Team Aircela

We outlined the technology to capture CO₂ from the air two decades ago. Since then our team has been advising governments and the private sector on how and why to build carbon capture projects.

We discovered a way to miniaturize the tech while making it more efficient, opening up the potential for a completely new kind of carbon capture company, built around swift development and organic growth.

Aircela is the culmination of decades of thinking about the role of technology in fighting climate change, and the start of decades of doing something about it.

Board

Dr. Eric Dahlgren

Co-founder, CEO

Eric has been one of the leading minds in the application of carbon capture technology since his 2013 Columbia PhD thesis on the miniaturization of environmental engineering problems.

Frustrated by the lack of progress in the industry, Eric and Klaus Lackner came up with the idea of a miniaturized CO₂-to-fuel system and Eric and Mia co-founded Aircela to build it.

Eric grew up in Lund, Sweden, playing the grand piano of his great-grandfather Svante Arrhenius, a Nobel laureate who was the first to calculate the effect of CO₂ on the temperature of the earth.

Mia Dahlgren

Co-founder, COO

Mia co-founded Aircela with Eric to apply her degree in Social Sciences by building a mission, team, and culture that match the importance of the technology we're developing.

With a training in how people think, Mia will ensure that Aircela works for people, as well as for the environment.

Prof. Klaus Lackner

Senior Science Adviser

Klaus is known as the "Father of Direct Air Capture", and has been advising the world's governments and large corporations on carbon capture for decades.

Klaus is Director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions and a professor at the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University.

Klaus is the inventor of the air capture technology that Aircela uses, and has been overseeing the prototyping of carbon capture devices since helping his daughter win her eighth-grade science project in 2006.

Eva Zlotnicka

Series Seed Director

Eva is a Founder, Managing Partner, President, and member of the Management Committee of Inclusive Capital Partners. Just prior to founding Inclusive Capital Partners, she was a Founder and Managing Director of the ValueAct Spring Fund (now known as Inclusive Capital Partners Spring Fund) and Head of Stewardship at ValueAct Capital. Prior to joining ValueAct Capital in 2018, Ms. Zlotnicka spent more than 10 years on the sell side. Most recently, she was lead US Sustainability and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) equity research analyst at Morgan Stanley. Ms. Zlotnicka is currently a director of Enviva Inc., where she chairs the Health, Safety, Sustainability, and Environmental Committee, Unifi, Inc. and Arcadia Power. Ms. Zlotnicka was previously a director of Hawaiian Electric Industries. Ms. Zlotnicka also serves as a member of the Investor Advisory Group for the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), is a member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Corporate Governance and Finance at NYU Law, and is a director of the Sustainable Ocean Alliance. Ms. Zlotnicka also co-founded Women Investing for a Sustainable Economy (WISE), a global professional community. She has two BSc. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, including one from the Wharton School, and an MBA and a Master of Environmental Science degree from Yale University.

Key personnel and advisers

Kristian Tuszynski

CTO

Kristian comes to Aircela from a long career at UTC/Carrier, where he was Global Controls Manager and his work included building digital models of hydroelectric dams. Kristian is shepherding our technology from the drawing board to production, and is building the brains of the system, with his controls software allowing aircela systems to work together as an interconnected swarm.

Prof. Amanda Simson

Fuels Adviser

A professor of Chemical Engineering at the Cooper Union in New York City, Dr. Amanda Simson has worked on rockets for Boeing and alternative energy technologies for Watt Fuel Cell. Professor Simson is helping us on R&D of our fuel generation technology.

Prof. Garrett van Ryzin

Business Adviser

Garrett is Professor Emeritus at Columbia Business School and Distinguished Scientist at Amazon. He has also applied his expertise in operations and economics in building scalable marketplaces at Uber and Lyft. Garrett is co-author with Eric and Klaus of the “Small Modular Infrastructure” paper that helped launch Aircela. He brings expertise in operations, innovation, entrepreneurship and technology to Aircela.

Chris Larsen

Business Adviser

Chris is an executive and angel investor focusing on democratizing technologies hitherto monopolized by massive organizations. After founding E-Loan, Prosper Marketplace, and Ripple Labs, Chris has been a board member or adviser for organizations such as Coil Technologies, GiveCrypto and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). Chris is the cofounder of RippleWorks, a philanthropic organization that provides expertise to promising startups in the developing world as well as underprivileged communities in the US. The 20-person team has completed over 125 projects since 2015 reaching over 200 million people.

Aircela is honored to have Chris as an investor and adviser since late 2020. He is helping the team understand how to turn our nascent technology into a fast-growing technology company.