According to PwC, 2021 was a record breaking year for investment in climate tech startups. This growing field presents a plethora of opportunities for climate minded tech professionals. GA is pleased to bring together a panel of individuals who work in different areas of the intersection of climate and technology.

This conversation will give a glimpse into the application of coding, data, and marketing in the world of climate action.

Randa Fayez, an Arab-American immigrant, is an engineering leader with 15 years experience in industry, who is driven by work that is both impactful and purposeful. As an engineer at Bloomberg, she led teams building some of the most innovative and critical applications in the Bloomberg Terminal as well as internal engineering tools. One of the highlights of Randa’s time at Bloomberg had been working with other leaders to build an engineering-wide program to facilitate communication, collaboration and productivity across thousands of engineers across multiple offices that span the globe. Randa joined Gro Intelligence as she was drawn to the mission of the company and the questions that it can help answer to address food security and climate change.

When not at work, Randa hides in museums, takes photos of odd angles and strange light, and contemplates the meaning of life while trying to recall if the oven was left on before leaving home.

Kelsey Josund is passionate about nature, innovation, and storytelling — so communicating how technology can help solve climate change is her favorite thing.

Raised by an eco-builder and forest conservation fundraiser, she’s been involved with environmental causes since childhood. While at Stanford University, she led the solar car team, racing an experimental solar-powered electric vehicle across the Australian Outback in 2015 and 2017. She then graduated with a BS and MS in computer science. After college, she worked at Tesla and Pilot AI on firmware and computer vision, before joining Pachama to bring machine learning into the forest carbon offset space. Pachama is a fast-growing startup that uses satellites, forest inventory data, and modern machine learning to verify carbon credits and bring transparency to the nature-based carbon credit industry.

Kelsey spends her workdays training machine learning models to predict biomass from satellite data and her evenings writing novels. Her first book, Platformed, is a near-future dystopia about a climate change-embattled Silicon Valley. It came out in 2021.