One of Los Angeles’ buzziest new venture capitalists grew up in a world without money.
As a child, Tenzin Seldon lived nomadically in the Himalayas as part of a community where cash was a foreign concept and bartering was king. Her family’s way of life put Seldon in close contact with the natural world, and the marks of a changing climate were stamped on her childhood. She watched playgrounds flood and mountain glaciers melt. As a precocious and curious young girl, she wondered why.
Now, Seldon’s Santa Monica-based venture firm is using capital to scale solutions to the environmental problems that once puzzled her.
Pulse Fund, founded in 2022, just closed its inaugural fund focused on the energy transition, food and agriculture, infrastructure, and mobility sectors at $63 million. The effort grew out of an innate fascination, Seldon said.
“I always had an affinity for numbers, for ecology, for nature, and for the integration of all of these very distinct disciplines,” Seldon said. “It wasn’t until I came to America in 10th grade (that) I learned the term climate change in geography class.”
As she came of age, Seldon connected the changing landscapes of her childhood to global trends driven by greenhouse gas emissions and development. She studied policy, economics and math at Stanford University and, later, at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar before working on disaster risk reduction policy with the United Nations Environment Programme in Thailand.
“I’ve really been devoted to the climate space and using the instrument of money and capital to … create a larger yield of difference in it,” Seldon said.
After finding early entrepreneurial success with Kinstep, a tech platform that connects vetted immigrants and refugees to jobs, Seldon turned back to the environment. Her drive to address the far-reaching effects of the climate crisis led her to co-found The Plant, which made waves in 2022 when it announced plans to redevelop the defunct Glenwood Power Plant in Yonkers, New York, into a hub for climate innovation. The $350 million project stalled as the group struggled to secure parking and lock down an agreement on the benefits the reimagined space would bring to the surrounding community.
Pulse was Seldon’s next move as she changed gears from creating a space where climate thought-leaders could soundboard ideas to backing up-and-comers with solutions and business models already in place.
“I really realized, in having raised millions of dollars as a founder from blended finance models, how critical it was that the right financing instruments were not being leveraged for the right climate solutions,” Seldon said. “There was a mismatch and a gap between what needed funding and financing and who was funding them, and so that’s why I chose to step in.”
The first-time manager’s debut fund bet on Plantible’s plant-based protein products, Mast Reforestation’s carbon credits scheme, it’s electric’s curbside electric vehicle charging and Twelve’s carbon dioxide emissions recycling technology, among others.
Active investor
Pulse often leads financing rounds and takes board seats, a hands-on approach well-received by John Walsh, the founder of Ohio-based electric shuttle and school bus start-up Endera.
The fund made its first investment in the transportation company in 2024 and participated in a $36 million equity investment led by asset manager Magnetar in early 2025.
“(Seldon’s) been a phenomenal board member. She’s helped with our overall cap table, in terms of how to structure it so that we can receive venture capital funding in our early days,” Walsh said. “Climate is a very hard industry, especially now in the current political environment. She’s given us political connections that have helped us influence policy in our favor.”
With Pulse’s help and Seldon’s contacts, Walsh said he had an easier time navigating California’s electric vehicle voucher program.
“Those things don’t come with just a normal check,” he said.
Walsh said he also appreciates that Seldon understood Endera’s incremental approach to scaling its electric fleet. The company has used Metro Titan’s line of gas-powered buses acquired from Winnebago to generate cash flow and drive down the price of its electric buses. As a result, Walsh said he struggled to securing funding from other climate tech investors turned off by the fact that Endera’s operations aren’t fully electric.
“It takes someone that sees the bigger picture,” Walsh said. “A lot of climate investors, they’re entirely mandate-driven. They’re like, ‘No, sorry, you have an internal combustion engine. That’s not sexy. That’s not checking a box.’”
Investors raise climate tech bets
Pulse’s first fund closed shortly after global climate tech venture funding recorded a banner first half, surging 55% year-over-year to $26 billion, market research firm Currence reported.
A race to power the energy- and water-hungry AI buildout is largely driving that boom, and climate tech funds have poured primarily into alternative energy start-ups like geothermal pioneer Fervo Energy and low-carbon data center developers like DayOne.
Pulse has seen “significant interest” from AI hyperscalers looking to invest, though most of the companies Seldon has backed don’t generate power or cater specifically to data centers.
So far, the fund has directed more attention to overlooked sectors like nature restoration, she said, which needs considerable global investment by 2030, according to a report from the World Economic Forum.
“There’s a gap of about $700 billion in the nature financing gap, and venture very rarely touches nature. That’s why one of our early investments was in Mast Reforestation,” Seldon said. “We thought that they were doing nature in a scalable manner, using biomass burials and then creating a carbon off-trend process.”
Restoring an ecosystem or reforesting a tract of land might not sound like a returns-driven investment. It didn’t, at first, to David Osborn, who backed Pulse with his family office, DRO Investments.
“I had always considered climate more a philanthropic endeavor than an investing endeavor,” Osborn said. “I had come to the conclusion that you’ve got to sacrifice returns for climate investing, so I’d rather donate to climate and invest where I could make maximum profits.”
Osborn began to change his mind upon meeting Seldon on the board of a charity that supports orphanages in Nepal a few years ago.
She introduced him to the companies she’d made her first bets on and, after digging into the theses behind her investments and running his due diligence on Pulse, Osborn wanted in.
“I was just convinced that not only could I make a difference with my capital in solving one of the planet’s biggest challenges, but also make … a great return,” he said.
Seldon scores “some of the best deals because of who she is,” Osborn said.
Her conviction has helped her bring a roster of other investors on board. Among them are financial services company Beneficient, early-stage investor C6 Partners, the Hyatt-owning Pritzker family and an Asian sovereign wealth fund.
Pulse crossed the finish line despite a highly competitive venture fundraising environment that’s seen family offices and wealthy individuals pull back – especially from emerging, less established managers. But Seldon said she’s no stranger to beating the odds.
“My entire life, people have told me that something is impossible to do, and I just stay consistent and I compound on it,” she said. “The way I voice urgency is by staying focused and not necessarily being the loudest voice in the room, but by being the most consistent voice.”
