Women in Clean Tech·January 5, 2026· 8 min read
Women in Clean Tech: The Second Wave
Founders, engineers, and operators rebuilding the industrial stack with different defaults.
The second wave of clean tech is being built by founders who refuse to inherit the old industry's defaults — financial, cultural, or chemical.
The first wave of clean tech, roughly 2006 through the late 2010s, was disproportionately funded, run, and narrated by men. The second wave — the one quietly getting built right now — looks different. Not uniformly, not evenly, but visibly.
Different defaults
The second-wave founders we profile are designing companies whose defaults are circular, whose hiring is intentional, whose supply chains are auditable from day one. They are not retrofitting ESG onto a pre-built business; they are starting with the loop closed and the org chart flat.
“They are not retrofitting ESG. They are starting with the loop closed.”
Watch this list
Over the next year we will be running long-form profiles of a dozen women operators — in materials, in grid software, in regenerative agriculture, in circular manufacturing. The point is not to compile a list. The point is to compile a working pattern, so the third wave knows what to copy.
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Pieces from the dispatch.
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