Entrepreneur Tyler Huggins grew up in rural Montana in a family of loggers and miners. But he wanted to have a larger impact on society as a whole, so he decided to launch a startup. He looked at many options, but they just didn’t have the impact he craved.

Until he met Justin Whiteley, a fellow entrepreneur who had been working to build next-generation battery technology near Silicon Valley. The pair formed Emergy. It combined Huggins’ environmental engineering skills and desire to protect the nature he grew up around with Whiteley’s technical efficiency and commercialization mindset.