Enviros Drink To Climate Tech Dreams

Yale post-doc Wangbiao Guo has just received a patent for a multi-stage system that captures carbon from the air by the use of algae. 

All he needs for the next step is about $500,000 to finance a pilot/prototype to begin to take the product to market — and that’s why he was enjoying an American Snappy Lager Thursday night over at 770 Chapel St.

He was one of more than 300 green tech entrepreneurs, researchers, bankers, potential investors, academics, and city economic development officials who turned out for drinks, networking on steroids, and wonderfully optimistic talk about how New Haven is poised to become one of the ten most significant hubs of green tech entrepreneurship in the country.

The host was Ryan Dings, the CEO of ClimateHaven, a recently formed and ambitious climate tech incubator as they showed off their 9,000 square feet of still raw but inviting, sun-lit space right above Make Haven on Chapel Street between State and Orange.

“Building products, building business, and finding manufacturing partners” is how ClimateHaven Managing Director Casey Pickett put it.

Formed in March, with a formal ribbon-cutting scheduled for November, the group already has eight to ten start-ups, like Guo’s, signed up.

They pay rent for flexible working space, but it’s far more than what you think of as a co-working space, explained Pickett. ​“You can bring in your whole team, and you can build.”

That’s why it’s very un-coincidental that ClimateHaven is establishing itself on the third floor directly above Make Haven, one of the several area green-focused nonprofits with whom ClimateHaven is already in partnership.

They include New Haven Green Drinks, the long-time sustainability meet-up group, and the state-sponsored Forge – both co-sponsors of Thursday’s green soiree – which helps move a product from prototype to commercialization.

And ClimateHaven’s specific niche in all this?

“We’re an incubator, accelerator, and [perhaps most importantly] a convenor,” Dings said.

In addition to Guo’s, among the other start-ups already slated to move in and really get moving once the painters finish up and the computers are connected will be other carbon capture innovators, such as one working on creating carbon-negative concrete. That company is called BlueGreen Materials.

There’s also a future battery recycling company; a power management platform for car chargers; and a group developing ​“smart plugs” that will reduce electric load on appliances when they are not being fully utilized.

Dings, the former chief operating officer at Boston’s Greentown, one of the largest climate-tech start-up incubators in the country, was nothing if not optimistic about New Haven’s potential. 

He cited the talent and intellectual power of the community, policy makers that get it (Mayor Elicker and a half dozen municipal economic development officials were among the green-drinking throng), and the availability of office and lab space.

Because of that, Dings said that while New Haven start-ups are the initial focus, ClimateHaven’s catchment area, so to speak, is going to be the entire Northeast as well, with a focus even on New York and Boston, his most recent digs.

And never far from his remarks welcoming guests to the beginnings of ClimateHaven was the sense of a literally breath-taking moral urgency to the work of green entrepreneurship.

Citing the sense of responsibility he feels for the planet he’s leaving his own children, Dings said, ​“the [climate-change caused disastrous] weather is the top story in the news and we have an awful lot to do to protect the planet after 250 years of an extractive economy.”

And so much now has to be done in a short period of time, ​“lots of [green] entrepreneurship will be required.”

In addition to the physical space, and the tools and equipment to scale technologies, Dings cited as arguably the most important function of ClimateHaven is as the bringer-together of people to support, invest in, guide, champion, and employ the green entrepreneurs expected soon to be percolating away in the new space.

And the impressively large, energetic crowd — at least in their geographical diversity Thursday night (most of the faces were white) — bore that out. Guilford Savings Bank’s Nancy Gerson said she found the evening ​“very exciting” and was looking to partner and support the industry.

And attorney Tom Regan, who is based in Hartford and who often works with green start-ups, said there was every reason in the world to think New Haven, having already established itself as a home to biotech and health science businesses, could as well be home to ​“clean tech, the next big thing.”

“New Haven is so diverse and so smart and there’s so much opportunity,” Regan added, he saw no reason why it could not one day soon be on a par with a Cambridge or a Silicon Valley in green tech entrepreneurship.

And the main reason for that? The Independent queried.

Regan tapped his beer against Dings’ and motioned through the large floor-to-ceiling windows and up Chapel Street; he was pointing toward Yale University.

That ever-present town-gown dynamic was very much also on the mind of Mayor Elicker.

“When I walk into a room and don’t know many of the people,” he said in brief remarks, ​“that tells me New Haven is becoming more and more of a destination.”

When he asked how many people are from Yale, at least three-quarters of the room raised hands aloft. ​“But I know there are also people here from Brooklyn and from Boston.” (Pickett reached out to the Independent after the publication of this article and said that only a third of the attendees were from Yale.)

Most importantly, Elicker reminded people that New Haven is a place where you can not only innovate, develop a successful business, but also stick around, maybe meet the love of your life, have children. The whole thing! 

That wasn’t just charming talk. Its point was also to address New Haven’s perennial challenge: how to convince innovative companies that begin in the Elm City to stay here.

“You have a lot of friends in City Hall. They share your beliefs [in science, green innovation, etc], but you can also fall in love,” he said. ​“I did. I met my wife while planting flowers” beautifying a local park, he said.

For more information about ClimateHaven and its programs, the contact is: [email protected]h