Our Team
Advisory Board
Go-to-market Advisor
Bret is terrafuse's go to market advisor. Bret is an exited insurance executive and has worked in insurance for over 20 years. He is currently VP of Data & Analytics at RLI Insurance Company. Before RLI, Bret led SpatialKey (a geospatial analytics solution provider) from its infancy, to adolescence, to a successful exit. Prior to that he held senior leadership roles at RMS and Willis Re. He is passionate in his cause to empower decision making in insurance through innovative analytic and data solutions.
Advisor
Andrea is an exited founder of a publicly traded company. He has over 30 years of experience. He is co-founder and former CTO of ION, where he designed and developed ION's popular platform for electronic trading. In his 20 years at ION, Andrea helped the company grow from a start-up to a $1bn revenue multinational in the financial technology sector. Andrea's expertise lies in the design and development of distributed, low-latency architectures, and in building and scaling organizations to deliver modular, enterprise solutions. Andrea is currently advising startups and collaborating with the Multilanguage Cognition Lab at University College London.
Dr. Gireesh Shrimali
Advisor
Gireesh is the Head of Transition Finance Research at Oxford University. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at Stanford University and a Director at Climate Policy Initiative. He has taught at Johns Hopkins University as well as the Indian School of Business. His research is on the catalytic role of finance in getting to the 2C climate target. He also focuses on ESG issues, such as climate risk and net zero transitions. He holds a PhD from Stanford University, an MS from the University of Minnesota, and a BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology. Prior to his academic career, he has over nine years of industry experience.
Dr. Daniel Feldman
Advisor
Dan is an atmospheric scientist by training. His research focuses on remote sensing, mountainous hydrology, and atmospheric modeling and forecasting. He leads research projects for the U.S. Dept. of Energy, for NASA, and for the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program. Dan works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and holds a B.S. in Environmental Engineering Science from MIT and a Master's and PhD in Environmental Science & Engineering from Caltech.
Board of Directors
Hunter Connell
Founder, Board Member
Before Terrafuse AI, Hunter worked at Ajax Strategies, where she invested in early stage climate technology companies, seven of which have since exited including three public offerings. She also served on the philanthropy team at Energy Innovation supporting nonprofits focused on decarbonization. Prior to that, Hunter designed solutions for climate change adaptation and habitat restoration as an environmental engineer. Hunter studied business at The Wharton School and Environmental Science at UCLA.
Chrysanthe Gussis
Board Member
Chrysanthe is an investor and advisor to early stage climate tech companies. She has extensive experience in finance, structuring, legal, operational and business strategy, and scaling of high volume, high growth businesses. She also has deep relationships in the banking and clean economy sectors. She was previously an executive at SolarCity for 8 years, where she helped make solar energy accessible by developing scalable, lower-cost financing during a period of consistent year-over-year doubling in growth. Chrysanthe holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a JD from the University of Michigan.
Eugene Kirpichov
Board Member
Eugene is an expert in large-scale data processing and machine learning infrastructure, as well as catalyzing big-tech talent en-masse to the climate technology space. He founded Work on Climate for this purpose- the first dedicated movement of its kind. Eugene was previously a Staff Software Engineer working on Google's cloud technologies, data processing and machine learning infrastructure, before leaving to focus full-time on the urgent climate crisis. He founded and runs Work On Climate, a non-profit focused on making climate work mainstream among professionals, with 7,500+ members and growing.