Kathy Hannun

Kathy Hannun was 9 months pregnant when she closed a $4.5M round led by NEA for her startup, Dandelion Energy.

She signed the deal and delivered her daughter 24 hours later.

“Fear is more self-limiting than anything,” she said. “If I were a man going through a divorce, would I feel obligated to tell investors constantly? Probably not.”

Before Dandelion, Kathy was a Product Manager at Google X, where she led the Rapid Evaluation team looking for climate tech moonshots.

That’s where she first saw the potential of geothermal: a proven, emissions-free heating and cooling system that barely existed in the U.S. market.

So she spun Dandelion out of Google X in 2017 to make geothermal cheap, fast, and scalable.

First market: the 6 million homes in the Northeast still running on oil and propane.

Because Kathy’s bet was that homeowners would choose geothermal… if someone made it easier and cheaper.

Turns out, she was right.

Since launch, Dandelion has raised over $35 million and helped customers avoid over 100 million pounds of carbon emissions.

Her work earned her recognition as an MIT Tech Review 35 under 35 and a CNBC Changemaker.

Kathy doesn’t think success means inventing something from scratch.

“The challenge isn’t to build a moonshot,” she said. “It’s to take something that’s existed for a long time, and make it affordable and practical.”