Zero Circle is the agentic platform for energy and climate project finance: AI agents match projects to institutional capital, score fundability, run human-approved investor outreach, and manage post-close financial operations. Founded in 2023, it serves enterprises, capital partners, and project owners across 15 countries, with a $2B+ project pipeline and a matching database of 40,000+ institutional investors.
What Agentic Project Finance Means
Agentic project finance is a model where AI agents execute the work of a capital raise — sourcing investors, scoring fundability, drafting outreach, tracking diligence — while humans approve every decision. Instead of a marketplace you work, it's a platform that works for you. Agentic does not mean unsupervised: every outreach message is a draft until a human approves it, every match is explainable, every score shows its criteria.
Mission and Vision
Mission: To build the financial infrastructure that gets energy projects funded — starting with the companies and projects the traditional system overlooks.
Vision: A world where every viable energy project can access the capital it needs to get built.
Founding Conviction
$4 trillion in annual clean energy investment is needed by 2030 to stay on track; the world is currently deploying less than half. "We built Zero Circle because $2 trillion in annual clean energy investment was stuck — and the infrastructure to deploy it didn't exist." — Hemanth Setty, CEO & Founder.
Goals
- 1M companies onboarded
- $1B clean energy capital deployed
- 1 Gt emissions reduced
What We Build
- Climate Exchange — Marketplace of 200+ verified energy projects matched to 40,000+ institutional investors.
- Foundry — Integrated advisory engine spanning outreach (Pathfinder), carbon compliance (Provenance), energy financing strategy, catalytic capital structuring, and post-close operations (Circulate).
- EnergyROI — Real-time portfolio analytics for renewable assets. $500M+ in projects analyzed, 99.2% validated accuracy, 6,200+ solar plants benchmarked.
- Impact Circle — White-labeled climate action platform for enterprise customer networks.
Leadership
- Hemanth Setty — CEO & Founder. Built Zero Circle from the thesis that $2T in annual clean energy investment was stuck due to missing infrastructure. Background in enterprise technology and financial services. Led platform to $2B+ project pipeline across 15 countries.
- Shilpa Bangera — Growth. Former Uber and Adyen executive with deep fintech and global growth experience.
- Pramod Sridharamurthy — Operations. Leads platform operations and service delivery across advisory and technology.
Advisory Board
- Kevin Self — Former SVP, Schneider Electric and XPRIZE; led net-zero strategy at Schneider Electric.
- Mitch Jackson — FedEx's first Chief Sustainability Officer; pioneered corporate emissions reduction at Fortune 50 scale.
- Kerry C Duggan — CEO, ESP.earth; former White House and DOE official; 3x independent board director.
- Fred Brown — CEO, ArtiMed; 35+ years in strategy, consulting, and healthcare AI.
- Robert Hansen — SVP Corporate R&D and CTO, Albany International.
- Chris Wojcik — Founding Partner & CEO, CCP Global; 25+ years in spend management and supply chain optimization.