed with Alexander Straub during Phase 1, to build Windfinity. They aim to become world leaders in wind energy by acquiring legacy (20-year-old) wind turbines and then operating and maintaining them for another 10+ years.
Will says: “There is never a dull moment working with Alexander. Our shared ambition, optimism and dreams means we are constantly pushing boundaries, talking to interesting people and driving forward Windfinity. I’ve learnt a lot from working with him and I’m looking forward to what the future holds.”
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Paul Young

Founder – Cohort 2

Paul’s journey prior to Carbon13 has been varied. He started as an astronomer, moved to hedge funds and then to FinTech, building many successful start-ups on the way. 

He loves working with data and computers to solve problems and joined Carbon13 with his co-founder, Tom Merriman, to explore how their combined experience could be applied to climate change and meet a like-minded new co-founder.
Through Phase 1 the programme, they met Natalia Dorfman: “Meeting Natalia was like discovering a missing piece to our puzzle. Suddenly all our ideas and values clicked into place! Together our ability to be both creative and to execute our plans leapt forward. Carbon13 is the perfect place to form such a team, and we have benefited from their support at every step.”
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Sarah Montgomery

Cofounder and CEO – Infyos

Sarah joined Carbon13 with a background in implementing global technology solutions for the supply chains of multinational companies and as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Battery Alliance. She is determined to tackle the challenges of the world’s fragmented supply chains to make a sustainable impact on a global scale.

With this mission in hand, Sarah partnered with her now cofounder and CTO Tony To – brought together by Phase 1 of Carbon13’s programme – to build Infyos. Infyos are building a future where every electric vehicle battery is sustainable. 

Sarah has said: “Having a great cofounder is essential to building a successful startup. The “team-first” ethos of Carbon13 made it possible for me and my cofounder Tony to form a team with the solid foundations needed for our business to thrive in the highs and lows of early stage startup life.” 

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Neel Shah

Cofounder and CEO – PuriFire Labs

Neel has over 14 years of experience in global finance, private equity investing, business development and operations.  

He joined Carbon13 to combine his commercial acumen, finance skills and startup operations experience to launch a venture and drive levered impact to reduce and tackle CO2e emissions globally.

Through Carbon13’s programme, Neel partnered up with Dr Matthew Pearce to build PuriFire Labs – a regenerative waste technology company which converts plastic and municipal waste into value-added products including electricity.
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