Last week, as part of the annual Climate Week in New York City, Davida Herzl sat on a panel for the Clinton Global Initiative. As the co-founder and CEO of Aclima , a San Francisco-based climate tech company that measures air pollution and greenhouse gases for governments and companies, Herzl spoke about the health disparities generated in cities by air pollution and how the best ideas often come from people that have experienced inequity. For Herzl, it was the kind of conversation that’s resonated throughout her life.

Growing up in San Diego, she was just three miles away from the Mexican border, where she could see high levels of pollution on a massive scale. Her parents were raised in Mexico, and in their home they spoke both English and Spanish. When Herzl’s family moved away from the area, she recognized the contrast between the quality of her new life, with cleaner air, and the lives of those still impacted by pollution in Mexico.

“Founders build new tools and new companies based on their lived experience,” she says. “And that’s why it’s so important to have a diversity of founders building tools, in particular in the climate space, because we all experience climate change, its sources and its impacts, in very different ways.”

Since founding Aclima in 2007, Herzl has become a leader in using hyperlocal data to drive climate action, particularly in urban areas with minority and disadvantaged populations. The company’s hyperlocal approach to measuring air pollution is based on their groundbreaking research from 2017, which proves that pollution varies five to eight times from one city block to the next. Aclima uses a roving fleet of vehicles equipped with specialized air quality devices to map air pollution along public roads, while Aclima Pro, the company’s proprietary software, analyzes their block-by-block data on pollution and greenhouse gases and transforms them into insights for Aclima customers.

That 2017 study led to West Oakland becoming the first community in the state of California and in the nation to develop a community-led emissions reductions plan. Nearly 50 percent of the interventions in the plan are now in active implementation.

Aclima has worked with some of the largest companies in the world, including Google and the utility ComEd, but its current focus is on large government customers responsible for implementing laws that limit emissions.

Last year, for example, the company partnered with AECOM, a global infrastructure consulting firm, to deploy its mobile mapping technology block-to-block across the country as a part of a five-year $5.7 billion contract with the Environmental Protection Agency’s EARTH program. In September, Herzl was awarded a $27 million contract from the California Air Resources Board to improve air quality in California communities adversely impacted by pollution.

Validating the Lived Experience

Whether it’s on a Climate Week panel, in a meeting with her team, or in discussions with customers and investors, Herzl is always focused on the problem she is solving for human beings who rely on clean air to breathe and live healthy lives.

“We tend to all, as a society, talk about climate change as something that’s happening at a global scale. Which it is, but it’s really happening at the human pollution interface, because all of those emissions that are changing our global odyssey go straight into our lungs,” she says. “And so we’ve kind of gotten fully disconnected from that. And unless you’ve had that experience of seeing those communities directly that way, you just don’t know it in the same visceral way that I do.”

Herzl has stayed anchored in her mission by connecting with the communities her products are designed to serve. Believing always that the best ideas come from those with lived experiences, her early work was inspired by a community activist named Margaret Gordon, the founder of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, who harnessed data to understand why children in her community were getting sick with asthma and suffering from other respiratory ailments caused by air pollution.

In law school during her late 20s at the University of San Diego, Herzl became interested in climate change, environmental regulatory policy, and some of the weaknesses of the United States Clean Air Act of 1970, which established standards for acceptable pollution. The problem with the legislation, says Herzl, was that what was deemed acceptable pollution was defined by what could be measured. So if a regulator couldn’t measure a pollution source, he couldn’t regulate it.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is that the technology that’s used to measure emissions for compliance is stuck in the 1970s,” Herzl says. “The Clean Air Act was terrific for reducing overall emissions, but where you have communities of color there was no data on those pollution sources.”

Closely following Gordon’s work, Herzl set out to deploy technology in West Oakland that would better measure pollution. In 2022, Aclima published a report of measurements for the nine-county Bay area validating with datawhat environmental justice activists had been saying for decades: Communities of color are exposed to 55 percent more smog than mostly White communities.

In Touch With Her Values

Although she was trained as a lawyer, the 48-year-old Herzl has always seen herself as a social entrepreneur, more interested in solving important societal problems than becoming wealthy. In 2020, she transitioned Aclima from a C Corporation to a public benefit corporation so she could focus her strategy less on maximizing profits and more on the social benefit of her company’s technology and stakeholders.

At industry events like Climate Week, Herzl enjoys all the founder conversations and interest around building companies, finding funding, and hiring diverse teams, but what stimulates her perhaps more than anything is a desire, at the most fundamental level, to probe the motivation behind founders’ products and why those products matter to them.

“If you are in very close touch with those values, it literally defines everything,” she says. “It defines who you hire. For a lot of people, it’s hard to talk about what matters to them beyond a surface level. My biggest advice to founders is to know what matters to you and hold it really close to your hearts.”

For Herzl, staying in touch with her values has meant turning down money from several major investors who didn’t fully share her vision for Aclima. “Who you take money from defines your destiny,” she says. “Your investor has to care about the problem you’re solving and be intellectually ready to really understand the system that you’re trying to change. It’s a tall order if you’re a woman of color in Silicon Valley challenging a status quo, which is an economy that’s powered by fossil fuels, where all of the rules are written in favor of that infrastructure.”

Herzl’s current cap table is large, and includes a few key allies who have supported her over the years as Aclima has reached its growth stage: Radicle Impact, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that funds early-stage companies, mostly led by women or BIPOC founders in the climate solutions and fair finance space, and Plum Valley, an early-stage venture fund that invests in women founders in the STEM field. In about a month, Aclima will announce the closing of a Series B extension.

Fast Isn’t Fast Enough

Certainly, Herzl’s career is on the upswing, despite a very challenging last several months. Climate Week was one of her first major events since coming back from medical leave after undergoing major surgery last December. During her leave, she was kept up to speed on the day-to-day operations by a family member and investors working in the company. “As a climate tech founder, I was very used to facing and confronting and owning a lot of challenges, and that ability is what got me through my illness,” Herzl says.