The Department of Energy’s IMPEL initiative at Berkeley Lab, which supports early-stage innovators in transforming their concepts into market-ready technologies, has announced its sixth cohort of participants. This year’s cohort features 43 innovators from across the United States, including six Indian Americans, all focused on developing solutions that align with the program’s goal of decarbonizing the building sector and promoting a net-zero, sustainable future.
IMPEL, which stands for Incubating Market-Propelled Entrepreneurial Mindset at the Labs and Beyond, is a technology commercialization program funded by the DoE’s Building Technologies Division.
Based at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the program’s mission is to accelerate the widespread adoption of next-generation building decarbonization technologies. As carbon emissions from buildings and construction reach unprecedented levels, IMPEL has united a diverse network of researchers, investors, entrepreneurs, and policy experts to support this mission.
“IMPEL is focused on helping early-stage innovators overcome what’s known in the start-up world as the ‘commercialization valley of death,’ a period between the prototype or pilot phase and the commercial launch phase,” said IMPEL Program Director and DOE Senior Advisor Reshma Singh.
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Singh was inspired to start the program after experiencing her own challenges in bringing clean-tech patents to market. “Our aim is to boost science, sustainability, and business impact,” Singh added
IMPEL connects its innovators to public and private sector pipelines, and a diverse network of investors and industry experts to help the innovators reach their next milestone.
In the six years since its genesis, IMPEL supported over 250 innovators from 36 U.S. states and territories who raised over $125 million in funding, created approximately 211 green jobs, and secured over 209 pilots, awards, grants, and prizes.
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Here are the six Indian Americans who are part of the cohort:
Amit Bharti is the CEO of CtrlZ Climate, which focuses on carbon removal in commercial buildings. The climate startup is supported by Stanford University’s TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy and Nvidia along with IMPEL.
Chokha Palaymkottai is the CEO of Integral and Open Systems Inc. which is an AI-driven platform for sustainable energy management based in Michigan.
Nishant Basil Kanapilly is the co-founder of Monaire whose mission is creating energy & maintenance solutions for light commercial HVAC and refrigeration. Brands like Goodwill, Firehouse Subs and 7-Eleven are partnered with Monaire.
Rohit Arora is the Chief Product Officer of dodda.ai, a platform that streamlines permit processing for high-performance buildings.
Roshan Revankar is the Chief Customer Officer of Genesys, a firm which offers a closed-loop advection device or CLAD that taps into the heat transfer attributes of groundwater, to overcome traditional geothermal challenges. Genesys defines itself as “a clean technology company rethinking heating and cooling for buildings.”
Vamsi Kumar Kotla is the CEO of ReMo Homes, a firm which focuses on industrialized construction for zero-carbon homes. The project designs and builds affordable, modular, high-performance, highly manufacturable, and rapidly deployable homes.