Tenzin Nyidon
DHARAMSHALA, Sept. 22: Tibetan-American entrepreneur and climate investor Tenzin Seldon has successfully raised $63 million for the inaugural fund of Pulse Fund, a climate-focused venture capital firm investing in early-stage companies working across energy, infrastructure, food and agriculture, and mobility.
Founded in 2022, Pulse Fund was established by Seldon, who serves as its founder and managing partner. The fund’s close comes as Seldon’s career in climate policy, entrepreneurship, and investment continues to be shaped by her early experiences growing up in the Himalayan region.
In a 2021 interview with Tricycle, she recalled seeing ice-capped mountains around Dharamshala melting and said that climate change was not an abstract concept for her but something she experienced first-hand. Her early experiences eventually became the foundation of a career spanning climate policy, social entrepreneurship and venture capital.
Seldon moved to the United States during her adolescence and graduated summa cum laude from Stanford University before becoming the first Tibetan-American Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. She subsequently worked with the United Nations Environment Programme in Thailand, where her work included disaster-risk reduction policy.
She later co-founded The Plant, a climate-focused initiative aimed at creating a hub for climate solutions through the redevelopment and adaptive reuse of historic buildings, before turning her focus toward climate investing.
Through Pulse Fund, Seldon now backs early-stage companies developing solutions across energy transition, infrastructure, food and agriculture, and mobility. The firm’s investment thesis is built around the interconnected nature of these sectors rather than treating them as isolated areas of the climate economy.
“We invest across energy, food and agriculture, infrastructure, and mobility, and we underwrite them together, because a breakthrough in one keeps turning up as the reason a company in another suddenly works,” Seldon said. “Investors who look at one sector at a time miss those companies, or they price them wrong.”
The newly raised $63 million represents Pulse Fund’s inaugural fund, with the firm seeking to invest in companies developing scalable solutions to climate-related challenges.
Its portfolio to date includes Mast Reforestation, a company focused on post-wildfire reforestation and carbon removal; Twelve, which develops fuels and other products using captured carbon dioxide; Endera Motors, an electric mobility solutions provider; and InventWood, a developer of engineered wood products designed to provide lower-carbon alternatives to conventional materials.
Seldon has described the current period as a major transition in the global economy, with significant amounts of capital expected to move toward technologies and businesses addressing climate change.
“We are at the beginning of the largest capital reallocation in history, and understanding how the energy transition, infrastructure, food and agriculture, and mobility move together will define where that capital lands,” she said. “We back the founders who see those connections before the market does and build companies at the center of them. This close is a mandate to go find more of them.”
