Kripa Balachandran

Kripa grew up in the Middle East, watching her single Indian mother navigate a world that consistently undervalued her. She saw droughts, floods, and oil-rich lifestyles with stark inequality, and so she decided early that her career would be in service of something bigger. 

 Today she is Head of Product at Mission Zero Technologies: the UK's market leader in Direct Air Carbon capture, leading a 38-person team delivering the infrastructure for a $1.1T market. A Cambridge-trained chemical engineer, she is writing and executing the playbook for scalable with hardware with real impact, that turn first-of-a-kind science into investable climate deployments. In 2025, her team delivered three first-of-a-kind DAC deployments across the UK and Canada (a world first), driving ~60% cost reduction and is proud to have increased female technical representation from 15% to 30%.  

Previously, at Jaguar Land Rover she regularly attended board meetings as young as 26 and at EV scale-up Arrival, was one of the youngest directors leading a $400m programme, showing her rapid and capable rise early in her career. 

 Everything she is building now is preparation for founding her own climate venture in future, and to ignite the next generation of climate leaders.