Partner at Khosla Ventures
Check size: No Jessy-specific check size is disclosed by Khosla Ventures. Publicly observed work spans an $11 million Spiritus seed financing led by Khosla and Pascal's $8 million seed round, but round size is not the same as the firm's check. Third-party claims of a $100,000–$5 million range were excluded as unverified.
Jessy looks for climate technologies grounded in hard science and non-obvious mechanisms that can make a meaningful dent in greenhouse-gas emissions. Her career shows a materials-to-systems lens: understand the physical mechanism, identify the governing cost and performance variables, build around available supply chains, and prove a path from laboratory result to commercially relevant hardware. Spiritus reflects this in lower-energy, lower-cost direct air capture; Pascal in solid refrigerants operating below 10 bar with off-the-shelf components. She is comfortable with capital-intensive physical products when a technical discontinuity creates a credible route to scale and economics.
Start with the climate problem in physical and economic units: current emissions, incumbent process, customer and cost. Identify the non-obvious technical insight and show data for the governing mechanism. Break down energy, materials, kinetics, throughput, durability, CAPEX, yield and manufacturing; distinguish measured results from modeled targets. Explain the scale-up sequence from present prototype to commercial demonstration, the hardest remaining failure mode, supply-chain strategy, buyer and deployment path, and why costs can beat the incumbent without a permanent green premium. Be ready for rigorous materials, thermodynamics and process questions.
Non-obvious science that changes a key cost or performance constraint; strong technical founders; a quantified path to large emissions impact; solutions addressing unavoidable demand such as cooling; low energy input and inexpensive, durable materials; designs compatible with existing components or supply chains; prototypes that isolate the hardest remaining engineering risk; and teams able to bridge research, product, manufacturing and market deployment.
No explicit pass list is public. Evidence from her work suggests risk in incremental green products without a step-change in economics or emissions, science that cannot leave the lab, systems dependent on scarce or fragile inputs, climate claims without measurement, hardware that ignores heat and mass transfer or manufacturing realities, and markets where a green premium is the only route to adoption. These are evidence-based inferences, not quoted criteria.
Start with the quantity of greenhouse-gas mitigation and work backward to the technology, deployment scale and customer behavior required to achieve it.
Look for a scientific or engineering mechanism that changes a dominant constraint by an order of magnitude, such as pressure, energy input, sorbent cost or thermal performance.
Trace a materials breakthrough through component design, heat and mass transfer, controls, manufacturing, supply chain and full-system economics before assigning commercial value.
Optimize coupled drivers together—energy, material cost and durability, kinetics, CAPEX and throughput—because winning one dimension while losing another does not create a scalable system.
Favor architectures that convert a new mechanism into reliable products using commodity or off-the-shelf components where possible, shortening the route to scale.
Define explicit milestones from bench mechanism to integrated prototype, commercially relevant demonstrator, field validation and repeatable manufacturing, with the hardest risk isolated at each step.
Show how performance, cost, reliability or regulation makes the clean solution competitive on its own rather than relying indefinitely on customer willingness to pay extra.
Quantify lifecycle emissions, energy source, durability, leakage, replacement and verification so an attractive headline does not conceal rebound or upstream impacts.
“Our ‘North Star’ for everything we are working on is the mitigation of climate change.”
— https://www.responsibilityreports.com/HostedData/ResponsibilityReportArchive/x/NYSE_XRX_2019.pdf
“In Spiritus, we have a combination of a strong approach and team to solve this climate challenge.”
— https://spiritus.com/
“Pascal’s pioneering technology stands poised to tackle both the emissions and survival challenges.”
— https://www.linkedin.com/posts/khosla-ventures_exclusive-pascal-raises-8m-to-make-coolant-activity-7194055576513884161-u_xR
A liquid-mist reactor architecture can continuously decompose hydrocarbons into hydrogen and solid carbon while separating products and recirculating the liquid medium; Rivest is a named inventor.
Rivest defines greenhouse-gas mitigation as the North Star and maps PARC's capabilities in materials, deposition, chemical and electrochemical systems, sensing and analytics to carbon management, industry, buildings and cooling.
Nanoscale cation exchange enables rapid, controllable access to novel and metastable nanocrystal compositions, creating applications across materials synthesis, devices and sensing.
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