Tenzin Seldon, Founder and Managing Partner of Pulse Fund and Creator of Gross Domestic Regeneration (GDR), has been named to the 2026 TIME100 Most Influential Climate Leaders List. Seldon’s profile and the full list are available here.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261109820392/en/

Photographer credit: Katherine Chen

Photographer credit: Katherine Chen

The recognition arrives eight weeks after Seldon closed Pulse Fund’s debut fund as its solo managing partner, backed by institutional investors including a sovereign wealth fund, Pivotal Foundation, and the Pritzker family, in the most difficult fundraising environment for climate capital in a decade.

“In my four decades of meeting tens of thousands of people, I have never encountered anyone quite like Tenzin Seldon,” said Omani Carson, Founder of Momentis Family Office, Omya, and Carson Group (over $70 billion in assets); Investor and Limited Partner, Pulse Fund. “She possesses a combination of intellectual brilliance, profound depth, and the rare ability to translate an audacious vision into tangible action. Her command of mathematics and finance is matched only by her unwavering commitment to the future of our planet. I believe Tenzin will be remembered as one of the defining minds of her generation.”

Seldon’s vision extends beyond the companies she finances. Through Gross Domestic Regeneration (GDR), an economic framework she created, she is applying the same systems-level thinking that drives her investment strategy to a larger question: how should nations measure prosperity?

“I built Pulse Fund to move the capital that was not moving,” said Seldon. “And I authored Gross Domestic Regeneration to measure what the world was losing but could not see. Both exist because the gap was too large to ignore, and too important to leave to someone else. What gets measured gets protected. What gets funded gets built.”

The Investor Behind Climate’s Next Frontier

Before founding Pulse, Seldon built several companies, including a net-negative infrastructure company, and oversaw disaster risk reduction policy at the United Nations Environment Programme in Asia. She then founded Pulse Fund with a dual mandate: to generate outsized financial returns and accelerate climate stabilization. As a first-time solo GP with no prior fund track record, she built Pulse into an institutional-scale fund. She is investing in some of climate venture’s most competitive financing rounds.

Pulse’s portfolio includes category-leading companies such as Endera, Floodbase, InventWood, it’s electric, Mast Reforestation, Plantible, Twelve, and Unravel Carbon. She leads many of the rounds and holds board seats across the portfolio.

To the founders she backs, Seldon is more than a source of capital. She is a co-architect and an instrumental partner.

“Tenzin Seldon is a rare combination of visionary and highly disciplined investor and global thought leader,” said Nicholas Flanders, Co-founder and CEO of Twelve. “As one of her portfolio company founders at Twelve, I have experienced firsthand how her backing opens doors to strategic partnerships, follow-on capital, and institutional credibility that have accelerated our financial growth and amplified our impact.”

Bessie Schwarz, Co-founder and CEO of Floodbase, a Pulse Fund portfolio company, echoes these sentiments: “Tenzin is a true voice of climate, and what sets her apart is that she is also a formidable venture capitalist. She brings the same intellectual discipline and analytical depth to climate investing that she brings to her broader vision for the planet.”

“From our earliest conversations, Tenzin saw flood resilience as a significant financial opportunity as well as a technological challenge. Her rigorous diligence, strategic insight, and command of complex markets help founders like me build stronger, more scalable businesses. Tenzin shows that serious climate leadership and exceptional investment discipline reinforce one another.”

That view extends beyond the portfolio. Among the institutional investors and partners who have worked most closely with Seldon, the perspective is consistent.

“Tenzin is one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met. She unites a brilliant mind, a deep spiritual practice, and a tireless devotion to her work, a rare harmony of intellect, spirit, and discipline,” said Randall Mays, Investor and Limited Partner, Pulse Fund and Chairman, Live Nation Entertainment ($41 billion market valuation). “The world needs leaders who can see the problem this clearly, and have the courage to fix it. Tenzin is one of them, and she has given herself, selflessly and completely, to making this world better for all of us.”

From Investing in Companies to Rethinking Entire Economies

At Pulse, Seldon identifies opportunities across interconnected industries, and Gross Domestic Regeneration applies the same thesis to nations: it measures whether an economy is regenerating or depleting the natural and social systems it depends on, and is intended to work alongside GDP measurements.

Fifteen countries are under consideration to be selected as part of the initial consortium of eight to implement GDR as a pilot initiative led by the Gross Domestic Regeneration Institute (GDRI), which Seldon founded and chairs.

“Tenzin is giving us a way, as a global community, to measure what truly matters,” said Justin Winters, Founder and Executive Director of One Earth. “GDR builds on a deep legacy of innovative research – and Tenzin is uniquely positioned to bring this to the world. Her depth of perspective is what makes this idea so powerful, and now it’s incumbent on all of us to work together with her to move it forward.”

Together, Pulse Fund and Gross Domestic Regeneration reflect Seldon’s broader approach to climate and economic leadership: directing capital toward solutions while developing new ways to measure the conditions required for lasting prosperity.

Seldon will attend TIME’s TIME100 Impact Dinner: Leaders Creating Climate Action in Antalya, Türkiye, on November 10, during COP31.

About Tenzin Seldon

Tenzin Seldon is Founder and Managing Partner of Pulse Fund, Creator of Gross Domestic Regeneration, and Founder, Chair, and CEO of the Gross Domestic Regeneration Institute. Raised in the Himalayas, she has spent more than two decades building and scaling climate technologies. Beyond Pulse, she advises and sits on the boards of publicly traded companies and global institutions, including Marathon Digital Holdings, Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and One Earth. She has lectured at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and Stanford University.

Seldon was named a Harry S. Truman Scholar by the U.S. Congress and has been honored as an Inc. Female Founder 500, a Los Angeles Times Banking & Finance Visionary, a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, a UN Innovative Disruptor, and a London Stock Exchange 21st Century Icon. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University and studied as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford.

About Pulse Fund

Pulse Fund is a venture capital fund investing in scalable climate companies across four interconnected verticals: energy transition, infrastructure, food and agriculture, and mobility. Pulse invests horizontally across these sectors, combining in-depth due diligence with extensive climate, venture, and finance expertise to pinpoint opportunities others miss and to generate outsized financial and climate returns. As active investors, the firm frequently leads financing rounds and takes strategic board positions to help guide companies toward long-term success. Pulse’s network includes a premier partnership with NASA, supporting the firm’s portfolio across all four verticals. Learn more at pulsefund.com.

About Gross Domestic Regeneration and GDR Institute

Gross Domestic Regeneration (GDR) is a framework for measuring an economy’s capacity to sustain prosperity into the future, not just its current output. Designed to complement GDP, GDR scores economies on three pillars of Ecological, Social, and Capital regeneration capacity, using nine indicators from public data, and combines them so that no area can be neglected without lowering the overall score. The Gross Domestic Regeneration Institute, founded and chaired by Tenzin Seldon, leads the development of this framework in collaboration with universities, non-profits, corporations, and nation-states. Learn more at gdrinstitute.org.

Media gallery

About The Author
Business Wire