Hi {{first name | there}}!

This month, that convergence is everywhere you look. We're gearing up for the Emerald Summit & Bold World Awards, landing right in the middle of NYC Climate Week with a lineup built around the same tension so many of us are wrestling with: how do we scale AI responsibly and sustainably?

In addition to riveting speakers and networking opportunities, we will be announcing this year’s recipients of the Bold World Awards. In 2025, we had several competitive and exciting startups across the fintech and climatech space, from our winners to the finalists:

🥇 Tiya Gordon, Co-Founder & COO, it’s electric – redefining equitable, scalable EV charging for cities
🥈 Brandi DeCarli, Founder & CEO, Farm from a Box – innovating climate-smart, energy-sufficient solutions for food independence.
🥉 Constanza Gomez, Co-Founder & CEO, Sortile – transforming textile recycling with AI-powered sorting technology.

We are still accepting startup pitch submissions through this week, so if you know a founder who would be perfect for this opportunity, forward this email their way.

In this issue, we’re also spotlighting a quieter but equally telling shift: experienced fintech operators, the people who built payments rails and banking infrastructure, are increasingly migrating into climate tech.

Add in a risk lesson on why data stripped of human dignity isn't just incomplete but actively harmful, and a two-year flashback through some of the sharpest investors we've had on the podcast, and you've got a full picture of where this community's attention is headed next.

Let's get into it.

This September, Wallet Max returns to NYC Climate Week with the Emerald Summit and Bold World Awards, a full day built for the people actually moving capital toward a livable planet: impact investors, corporate executives, and the founders building AI, climate, and fintech solutions at scale.

Taking place at the intersection of Climate Week, the UN General Assembly, and NYC Fashion Week, this year's themes are Fundraising Community and AI Sustainability, with a special focus on Enterprise Transformation.

Expect diverse speakers across keynotes, panels, and a live pitch competition — from unlocking capital flows for climate solutions to a fireside chat on climate fintech. Confirmed speakers and judges so far include:

Curious what last year looked like? Check out the Emerald Summit 2025 recap for a taste of the energy, or head to getwalletmax.com/summit for full 2026 speaker bios and programming updates as they drop.

🎟️ Get your tickets: luma.com/EmeraldSummitWM26 — Summit-only and Summit + VIP Dinner options available. Tickets are limited, so save your seat today.

🎤 Are you building in climate, AI, or fintech? The Bold World Awards pitch competition puts mission-driven startups on stage in front of a live panel of investors and industry leaders, with prizes and resources for standout teams. Startup applications are open through this week.

👉 Submit your interest here to pitch

Over the last two years, I’ve interviewed a number of amazing and innovative professionals across the fintech, investment, and climate tech space on the Planet Positive Podcast.

Here's the roundup with short bios for each guest:

🎯 2025 Guests

🎯 2026 Guests

👉 Find all of these episodes in our podcast library: www.getwalletmax.com/podcast

AI's growth curve is staggering. And so is its footprint. 

A new market analysis from Spherical Insights projects the global AI data center market to balloon from $36.32 billion in 2025 to $348.4 billion by 2035, a 25%+ CAGR fueled by generative AI, GPU-hungry model training, and enterprise cloud adoption. But that expansion comes with a cost. As Climate Action reports, the number of data centers worldwide has surged from 500,000 to 8 million since 2012, with electricity and water demands rising in step. In the UK alone, data centers already consume roughly 2.5% of national electricity, a figure expected to quadruple by 2030.

The response isn't to slow AI down, but to build it smarter. An ongoing research series on frugal AI makes the case for resource-conscious design from the ground up: lighter models, less data-hungry architectures, and systems built for accessibility rather than scale for its own sake. It's a framework climate fintech investors should know well. Doing more with less is the whole thesis of sustainable innovation.

Meanwhile, two recent academic studies reinforce why this matters for business strategy, not just engineering. A Scientific Reports study of 294 employees found that AI collaboration meaningfully boosts employees' "sustainable career capacities", resourcefulness, flexibility, renewability, and integrative thinking, which in turn drive successful, lasting innovation outcomes inside organizations. And a Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence bibliometric review of the field's 50 most influential papers confirms AI is increasingly treated as a strategic asset tied to ESG performance, competitive advantage, and long-term resilience, not just a productivity tool.

Put together, the research paints a clear picture: AI's climate impact and its climate potential are two sides of the same coin, and the organizations that win will be the ones that design for both efficiency and impact from day one.

This is exactly the conversation happening at the Emerald Summit. With AI Sustainability and Enterprise Transformation as headline themes this year, you'll hear directly from the investors, operators, and policymakers wrestling with these tradeoffs in real time, plus a live pitch competition spotlighting the startups building smarter, leaner, and more sustainable AI infrastructure.

🎟️ Reserve your seat: luma.com/EmeraldSummitWM26

Sarah Morgenstern, Investment Partner at Flourish Ventures, an $850M evergreen fund backing entrepreneurs building better financial systems, sat down with Bhuva Shakti to delve deep into fintech investing. 

Sarah's path, McKinsey to Omidyar Network to Flourish, shaped a core belief: fintech's real work isn't optimizing individual companies, it's reshaping systems. She traces this shift to two moments: the industry's pivot from "access" to genuine financial health, and realizing that unglamorous infrastructure plays (like Plaid) often matter more than flashy consumer apps.

It’s important, Sarah shares, to evaluate founders through two lenses: unfair founder-market fit, citing Vellum's Jules Muir, whose insurance-industry background gives her rare cross-value-chain insight, and structural inefficiency, pointing to portfolio company Reserve, which is modernizing insurance claims processing, one of the lowest-NPS experiences in financial services. 

The conversation also covered key touch points and trends like:

On AI, Sarah also offered key insights. Agentic tools that sweep idle cash, monitor refi opportunities, or act as a "CFO in your pocket" for small businesses are compelling, but bias, explainability, and liability questions remain unresolved. 

“I think it’s helpful to start with narrower permission tasks where often humans are still in the loop,” notes Sarah, “and slowly expanding autonomy as the trust, reliability, and frameworks come into place.”

A recurring thread throughout: policy, media, and research are all part of the innovative ecosystem that determines whether it scales responsibly or stalls.

🎧 Catch the full conversation below 👇

The podcast is hosted by Wallet Max Founder & CEO Bhuva Shakti, and is for anyone interested in learning from investors and founders shaping thoughtful, practical solutions.

Want more than advice from investors? Check out our full podcast library, updated at the end of the month, every month.

If you've been watching where capital and talent are flowing in 2026, a pattern is impossible to miss: climate and fintech are converging fast, and the operators building this next generation of companies are often the same people who cut their teeth on payments, banking, and financial infrastructure.

Start with the money. Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund just proved what catalytic capital can do at scale and turned $800 million in direct investment into $12 billion in downstream project funding, a 15:1 leverage ratio. By acting as an early buyer and anchor investor, Microsoft is showing corporates and VCs alike how to de-risk emerging climate tech and pull mainstream capital into the space.

That capital is chasing real founder migration. As Sifted has documented, a growing wave of experienced fintech operators are leaving consumer fintech to build climate companies, from recycling marketplaces to carbon removal registries. Their reasoning is consistent. The impact-per-dollar in climate now outpaces what's left to build in saturated fintech categories, and the underlying skills, such as regulated infrastructure, trust, embedded finance, transfer directly. Appinventiv's rundown of 2026's top climate tech opportunities backs this up, spotlighting "climate fintech", carbon credit marketplaces, ESG scoring, and sustainability-linked financial products, as one of the sector's fastest-moving bonus categories.

Meanwhile, fintech itself isn't standing still. Intuit's latest research shows AI-driven fintech systems are already cutting fraud response times by up to 99% and approving loans in minutes instead of days, a level of intelligent automation that's reshaping how financial products get built and who gets access to them. And even amid recent tech-sector volatility, market veterans like Tastytrade's Tom Sosnoff argue the pullback is creating attractive entry points in fintech names, a reminder that the sector's fundamentals and its convergence with climate remain very much intact.

Capital is proving it can catalyze climate at scale, operators are migrating their fintech expertise into climate problems, and AI is becoming the connective tissue that makes both sectors more efficient. 

For founders and executives trying to make sense of where AI actually creates business value versus hype, that's exactly the gap Bhuva Shakti's AI Revenue Engine (AIRE™) was built to close, helping leadership teams move past AI experimentation into measurable revenue growth, smarter operations, and real business agility.

📈 Ready to turn your AI investment into real outcomes? Book a consultation with AIRE™ and start your AI growth journey today.

I’ve spent my career working with data across multiple generations of software technologies and hardware platforms. But over time, I learned a truth that isn’t taught in most risk or analytics training: if your data strips away the dignity of people it represents, it’s not just incomplete, it’s harmful.

Data is never neutral. It’s shaped by the systems and biases of the people who collect it, interpret it, and decide what to do with it. I’ve seen reports that looked airtight on paper but erased entire groups from the picture, either by omission or design. When that happens, the damage is two-fold: you’re making flawed decisions and you’re reinforcing the inequalities you claim to address.

This isn’t just about ethics. This is also about accuracy. Decisions made without dignity-based context almost always create blind spots that lead to bigger problems later. When you ignore the human reality behind the numbers, you risk building strategies on fiction.

Data becomes a tool for resilience only when it includes the full spectrum of experience, not just what’s easy to measure or comfortable to acknowledge.

Read real case studies that helped me to develop this insight in my most recent risk lesson 👇

In my upcoming book on risk, Everyday Risk Wisdom: Your Risk Management Guide to Thrive in a Complex World as an Overlooked Business Leader, I cover a variety of lessons from my career.

Explore my book website below and get notified when this lesson is available for free!

Discovering what’s absent from datasets isn’t always straightforward. What strategy do you use to find out if your data represents reality?

Read the lesson for my “Data Without Dignity is Damage” action steps. Explore my book website below and get notified when this framework is available for free!

The Emerald Summit is only as strong as the community that shows up for it, and we're looking for a few more people to help make September count.

Sponsors: If your company wants visibility in front of the impact investors, climate founders, and fintech operators shaping this space, we still have partnership opportunities open. Reach out to explore sponsor packages and get your brand in the room.

Startups: The Bold World Awards pitch competition is your shot at the stage, live in front of investors and industry leaders, with real prizes and resources on the line. Applications close end of this week, so if you're building in climate, AI, or fintech, don't wait, apply here.

Volunteers: We also couldn't pull off a day like this without hands on deck. If you want to be part of the energy behind the scenes, from registration to speaker support, we'd love to have you. Drop us a line to get involved.

And if you're simply ready to be in the room, tickets are moving. Choose from Summit-Only, Summit + VIP Dinner, or reach out about Sponsor/Partner passes if you'd like a deeper level of engagement with speakers and fellow attendees. Seats are limited, so don't sit on it.

🎟️ Grab your seat now: luma.com/EmeraldSummitWM26

See you in September.

Thanks for supporting us to build a better world!

Bhuva Shakti, Founder of Wallet Max and Bhuva’s Impact Global.