Santa Monica's Pulse Fund Closes $63 Million First Climate Fund

Founder Tenzin Seldon backs Endera, an Ohio electric school bus startup that other climate investors balked at over its gas buses.

Tenzin Seldon is the only managing partner at Pulse Fund, a Santa Monica venture firm, and she has closed its first climate fund at $63 million.

The firm announced the close Sept. 18, and the Los Angeles Business Journal reported Monday on where the money is going. It's going to young companies working on transportation, on farming and food, on infrastructure and on the shift away from fossil fuels, including at least one that other climate investors turned down. Seldon told the Business Journal she'd raised millions as a founder and kept seeing climate money aimed at the wrong targets. "There was a mismatch and a gap between what needed funding and financing and who was funding them, and so that's why I chose to step in," she said.

The bets run from Plantible's plant-based protein to Twelve, which recycles carbon dioxide emissions, with curbside car chargers from it's electric in between.

The one other funds balked at is Endera, an Ohio startup building electric shuttles and school buses. To bring in cash and push down the price of its electric buses, Endera has leaned on Metro Titan, a line of gas-powered buses it picked up from Winnebago. Founder John Walsh told the Business Journal that kept some climate investors away. Pulse put money in during 2024 and joined a $36 million equity round led by Magnetar early in 2025.

Pulse tends to lead the rounds it joins and take a seat on the board, and Seldon sits on Endera's. Walsh credited her with reworking the company's cap table so it could raise venture money, and with easing its way through California's electric vehicle voucher program. "She's given us political connections that have helped us influence policy in our favor," he told the Business Journal.

The close landed in a boom. Climate venture funding jumped 55% from a year earlier to $26 billion in the first half, the Business Journal reported, citing research firm Currence, and much of it is chasing power for AI. Seldon said big AI companies have come asking to invest. But most of the companies she's backed don't make power or sell to data centers, and she said the fund has leaned instead toward nature restoration, a field she says faces a roughly $700 billion financing gap that venture money rarely touches.

Some of her own investors needed convincing too. David Osborn, who put in money through his family office, DRO Investments, told the Business Journal he'd long treated climate as something you donate to, not something you invest in. His thinking started to shift a few years ago, when he and Seldon both served as directors of a Nepal charity that helps orphanages. The Pritzker family, Beneficient, C6 Partners and a sovereign wealth fund in Asia also signed on, at a time when family offices and wealthy individuals were pulling back from newer managers, the Business Journal reported. The firm's announcement called a debut fund this size rare for any first-time manager, and rarer for a firm led by a single Indigenous woman.

Seldon grew up nomadic in the Himalayas, where she watched floods and melting glaciers, then went to Stanford, to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and to disaster-risk policy work with the U.N. Environment Programme in Thailand. Along the way she built Kinstep, a tech company that lines up work for immigrants and refugees who've been screened in advance. Then she co-founded The Plant, a $350 million plan unveiled in 2022 to turn the defunct Glenwood Power Plant in Yonkers, N.Y., into a climate hub. It stalled over parking and an unfinished community-benefits agreement, the Business Journal reported. Even a climate campus needs somewhere to put the cars.

Pulse was her turn away from building a home for climate ideas and toward funding companies that already had a working business. In Endera's case, part of that business still burns gasoline.

Source: labusinessjournal.com, retrieved October 27, 2026. Other sources: finance.yahoo.com.