The Innovator at the Intersection
The climate tech ecosystem in Connecticut is like a carefully crafted fine wine—complex, interconnected, and more powerful because of the distinct elements working in harmony. From Yale’s Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY) to ClimateHaven, from Tsai CITY (Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale) to Yale Ventures, each organization and individual plays a critical role in supporting students and ideas that are accelerating critical climate tech solutions at Yale and across New Haven, and ultimately for the planet.
This ecosystem functions much like a mycelium network, where seemingly separate nodes connect beneath the surface, allowing for the sharing of resources, knowledge, and opportunity. Through these connections, entrepreneurs are not just building companies; they are creating the future of climate innovation; and are creating the future of what environmental impact means.
Here’s the story of one such innovator:
Harrison Meyer (MBA/MEM '24) built his own path (with help along the way).
Harrison’s journey at Yale began when he enrolled at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) as a graduate student. Eager to make a difference, he dove into courses on climate change policy, energy economics, forest finance, and corporate sustainability. He even contributed to a report for CBEY on "Bridging the Regenerative Agriculture Gap." Through this experience, Harrison gained a deeper understanding of environmental challenges and potential business solutions.
Yet, he couldn’t shake the feeling that these frameworks, while valuable, didn’t fully capture the larger picture. As someone with a background in biofuels and chemical engineering, Harrison recognized that many environmental issues were deeply rooted in the physical world—bonds, molecules, and the built environment. He saw the need to connect his technical expertise with broader insights from environmental studies and business knowledge.
Motivated by this realization, Harrison applied early in his first year to pursue a dual degree with the Yale School of Management (SOM), determined to bring practical, scalable, and affordable solutions to market. His goal was to bridge the gap between environmental management, current business practices, and cutting-edge technology, making a tangible impact on the fight against climate change.
“I came into YSE hoping to find new climate solutions outside of my narrow scope of working on biofuels and carbon capture and really quickly realized that the only way to make climate solutions are to make ones that can actually scale–and this ultimately means they have to be financeable.”
“[For this] I really needed a solid background in finance, project management, and strategy that my background as a chemical engineer and working in sustainable development didn't provide.”
The YSE/SOM Joint Degree Program gave him the flexibility to immerse himself in two vastly different worlds—one focused on sustainability, the other on business strategy, finance, project management, and the operational skills needed to create and scale climate tech solutions to meaningfully address the climate crisis. The YSE/SOM joint degree allows students to build their own path, and with it, Harrison was able to take his work out of the theoretical and into the real world of climate tech.
“All this environmental and ecological damage is built by physical systems, sometimes by hundred-year-old technologies, [this] means that ultimately you need to replace the fossil alternative. But this requires operational and financial understanding just as much as technical understanding to change it.”
Through his courses, mentorships, and independent studies, Harrison developed and deepened his grasp of both the scientific challenges, engineering solutions, and the business opportunities in climate tech. This mindset—constantly looking for the space between disciplines—became the foundation for his entrepreneurial journey, and would soon propel him toward his future role as founder of Oxylus Energy, a startup working to create renewable fuel and industrial decarbonization.
“The joint degree married the need for caring about the environment and finding practical climate solutions that can actually work and scale.
I think the hard part was appreciating that it is fundamentally an energy transition. That means things don't happen overnight. New technologies are hard to build and they are hard to finance. They require pitch decks, they require financing documents, detailed techno-economic assessments (TEAs), they require GANTT charts – just so there is a shot that a new technology can hit the market. But this is what is honestly required. We can’t just hope that the same technologies will actually change the current built environment that currently requires fossil fuels.”
Building a Network, Sparking an Idea
Harrison had a passion and a vision – but he didn’t do it alone. He was lucky and is grateful for the larger Yale entrepreneurship and climate community.
The network at Yale—CBEY, Tsai City, Yale Ventures—gave Harrison the opportunities necessary to find like-minded individuals with the same passion for climate tech, and a collaborative and supportive environment in which to explore novel concepts and potential future businesses.
While at Yale, Harrison served as a teaching fellow for the Yale Program on Entrepreneurship, learning firsthand how to foster innovation in others while developing his own startup. He also met his future co-founders after participating in the Climate Innovation Intensive.
In discussing the network of resources, and partnerships amongst organizations such as CBEY, ClimateHaven, and Tsai City, Harrison shared,
“It's truly allowing a new model of climate innovation to take place. This is so exciting – [it’s] a model for a future sustainable and equitable New Haven. [Oxylus Energy] is incredibly grateful for the support from “greater Yale.” It really takes a village to build a company.”
This network, alongside the mentors and infrastructure critical for any nascent business, would be instrumental in launching their venture.
Oxylus Energy: A Venture in Motion
Harrison founded Oxylus early into his first year at business school. Harrison met Perry Bakas, who helped co-found Oxylus Energy, on his first day at SOM. Harrison was from Colorado and Perry had recently lived there – and they quickly bonded about their love for nature, the mountains, and the need for new technologies for its preservation. They swapped stories about working in the climate tech industry. As their conversations deepened their first semester, the topic turned to carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration, also known as CCUS, (the process of capturing and converting CO2 emissions to prevent it from returning to the atmosphere). Harrison thought there were better uses for CO2. Together, they arrived at a fundamental question: why are we treating CO2 as a waste product? Isn’t there something productive we could be doing with it? Why should we not just recycle it?
Having worked in both carbon sequestration and mineralization (the process in which CO2 is converted into rock for permanent carbon storage) and in biofuels, Harrison quickly suggested that they should return to chemistry and physics first principles. Carbon dioxide should be converted into the easiest molecule possible – why complicate it? This made the case for methanol. Methanol is a one-carbon alcohol that already forms the basis of petrochemical value chains and is the third largest globally traded commodity chemical. With his background as a chemical engineer, Harrison scouted top national and university research labs for new CO2-to-methanol technologies. Little did he know that one was a few blocks nearby – here on Yale’s campus.
While the two fledgling MBAs pondered how they might turn captured carbon into something that could be used productively, Oxylus’ third co-founder, Conor Rooney was busy finishing up his Chemistry PhD at Yale. Serendipitously, Conor’s PhD research focused on modifying a catalyst developed at Yale’s Energy Science Institute by Conor’s PI, Professor Hailiang Wang, that converts CO2 directly to methanol. Seeing that direct CO2 conversion of methanol could be a possible game changer climate solution, Conor enrolled into CBEY and Tsai City’s Climate Innovation Intensive to learn more about climate entrepreneurship. It was here that he met Perry who was teaching a class on Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). Conor presented his novel CO2-to-methanol technology as a feedstock for SAF and Perry quickly introduced Conor to Harrison to see if this could be the methanol technology they were both looking for.
Using his newly gained knowledge of finance and modeling, skills he acquired at SOM, Harrison created a financial model that convinced both Perry and Connor that not only was the science and engineering behind this idea totally feasible, but the market for this product was vast and untapped. Together, they built their first pitch deck. That year they pitched at StartUp Yale where they took home the Sustainable Venture Prize Audience Choice Award before later being selected for a 2023 Sobotka Seed Prize for Sustainable Ventures.
“That funding allowed us to build our first reactor – our first electrolyzer cell – proving to ourselves more than anyone that this wasn’t just destined to stay in the lab.”
Oxylus Energy quickly became a standout in Yale’s climate innovation community. Focused on decarbonizing the hard-to-abate sectors of aviation, shipping, and petrochemicals, responsible for ~11% of global GHG emissions today, the company received multiple accolades and funding. But more than the early accolades, it was the ecosystem that made all the difference.
Through connections and support from both CBEY and Yale Ventures, Harrison and his team built a solid foundation, raising non-dilutive capital and securing partnerships that would help propel the company forward.
A key turning point for Oxylus came when the team joined ClimateHaven, a dedicated workspace for climate tech ventures in downtown New Haven and a hub that’s quickly becoming a cornerstone of Connecticut’s growing climate-tech scene.
“ClimateHaven is developing a community and ecosystem that focuses on the other part of climate solutions which is the entrepreneurship and innovation side,” says Harrison.
Through the support of Yale Ventures and the broader ecosystem, they secured funding, space, and critical mentorship, including a “golden ticket” from Yale that gave them free access to ClimateHaven for a year. With this key support in their last year of graduate school, the co-founders built more electrolyzers and won over $100k from pitch competitions including Arizona State University’s Innovation Open, Rice Business Plan Competition, and being semi-finalists for MIT’s Climate & Energy Prize.
Just this summer, right after the co-founder's graduation, Oxylus Energy raised a $4.5 million over-subscribed Series Seed round, co-led by Toyota Ventures & Azolla Ventures with participation from Earth Foundry and Connecticut Innovations.
And it’s only the beginning—Oxylus is now expanding, hiring new talent, and continuing to develop its renewable fuel technologies in order to meet the challenges of the climate crisis.
Climate to the Future
Harrison Meyer’s story is one of curiosity, collaboration, and boldness. Through Yale’s Joint Degree Program, he found the freedom to explore, the network to support him, and the resources to bring his ideas to life.
But Harrison’s journey is not just about personal achievement, it’s also a reflection of a larger story unfolding at Yale, in New Haven, and in Connecticut. His journey from student to climate tech entrepreneur highlights the importance of interdisciplinary thinking, curiosity, and the power of a supportive community. New Haven may not yet rival Boston or Silicon Valley in terms of sheer size, but its appetite for climate tech innovation is undeniable. Startups like Oxylus Energy are proof that the ingredients for success—funding, mentorship, community—are all here.
“We've chosen to stay here because it's a great ecosystem of people that are passionate about making a difference, who are technically minded, and know that we need to scale new solutions to actually solve this climate crisis.
Connecticut is really building itself. New Haven is really building itself. That's great for the future and we hope to be a small part of that.”
The ecosystem is growing, and with it, a new generation of entrepreneurs like Harrison Meyer are emerging, driven by the urgency of the climate crisis and the possibilities of interdisciplinary solutions. More importantly, there is increasing recognition that hard problems require new solutions. As Oxylus Energy continues to grow, so does the potential for Yale and New Haven to become a hub for climate innovation—proof that the intersection of science, engineering, business, and sustainability is where the future lies.
What advice does Harrison have for future climate tech entrepreneurs and joint degree students?
“Build your own path. You make what you want of the program. If you have a really niche sustainability focus that really matters to you, you can make whatever you want of it. Solving climate problems will require many different climate technologies, business models, and financing schemes. Let a thousand flowers bloom.”
Not every person or organization who supported the founding and growth of Oxylus is mentioned above. Here are a few other notables from Yale and New Haven’s Climate Tech ecosystems who were instrumental in this journey: SOM: Jennifer McFadden and Kyle Jensen; YSE: Paul Anastas, Stuart DeCew, Peter Boyd, and Marian Chertow; Yale Chemistry: Hailiang Wan; Yale Ventures: Josh Geballe; and ClimateHaven: Ryan Dings, Haley Lieberman, Casey Pickett, and Aishwarya Kuruttukulam.