Our Team
Dawn Lippert
CEO
“Systems are actually all connected… there is no real separation between our water system, food system, energy system, and the built infrastructure that we’ve created, or the communities that exist in these places.”
Connect on LinkedIn 
Dawn Lippert is Founder and CEO of Elemental Excelerator, a global climate technology investor and nonprofit impact organization.
Under Dawn’s leadership, Elemental has invested in more than 150 startups in the energy, mobility, water, circular economy, and agriculture sectors, and those companies have gone on to raise over $7 billion in follow-on funding. Elemental has pioneered a new model for equitable climate technology deployment, centering social equity in companies’ cultures, products, and deployments, and implementing 115 first-of-their-kind technology projects with startups in deep partnership with local leaders. Dawn has shared insight on climate investing and the energy transition in the Economist, Bloomberg TV, Axios Pro, TED, Yahoo! Finance Live, Canary Media, and more.
In addition to leading Elemental Excelerator
Dawn serves as Founding Partner of Earthshot Ventures, a venture capital fund spun out of Elemental in 2021 and backed by Microsoft, John Doerr, Tom Steyer, and others. Dawn is also Senior Climate Advisor at Emerson Collective, the investment and philanthropic platform led by Laurene Powell Jobs.
Dawn is passionate about scaling climate technology together with policy solutions, and currently serves on the board of Clean Energy 4 America and as a C3E Ambassador for the Department of Energy. On the investing side, Dawn is a member of PRIME Coalition’s Investment Advisory Committee. Dawn was a recipient of the 2020 UN Global Climate Action Award, was named a Grist 50 Fixer, and served as an Omidyar Fellow. She is deeply committed to inclusion in technology, and in 2010 founded the nonprofit organization WiRE (Women in Renewable Energy).
Prior to Elemental Excelerator
Before starting Elemental, Dawn was a management consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton’s alternative energy practice in Washington DC. She also worked on energy and environmental projects in communities around the world, including Africa, India, and Latin America. Dawn graduated from Yale University and the Yale School of the Environment.
Outside of the office
You can find her playing with her husband and young daughter, on the soccer field, and enjoying the ocean.
