“Combating climate change through innovative solutions”

When entrepreneur and Stanford University graduate Anshuman Bapna was considering pursuing global issues worth solving, he realised climate change is not just an existential crisis but a space with massive risk and also opportunity. Well into his third startup venture at that point, he realised three things. One: there was a large section of people who considered climate change as an urgent need that had to be addressed immediately and wanted to work on it professionally but found it difficult to transition into it. Two: climate change, despite affecting everyone, had only about a million people globally working to solve it. Three: even if people wanted to work on climate change they had no idea as to where they could start as there was no climate education. 

When Anshuman mentioned to us that he was setting up a climate company, we knew we had to be on board. In 2020, Anshuman, along with Kamal Kapadia (who taught climate change at University of California and University of Oxford for many years) and Mayank Jain (who co-founded a startup with Anshuman during their undergraduate course at IIT-Bombay) founded Terra.do, an online climate school. Their mission? To get over 100 million people to work on climate change by 2030. Terra.do runs online learning programmes on climate education to achieve their mission. It also has a community that helps individuals across the globe transition their skills to work on challenging climate change problems.

To understand how the startup helped with climate change, we took the Terra programmes ourselves. “The BEENEXT team took the call to invest in us pretty early on. The team spent 6-12 weeks on the programmes they took to just be a student at Terra. That to me is fantastic, real commitment. The team goes way beyond financial investment and helped me think through the impact and outcomes we can create in addressing the problem at hand,” Anshuman adds. 

What we discovered that makes Terra.do different 

Terra.do has a three-pronged approach that makes what they do unique. They have a career services team that is focused on placing graduates to work in the climate space. They conduct virtual job fairs, facilitating companies in the sector to recruit thousands of people. They also have a practical training programme focused only on India, which places graduates with climate companies, for-profit and nonprofit, that are at a growth stage. Terra Studio is another offering focused on entrepreneurs, supporting those looking to start climate companies. 

One of the most amazing aspects that we have seen happen at Terra.do is the kind of people who showed up for the first cohort. They have had senior engineers at technology giants like Google, investors, C-Suite executives and technologists taking their courses and focused completely on climate change.  Anshuman gives a lot of credit to them for bringing climate change issues to the forefront for global policymakers. He believes that there is a large segment of amazing people who are trying to make an impact on the climate today.

We couldn’t have been happier to be part of this journey of creating long-lasting and unique solutions to solve one of humanity’s biggest challenges.