Ryan Orbuch is a Partner at Lowercarbon Capital and leads the firm’s work in carbon removal.
Prior to joining Lowercarbon, Ryan helped initiate and led Stripe’s carbon removal procurement program, which is generally regarded as the best in the industry. Ryan likely has met with more carbon removal teams than anyone in the world.
Ryan developed Stripe’s partnerships with Activate and Deep Science Ventures, and he recruited nearly 20 scientific expert reviewers from research universities around the world to inform Stripe’s carbon removal purchases. This has given him a unique understanding of the scientific opportunities of carbon removal approaches ranging from direct air capture to mineralization, geologic injection, ocean alkalinity enhancement, and more.
He led expert reviews of dozens of carbon removal project applications to select Stripe’s growing portfolio of removal companies, a basket of some of the most compelling carbon removal companies that currently exist. All of this has put Ryan at the leading edge of carbon removal science. With visibility into both scientific and practical operational challenges in scaling up carbon removal, Ryan is a trusted advisor to the foremost entrepreneurs and founders working to take CO2 out of the Earth’s carbon cycle.
He has been invited to speak to groups ranging from the National Academy of Sciences and the California Air Resources Board, to AirMiners and My Climate Journey, and he was a contributor to the CDR Primer. Ryan joined Stripe as a product manager with a background in software startups, but had long been interested in climate. When Stripe made a commitment in 2019 to purchase carbon removal, Ryan jumped at the chance to finally have an excuse to massively accelerate his learning about the field.
Before Stripe, Ryan was a product designer and software engineer. He co-founded Volley, an education software startup, and prior to that, while in high school, Ryan designed Finish, an Apple Design Award-winning productivity app for students.
Ryan grew up in Boulder, CO, where thunderstorms and blizzards inspired an interest in weather and climate from a young age. Ryan has traveled to countless countries around the world and worked in restaurant kitchens on two continents. He’s an enthusiastic scuba diver, a temporarily-lapsed skier, and insatiably curious. After many years in San Francisco, Ryan is now based in New York City.
