The Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst List

Some founders possess the capacity and drive to do exceptional things. Bloomberg New Economy’s 2022 class of Catalysts is a remarkable group of 28 people who are creating more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable outcomes. The legacy of our old economy is a world imperiled by climate transformation, with communities exhausting their finite resources and riven by divides in wealth, education, and quality of life. These pioneers in the new economy are solving such intractable problems as unreliable electricity in Africa, crippling student debt levels in the US, and global overfishing. They show what’s possible when courage and determination are combined with cutting-edge technology. And that’s worth celebrating. —Erik Schatzker

Rent is often the largest household expense, especially among the poor. But for more than 90% of American tenants, monthly rent payments aren’t factored into credit scores—which makes it hard for renters to ever buy a home even if they pay on time month after month. Esusu bridges this gap by reporting rent payments to the three major credit bureaus—Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian—helping renters establish and improve their credit profiles. Founded by Wemimo Abbey, who immigrated to the U.S. from Nigeria at age 17, Esusu covers 2.5 million properties and works with more than a third of the country’s largest landlords. In November 2021, Esusu announced a partnership with Freddie Mac in which the mortgage aggregator will provide benefits to owners of rental properties who agree to report on-time payments.

As director of MIT’s AbuGoot lab, Omar Abudayyeh is developing the next generation of cellular profiling, molecular diagnostics, gene editing, and gene-delivery technologies. After earning a Ph.D. at MIT and Harvard researching Crispr enzymes and genome editing, Abudayyeh pioneered what’s called Sherlock Crispr, which builds on the gene-editing technology to detect cancer and other diseases. The technology has been adopted by several startups that have sprung from Abudayyeh’s research. His ultimate goal is to identify enzymes—derived from bacteria from locations ranging from people’s mouths and intestines to the depths of Tokyo Bay—to help reverse aging and fight degenerative brain diseases.

Modern farming is complicated, with technological roadblocks, migration, supply chain issues, and climate concerns challenging the lives and livelihoods of rural farmers worldwide. Turkish entrepreneur Tülin Akın wants to ease the strain with Tabit Smart Farm, a company that finds technological solutions to support and educate farmers and build communities. Founded in Turkey in 2016, Tabit has helped almost 10 million farmers in various countries with smartphone apps, training programs, advertising services, research-oriented farms, and community support.

With the rush to get more rockets, more satellites, and more people into space, propulsion remains a major problem. The technologies in use today are expensive, highly toxic, and emit vast amounts of carbon. Founded in 2020 by aerospace engineer Jun Asakawa, Pale Blue seeks to develop an alternative that’s safe, sustainable, and affordable—and water is at the heart of its efforts. Pale Blue is working on a propulsion system that uses a unique chamber design to vaporize water at low power and, in less than 30 seconds, produce ions and an electrical charge that delivers thrusting power sufficient for take off. The company has gotten more than $4 million in backing and is exploring the potential for mass production.

In Brazil, 35 million people lack access to clean drinking water, and 100 million don’t have a sanitary sewage system at home—problems that lead to 15,000 preventable deaths a year. Sustainable Development & Water for All wants to change that by providing sanitation solutions to rural areas. Founder Anna Luísa Beserra designed what she calls Aqualuz, a solar-powered device that uses the sun’s UV rays to destroy disease-causing microbes and can daily treat 30 liters of water from rainwater collected in tanks. Now the organization is working to expand across Latin America and into Africa.

With 2 trillion fish per year being harvested from the ocean, the world risks the extinction of many marine species that are a key source of human food by 2050. In Asia, which accounts for almost 70% of global seafood consumption, Carrie Chan is working on a solution. Her company, Avant, is developing technology that can produce fish and marine proteins directly from fish cells, so there’s no need to catch the animals or raise them on farms. Instead of feeding fish, Avant feeds nutrients such as glucose, amino acids, and vitamins to cell cultures that develop into sustainable meat in about two months—80% faster than raising fish on farms. The group says its technology can be used to mimic the meat of a variety of species.

Anyone who’s spent time in the kitchen knows how much food ends up in the garbage—by one United Nations estimate, almost 1 billion tons per year globally. Asrar Damdam, founder of Uvera Inc., has developed a device that uses ultraviolet light to extend the shelf life of food. Her technology can more than double the time that meat, fruit, vegetables, baked goods, and cheese can be stored. The machine bathes the food in UVC light, limiting microbial growth in just 30 seconds, then vacuum-seals it to keep harmful microorganisms at bay. The technology keeps food fresher, she says, without any significant impact on taste. She has paired the device with an app that alerts users when stored foods are nearing their expiration date, helping direct more food to diners’ plates instead of the trash.

As long as cash is king in Africa, the poor will struggle to save enough money to make bulk, upfront payments for essential transactions such as apartment rentals. To help them, Nigerian activist Odunayo Eweniyi created PiggyTech Global, whose PiggyVest automated micro-savings and micro-investment service is aimed at making finances simpler and more transparent for low- and middle-income earners. The platform offers competitive savings interest rates and encourages discipline with few free withdrawals. The company says it has 4 million users and more than $200 million in assets under management.

More than 60 million low-income Indians age 8 and younger are falling behind wealthier kids because of a lack of educational resources. Social entrepreneur Azeez Gupta wants to close the gap with Rocket Learning, an early-years education company that has connected 50,000 teachers and 900,000 children using open-sourced content. Rocket has a WhatsApp bot that provides developmentally appropriate lessons, facilitates community support, and tracks progress. Offering a host of videos crossing language and cultural backgrounds that are simple enough for relatively uneducated parents to understand, the company aims to break the cycle of poverty and help the next generation get ahead.

With Indian farmers struggling to afford increasingly expensive electricity and facing frequent power outages, an estimated $7.3 billion worth of agricultural produce is wasted each year. Devendra Gupta created Ecozen to offer portable, solar-powered agricultural systems, including a solar pump with AI-enabled remote sensing to pump clean water and a cold-storage room for maximizing product freshness. He says 100,000 farmers have signed up for Ecozen and that it has installed systems that can produce 1 billion kilowatts of clean energy. He’s aiming to expand to other developing countries.

In Latin America, where 400 million people lack access to financial services, a decent bank can be hard to find. Colombian entrepreneur Andrés Gutiérrez wants to pave a road out of poverty for those most at risk across the continent with Tpaga, a free banking app that offers credit, insurance, investments, and payments in a digital wallet. Gutiérrez, who also founded the popular taxi-hailing app Tappsi, designed Tpaga to cater to marginalized groups such as migrants, gig-economy workers, and retirees living on government subsidies. More than 1.5 million individuals and 45,000 businesses already use Tpaga.

Almost 20 million people a year die because they lack access to safe surgery. Proximie, a software platform that enables physicians to virtually “scrub in” to operating rooms worldwide via a browser-based platform, aims to fix that. Proximie uses augmented reality and low-latency video feeds to provide a real-time, 360-degree view of the operating theater, and all of the videos are archived to augment training of surgeons in hard-to-reach places. With real-time diagnostics and analysis, founder Nadine Hachach-Haram says, Proximie can boost skill sharing and codify surgical best practices. Since its inception in 2016, Proximie has been used in tens of thousands of surgeries at more than 500 locations in dozens of countries.

Angel Hsu is taking a data-driven, multidisciplinary approach to combating the most vexing environmental challenges. At her UNC lab, teams of policy wonks, data scientists, visual designers, and interactive programmers use satellites and sensors to address complex issues such as climate change, air pollution, and urbanization. Hsu says she aims to “quantify the unquantifiable” to implement meaningful change and solve environmental problems.

Gibran Huzaifah is using data to make Indonesia’s 3.7 million small fish farms more efficient and help them access better financing and distribution. His company, EFishery, offers automated systems to avoid overfeeding, an online shop where farmers can buy supplies, and a credit-scoring platform to help them obtain bank loans. The company says it’s now the largest aquaculture operation in Indonesia, with 35,000 farmers using the system.

Satellite imaging can illuminate issues from pipeline leaks to food scarcity, but producing it can be expensive. Using high-frequency, high-resolution imaging, Satellogic has created a scalable Earth observation platform to create a fully searchable planet. Founder Emiliano Kargieman says the inexpensive technology will provide decision-makers worldwide with planetary insights to help solve global problems such as climate change, energy supply, and food security. The program, which has already been used by the International Charter Space and Major Disasters organization, a worldwide collaboration of space agencies, informs policies for governments, via work with the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy organization, and corporations, through the Carbon Disclosure Project.

In the past decade, the number of Brazilians who live in urban slums known as favelas has doubled, to almost 16 million. Edu Lyra—a writer and activist born in a favela near São Paulo—aims to improve their lives with education and entrepreneurial training. His organization, Gerando Falcões, has created Favela 3D, a data-based blueprint that aims to engineer smarter, more digitally driven favelas, bringing together the private sector, government, and civil society to contribute funding and respond to the needs of communities. The organization has raised about $25 million to help feed more than 1 million people during the pandemic.

Tamer Mohamed’s Aspect Biosystems is pioneering a new generation of regenerative medicine that lies in the space between cell therapy and organ therapy. Using 3D bioprinting technology, Aspect works with hardware and software to replace cells, regenerate tissue, and create sustained cellular therapies. The aim is to develop treatments for complex diseases such as diabetes and liver disease.

More than 900 million people in Africa have either unreliable electricity or none at all. Nigerian-born engineer Olugbenga Olubanjo Olufemi has created Reeddi, a hardware-as-a-service company that charges consumers a small daily fee to easily access a reliable supply of off-grid electricity from renewable energy sources anytime, anywhere. Reeddi’s solar-powered batteries can be rented in a local corner store for as little as 50¢ per day, which Olufemi says can cut a user’s energy expenses by 30%.

After building a group that helped communities in Uganda start clean-energy enterprises, working with Facebook on sustainability, and investing in several renewable-energy startups, Aneri Pradhan has developed a keen sense of how to make a difference in climate change. With New Energy Nexus, a network of funds and accelerators that support renewable-energy entrepreneurs, Pradhan aims to lift up diverse voices who might be able to enact change but struggle with getting sufficient funding. New Energy Nexus has helped direct $1.5 billion to almost 650 startups in 10 countries; Pradhan’s goal is to help fund and develop 100,000 climate startups by 2030.

Abhilasha Purwar believes data could be the key to getting ahead of climate-related disasters. The founder of Blue Sky Analytics uses AI and satellite data to ferret out ways to cut carbon emissions and reduce the resultant flooding, droughts, wildfires, and more. The company’s specialty is engineering huge datasets that parse real-time information: BreeZo for air quality, for instance, and Zur for farm and forest fires. They’ve worked to provide insights for the International Energy Agency in India, the Dalberg Global Consulting Firm, and Climate Trace, a group backed by former US Vice President Al Gore.

Almost half of Brazilian women who own a small to midsize enterprise say access to finance is a major constraint in operating and expanding their business. Moeda Seeds aims to help them with digital banking, payment, and micro-credit services powered by a blockchain system that helps investors track microloans. The company offers loans and counseling to help borrowers establish a reputation, document project status, and collaborate with others in the community. Moeda has funneled roughly $1 million into 28 projects that affect more than 150,000 people, mostly women.

African health-care systems suffer from long wait times, poor infrastructure, and inadequate staffing. Gregory Rockson’s MPharma is bolstering those systems with programs that transform community pharmacies into primary health-care centers, which today reach more than 100,000 patients each month. A separate software offering helps those pharmacies increase efficiency by collecting user information for predictive analysis of the center’s needs.

Viral vectors—engineered viruses that deliver a genetic payload to cells—are a critical component of many biologic drugs, but making them is notoriously difficult, as manufacturers struggle with poor yield and low quality. Alexis Rovner’s 64x Bio has created technology that can simultaneously test millions of potential cell lines, screening for combinations of genes that make for productive cells and dramatically increasing the potential of viral vectors in the development of medications. In January the company received $55 million from investors, led by LifeForce Capital.

Jefa aims to provide the 1.3 billion women across the globe who lack a bank account with accessible financial services catered to their needs. Founded by Emma Sánchez Andrade Smith, a veteran of Bridgewater Associates and the United Nations, Jefa is designed to help women build credit and encourage them to participate in the global economy. Women can sign up for an account with no minimum balance from their phone with just an ID. In 2021, Jefa partnered with Visa to launch a debit card for women in Mexico; Colombia and Central America are next.

As the space industry grows, the potential to girdle the planet with satellites that fly at an altitude below 2,000 km is coming into focus. With the power to produce clear and consistent imaging, these low-Earth-orbit satellites can provide communications in hard-to-reach places, monitoring resources for clean energy and much more. With the market for such spacecraft expected to expand sixfold from 2020 to 2028, to $1.8 trillion, Flavia Tata Nardini saw an opportunity. The Australian entrepreneur aims to create a global network of 140 satellites that’s fast and accessible anywhere; so far it’s launched six, Australia’s only commercial satellites.

About a fifth of global carbon output comes from agriculture, so cleaning up the sector could go a long way toward meeting emissions targets. Sustainability expert Anastasia Volkova founded Regrow Ag to help reduce the carbon footprint of grain, fruit, vegetable, and meat producers with software for soil and crop modeling, data analysis, and satellite imagery. Her company has monitored more than 200 million acres of land and has received $38 million in funding.

Only about 1% of US climate philanthropy flows to groups led by people of color. The Solutions Project, led by activist Gloria Walton, seeks to build up the communications capacity at climate-focused nonprofits led by minorities and women so they’re better equipped to win grants. Walton’s group has helped steer $112 million to such organizations and raised $50 million for its own grants program.

The average US college kid is carrying almost $38,000 in loans, but just 11% of Gen Z students say they have the information they need to repay their debts, and almost half say they don’t feel prepared to manage their money. Mos, founded by Amira Yahyaoui, a native of Tunisia who decamped to Silicon Valley during the Arab Spring, offers banking services designed to help students earn and save money throughout college so they can graduate debt-free. The app and associated debit card, which is available to US students 18 and older, offers young people financial advisers, tuition negotiation services, zero fees, and access to a $160 billion scholarship pool.