Karan Girotra

How did a team of researchers identify gaps, decode emissions data from CEMS devices, and help the Gujarat Pollution Control Board design the world’s first particulate pollution market in Surat? In this episode, hear Professor Michael Greenstone, Founding Director of the UChicago Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, Director at Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) and one of the Principal Investigators on the project, speak about this decade-long journey and more in a special podcast with David Greely on SmarterMarkets™. From technical hurdles to regulatory wins, this audio byte unpacks the lessons learned along the way. #EPICBytes

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From our PearX S25 cohort, meet Pravāh, the AI-native operating system for the electric grid When Mohak Mangal, Dhruv Suri, and Aman Gupta looked at the strain on the U.S. electric grid, they saw a system pushed to its limits. Exploding demand and unpredictable supply have made blackouts increasingly common. This costs the economy more than $150B a year, a number that could 10x in the next five years. Mohak Mangal and team founded Pravāh to help fix it. Their platform helps utilities and grid operators make real-time decisions on load, generation, and congestion, reducing blackout risks, optimizing power procurement, and bringing much-needed stability to the backbone of modern life. We’re proud to support the Pravāh team as they take on one of the toughest and most important infrastructure challenges of our time.

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This article, co-authored by Vardaan Ahluwalia and me lays out India's significant new Research Development and Innovation Fund initiative in the context of other successful interventions: when governments and the private sector work together, they can make a transformative difference to deep technology entrepreneurship. Equally, initiatives to help manage financial risk should be followed by structural reforms in areas ranging from intellectual property regulation, ease of clearances for start-ups, tax rationalization in capital gains and options that helps start-ups attract talent, and a visa regime that attracts leading global researchers. https://lnkd.in/gk92YSZa

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New deep dive out on powering data centers from Columbia Business School's Climate Knowledge Initiative, led by my colleague Gernot Wagner: https://lnkd.in/eY5EyDGQ Key takeaways: * most of the projected growth in power capacity in the US, China, and EU to 2035 will be from zero-emissions sources, especially wind, solar, and nuclear * data center operators in the US account for 58% of all announced renewable PPAs and 40% of projects under development, evan as many project PPAs require hourly matching * Google achieved 66% carbon free energy in 2024, and recently signed the first corporate PPA to buy power from a natural gas power plant with CCS to eliminate emissions "Tailwinds are cause for optimism: Solar is now the cheapest electricity source globally and nuclear and geothermal energy are experiencing a resurgence after decades of stagnation." Highlights of this work: https://lnkd.in/e7d_UMum Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change at Columbia University

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#AI isn’t just transforming tech ... it’s reshaping finance! Great discussion yesterday at University of Virginia Darden School of Business on “The New Capital Playbook: Financing AI Infrastructure” with Joe Harar (EdgeConneX) and Irtiaz Ahmad (Sobina Advisors) on how #AI is changing #datacenter capital stacks. Special thanks to Marc Ruggiano (LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business) and Dan Ephraim (PointOne Data Centers) for organizing such a timely event ... learned a lot! https://lnkd.in/ePww6UHB #AI #DataCenters #InfrastructureFinance #DigitalInfrastructure

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Happy new year! with our Investment no: 12💪🎉🎉👏👏 AI chips today do not fail because of lack of compute. They fail because they cannot breathe. Delighted to share that we have invested in Sidix, a fabless semiconductor startup building chip scale fully silicon cooling solutions, based out of Odisha. As power density on chips has gone vertical, cooling has quietly become the limiting factor. Compute can scale. Transistors can scale. But heat removal has not kept pace. Sidix is attacking this problem at the chip surface itself using a beautifully engineered silicon native MEMS approach to solid state cooling. This is first principles engineering at work. Micromachined silicon actuators that enable airflow generation and heat removal exactly where it matters. The result is meaningfully higher output per unit area, better efficiency, and the ability to run advanced CPUs GPUs memories and transceivers at lower temperatures with higher reliability. This is not just a better thermal solution. It has direct P & L impact across data centres and electronics systems globally. We love Sidix for how we like to invest a99 VC . Deep manufacturing led innovation. Serious MEMS pedigree. Global relevance from day one. And a team that understands both physics and markets. Excited to partner with Arun Rambhatla , Siavash Pourkamali , and the Sidix team as they help the industrial century run a little cooler. This also marks our third investment from the rapidly emerging Odisha manufacturing and deep tech ecosystem. The map is widening and the depth is getting real. Thanks to the boss Asha Venugopal and the boss’s lady Varsha Shivaraj for getting this deal done despite the bumps! Let the cool waves begin!

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Yael Grushka-Cockayne leading an interesting panel on Building AI Infrastructure in Virginia at VirginiaAI Summit hosted by Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine. Panelist: Lingjia Liu, Milos Manic, Nathan Mellis, and Manish Parashar. Key takeaways • Virginia is emerging as a national leader in AI infrastructure. • Community and environmental impacts must be designed in from the start. • Cybersecurity is driving real-world AI use cases—and the infrastructure required to support them. #AI #AIInfrastructure #Cybersecurity #Sustainability #Virginia #VirginiaAI

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PhD students are brilliant but often not understood. I’ve spent the last decade teaching these students how to communicate their research in ways that the general public can understand and get excited about. Steven Franconeri and I developed an evidence base curriculum that not just explained the practical importance of communicating research to a broader audience in a way that captured their attention and inspired them to learn more. Never had this skill been more important than now. It should be a required course for all researchers!

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This is going to be a great program on the future of AI in Higher Education with vitally important international implications.

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We’re launching the AI in Finance Certificate, developed jointly by Cornell Engineering and the SC Johnson College of Business. https://lnkd.in/gNW5DuYw Built on the CFEM model of integrating Cornell faculty and industry practitioners, the program focuses exclusively on finance applications of AI. It’s designed to help professionals gain confidence in AI’s transformative role across both technical and non-technical areas of finance, and to ask the right questions as the technology continues to evolve. #AI #Finance #Cornell #CFEM #ArtificialIntelligence #FinTech #LifelongLearning

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Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences is fortunate to work closely with the Center for Technology and Licensing, which continues to support new levels of intellectual property and startups in the college.

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