What’s your story, Mohammed Khan?
The stories behind climate tech founders
This year, we’re sharing a series of posts profiling founders of Climate Connection’s tech community, asking them to share their journeys, inspirations, and insights into how they got to where they are today.
Today, meet Mohammed Khan, the Chief Executive Officer at Immaterial, who you may have met in our May Climate Tech Time. Immaterial is a company on a mission to make carbon capture far more affordable with two innovations working in unison: the first being Nobel Prize-winning chemistry, and the second being proven, at-scale engineering systems.
Here’s Mohammed’s story.
How did your career begin?
I started as a Chemical Engineer at BP, moved into project management, and then into running businesses.
How did you determine which parts of the existing engineering to keep versus reinvent, especially when the pressure to innovate everything must have been strong?
It's been about focusing on what matters to drive the economics and balancing that against speed and scaling to achieve bankability.
What have been the toughest challenges along the way?
Time. When you are on a journey to balance investor interest, develop and demonstrate technology and have less than 9 times to iterate, it doesn’t take much to go off track. Maintaining the foresight to get it right first time, prioritising and focusing on the aspects that deliver material change and derisking at pace are the main components of navigating challenges.
Have you ever felt like giving up?
It’s sometimes demotivating when you don’t get an opportunity that you were really excited about, like winning grant funding or signing a new customer, but there are always other projects happening in tandem which need attention.
What has kept you going?
The delight of solving impossible challenges with a great team of people at Immaterial and a great network of our board, investors and advisors to ensure we distil and apply the wisdom well and avoid reinventing the wheel with a common and unified purpose.
What advice would you give to anyone else looking to build a climate tech startup today?
Make sure you define the problem well and focus on establishing a solution that makes economic sense for customers, and surround yourself with great people. The technology is then the outcome.
Can you tell us a story about how this community or an unexpected connection helped propel you to where you are now?
It's many stories with common themes: working with great people, building trust, and establishing a track record and credibility. On a personal level, it's chasing experiences that have provided practice in turning impossibilities into realities, resilience, outside-the-box ways of operating with a laser focus on economically viable outcomes, whilst addressing real customer business needs.
So there’s a glimpse into one of the founders of our Climate Connection community – a community built around the strategic magic of connection and intentional networking.
Interested in seeing yourself or another founder onstage?
We’re always looking for new startups and scale-ups to tell amazing stories. You can fill out our speaker nomination form here.
