Our story
Charm’s founders met through Planet, and independently developed an interest in preventing climate change. In 2017 they began working together to find a profitable way to sequester carbon. What started as a “char farm” (charm, get it?) evolved into a concept to turn agricultural residues into renewable industrial hydrogen via fast pyrolysis.
In 2020 our Chief Scientist and co-founder Shaun Meehan had two breakthroughs. First, converting agricultural residues into a bio-oil intermediate made the concept dramatically more economical and second, pumping bio-oil underground was a compelling and cost-competitive way to remove carbon from the atmosphere. We were off to the races.
Within 10 months, we completed our first carbon removal injection and in 2021, we completed more than 5,000 tons of carbon removal for customers like Stripe, Shopify and Microsoft.
We're just getting started, and we need a wide variety of experiences to build an entirely new industry. Gigatonnes or bust!
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Meet our team
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Anna Kim
Chief of Staff
Before joining Charm, she held product management, business operations, and strategy roles at various startups. She was most recently with Canvas, a construction robotics startup. Before transitioning into tech, Anna worked in real estate private equity and started her career in investment banking at Morgan Stanley. She holds a B.S. in Hotel Administration with a minor in real estate from Cornell University.
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Peter Reinhardt
CEO & Co-founder
Charm is developing a novel carbon removal pathway & fossil-free ironmaking. Prior to Charm, Peter was CEO and co-founder at Segment, a SaaS customer data platform which grew to 600 people before it was acquired by Twilio in 2020 for $3.2B. He previously studied aerospace engineering at MIT.
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Katie Holligan
Head of Operations
Prior to Charm, Katie worked as a drilling engineer and drill site manager for Chevron on unconventional assets in the Permian Basin. In 2018, Katie decided to use her career to make an impact on climate and began working on building decarbonization at Carbon Lighthouse. She graduated from Villanova University with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering.
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Nora Cohen Brown
Head of Market Development & Policy
Prior to Charm, she designed and led the government engagement and business development strategy at Saildrone as the Senior Director of Government Relations. She previously worked at the White House in the Obama Administration, and has held a variety of roles in the private sector, government, and nonprofits at the intersection of industry, policy, and government. She is a graduate of Haverford College.
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Harris Cohn
Head of Sales
Prior to Charm, Harris led Energy Consumers engagement at ClearTrace Technologies, and led the direct sales team at Carbon Lighthouse and helped lead the pivot to a subscription model. Harris also spent time at Bloom Energy, and Pacific Gas and Electric after completing a bachelor's degree at UC Berkeley with a minor in the Energy and Resources Group.
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Tim Thomson
Chief Financial Officer
He previously held finance leadership roles at several high-growth companies in the climate sector, including Impossible Foods, Stripe, Plenty, and Meati. Before transitioning to these start-up operating roles, Tim served as a growth equity investor at ABRY Partners and started his career in investment banking at McColl Partners. He graduated from Duke University as a Robertson Scholar with a B.S. in Economics.
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Grace Connors
Head of Engineering
Previous to Charm, Grace worked as the Head of Commercial Engineering at a process engineering startup decarbonizing the beverage industry, where she scaled benchtop technology through sixty times the throughput, and managed commercial installations. She holds a S.B. and S.M. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT.
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Ed Young
Head of Research
Before joining Charm, Ed was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where he built readout systems for superconducting sensors. Ed received his PhD from Princeton University, where he studied the Big Bang by building, deploying, and analyzing data from the SPIDER balloon-borne telescope. He holds a B.A. in Physics and in Astrophysics from UC Berkeley.
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First, Do No Harm
We are here to serve the Earth and all of its inhabitants.
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Like the hippocratic oath and Asimov’s Zeroth Law, we are intentional in our technology development and business decisions to ensure we make a positive impact. We value the safety, health and happiness of our teammates, business partners, family and friends. This is our oath to the planet and its ecosystems.
Gigatons or Bust
In order to solve the climate crisis, Charm must deliver at a massive scale.
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We value taking bold and calculated risks to accelerate our path to gigatons of impact because the climate crisis demands urgency and enormous scale. We must think bigger and keep this concept front-of-mind when making decisions big and small.
Radical Resilience
When the going gets tough, we get going.
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We value persistence in the face of adversity. Not through stubbornness, but through being open-minded, resourceful and adaptable. We put ingenuity to work. This includes learning from our mistakes and wrong turns so that, no matter the circumstances, we finish what we set out to do.
Solve the Right Problem
We heat seek toward the problems with the biggest impact.
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The ‘right problem’ isn’t always the most apparent, most interesting, or the one with the biggest scope, but solving it can unblock a path to success. We avoid getting stuck in the weeds on problems with inflated importance; instead we take a step back and reorient to the critical path.
Weird and Full of Wonder
Never lose a sense of child-like awe and curiosity for the unknown.
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At Charm we are constantly in search of new learnings, opportunities, and discoveries. Even little things can surprise us and make us think in entirely new ways. We love to share those small moments and see the joy and excitement it brings to others. When we look through fresh or even child-like eyes, we can see things more clearly and simply, and have some fun along the way.
You’re Not Alone
We look to others to better ourselves.
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The climate crisis won’t be solved by a single person or entity. There are many people working to solve this problem we face, and while we’re in separate boats, we are all riding the same tides. We look to others for help when we need it and leverage the knowledge of those within the team or in relevant fields to learn from past mistakes, check assumptions, better our work, and ourselves.
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Climate heroes wanted!
The consequences of climate change inherently affect some more than others, and we believe we are going to need a diverse team to help us save our little planet most effectively and justly.
Charm Industrial is an equal opportunity employer with a firm commitment to growing our team in an inclusive way, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, medical condition, age, or veteran status.