“Classified” is an occasional series spotlighting some of the more powerful lessons being taught in classrooms around Haas.
It’s the first pitch day for the new Climate Solutions Fund at Berkeley Haas, and a panel of investment industry judges are peppering an MBA student team with questions about solar panel materials firm Caelux.
The questions bounce from the pricing of Caelux’s funding rounds to its manufacturing strategy and the potential geopolitical pressures the company faces to possible exit strategies.
“We expect them to IPO and stand on their own, though acquisitions are possible,” answers Jash Padhiar, taking turns in the hot seat with teammates Vanessa He, EWMBA 27, Kamakshi Sharma, Olavo Egydio, and Lynda Negron, all MBA 25, during last month’s pitch competition.

In the end, the Haas team pitching Caelux received a $300,000 investment to support the deployment of new manufacturing for the company. Yet all five finalist teams presenting to the judging investment committee—including those pitching for EV battery pack maker B2U, heat pump firm Gradient, wind power company Hover, and sustainable energy services firm Redaptive—walked away with unique skills from the new Climate Solutions Fund course: The ability to structure financing in private markets by co-investing in real-world deals.
“This was as close as I could have been to the real thing,” said Egydio, who worked in product marketing before coming to Haas. “The faculty opened a lot of doors to people who we wouldn’t have had access to. We had a lot of time to spend on this, and we had mentors guiding us. It was a very cool exposure.”
Pushing further in finance
Finance Professor Adair Morse came up with the idea to launch the course-based Climate Solutions Fund in 2021 while on leave from Haas at the U.S. Treasury, where she was deputy assistant secretary of capital access. Morse, co-founder of the Sustainable and Impact Finance Center (SAIF) at Haas, wanted a hands-on way to teach students new designs not traditionally taught in mainstream finance courses.
The new fund rounds out three at Haas including the public markets-focused Sustainable Investment Fund—the first and the largest student-led sustainable investing fund within a leading business school—and the Haas Impact Fund, a seed/startup capital offering.
The fund’s generous supporters include Allan Holt, MBA 76, along with founding donations from Larry Johnson, BS 72, Charlie Michaels, BS 78, and his wife, Doris; Scott Pinkus; and Professor Laura D. Tyson, former Haas dean and co-founder of SAIF.
Tapping further into the Haas ecosystem, Morse recruited alums Jeep Kline, MBA 10, founder and managing partner of Raisewell Ventures, and Todd Evans, MBA 07, managing director at Strategic Value Partners, as co-instructors.
“This is the beauty of Berkeley,” Morse said. “We have such a big network of people doing finance and infrastructure projects and public-private partnerships and VC and growth equity and private debt and on and on. Everyone wants to participate with our students and wants to help us mobilize this kind of education, so it was just a matter of putting the pieces together.”

The goal was to develop a new type of financial professional who will work alongside the investors who have capital to deploy. These new professionals must understand the different types of tools required to invest in this complex and growing market, Morse said. A solar panel solution, for example, might require debt financing, while an innovation that adds to a solar panel technology may require certain types of equity investment. Sometimes a blend of investment types are required—whether it’s the public sector funding or a special purpose vehicle to pool capital. “It’s a landscape of understanding that requires years of experience with different kinds of financial implementations,” Morse said.
Laboratory learning
The structure of the course is unconventional—Morse prefers to call it a learning laboratory. During the first three weeks, students learned new theories and finance concepts to pave the way for their investment pitches. After three weeks, Morse and her teaching team broke students into four-or-five-member teams and paired them with an instructor and industry mentors who helped them find and vet potential companies. The teams met weekly, learning all that goes into sourcing deals, including a deep dive into analyzing a company’s data and finances.

“They start to learn how to do due diligence, deciding what’s good and bad about different opportunities they face and how to make decisions,” Morse said. “Questions evolve, and there’s this back-and-forth with the instructor as they’re learning how to source and how to think about where there are opportunities.”
With the guidance of instructors, team Caelux reached out to more than 130 companies before interviewing 50 for a possible investment. “Once we had those conversations we narrowed it down to the best opportunities,” Padhiar, who worked as a finance intern at Chevron while at Haas, said.
The team honed in on Caelux after it heard through a Berkeley PhD alum that the startup was opening a Series B investment round—following a $12 million A3 funding round led by Temasek, a global investment company, with Reliance New Energy Limited, Khosla Ventures, Mitsui Fudosan, and Fine Structure Ventures participating. One challenge: understanding more about perovskites, solar cells that Caelux promises will be more efficient than silicon solar cells, which only capture about 20% of sunlight on average.
“The hardest part for us with assessing the deal is that we aren’t chemical scientists,” Padhiar said. “We had to go off of other factors such as evaluating the team, the opportunity set, the traction, which gave us exposure to different ways of looking at investing.”
Getting to the pitch
For the midterm, with the pressure building to decide on a target company, students presented status reports, outlining multiple investment opportunities that they winnowed to one opportunity per team. “This is one of the most essential and practical parts of the course as it involves thinking through the merits of different opportunities with different risk/return characteristics,” Evans said. “It’s one of the hardest things an investor has to do: make good relative value decisions across disparate opportunities and then allocate a limited amount of capital.”

The learning curve for finding winning companies to invest in is steep, Morse said. “It’s hard. There’s no way around it,” she said. “Halfway through the semester the students are saying, ‘Whoa, I don’t understand a lot of this’. By the end, the pieces are starting to come together, and that’s what makes it real for them. They’re pulling the deal together, they realize the pieces of it that they’re not quite getting, and then it comes together.”
Part of the MBA teams’ strength and success at sourcing deals came from combining students with diverse undergraduate and career backgrounds. “The magic comes out when the students come together as a team,” Morse said. “You’ll have someone with a finance background, someone with an engineering or technical background, and someone that is able to speak to the market opportunities. By the time you get to pitch day, the students have figured out who does what best, and they really are amazing in putting together the expertise.”
Emily Myerson, MBA 25, advocated for Gradient, which manufactures planet-friendly heat pumps that reduce carbon emissions. When pitching Gradient, the students noted that the company’s founder and CEO Vince Romanin, who holds an PhD in mechanical engineering/heat transfer from UC Berkeley, had just landed a contract with the New York Housing Authority. “I found the company’s potential for growth and helping communities where my students live exciting,” Myerson said.
Judges questioned the Gradient team about whether the company overestimated the sales pipeline, the growth trajectory for the new heat pumps in the United States, and the possibility of losing federal incentives under the new presidential administration.

Kline, a former senior Intel executive and World Bank economist who has taught at Haas for four years, said the combination of soft and hard skills students absorb in the class helped them tackle all of the judges’ questions, resulting in a high deal quality at the pitch competition.
The teaching team also worked closely with industry mentors like Jeff Johnson, a managing director at Blackford Capital, a large public equity fund. Mentors like Johnson spent hours helping students to ready their pitches to judges including Niloufar Aazam-Zanganeh, MBA 10, managing director and CFO of philanthropic impact investor elea; David Suh, a managi director at Samsung Ventures America; Joakim Mahlberg, BS 04, an investment officer in sustainable investments at CalSTRS, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System; and Rebekah Saul Butler, MBA/MPH 02, managing partner at Gratitude Railroad.
After graduating, former MBA students continue to track the success of all three of the Haas student-run SAIF funds, paying attention to how the portfolio and their companies are doing over time.
“We’re building a new community by having these portfolios, and it brings people back,” Morse said. “It’s not exactly a football game, but it’s the same idea of people coming back to the SAIF center and appreciating that they were part of building this with us.”

The course also inspired a few career pivots to climate-related investment. Negron, a social studies and computer science major as an undergraduate, came to Haas hoping to become a startup founder. “Now I am considering early-stage VC, so we’ll see what happens,” she said. “The work that we are doing is more important than ever. We have to keep pushing this agenda forward.”
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