I'm Dahl Winters, the CEO of our small team of 4 co-founders here at TerraNexum. The name of our company literally means "earth network" which is an apt description on many levels. All of us are scientists and engineers with physics backgrounds, and hopefully we're on track to verify the 1% rule. That is, that only 1% of VC funding goes to companies headed by women of color. We've been raising for 6 months now and are still running our company from our own pockets due to zero available investment funds.

We are working to accelerate the energy transition by deploying more renewable energy and by removing carbon from the atmosphere. We do so by designing systems and processes to help. We were quite fond of geospatial big data analytics and remote sensing for a while, and it occurred to us we could make use of containerized quantum applications to accelerate such processing and analytics workflows by at least 100 times, potentially more.

We had no interest from investors on our geospatial app that made use of quantum optimization to connect investors, climate tech providers, and companies with sustainability goals. We had much more interest from both investors and customers on our QMs (quantum modules) which were being designed to run containerized quantum applications both in the cloud and at the edge. But within our team, it was clear that we were moving farther and farther away from directly tackling the climate problem that our team assembled to form our company to do. Chasing investors was not our primary goal. Providing the means to achieve a sustainable future was.

This sponsorship is important because it will directly fund our work in the following areas:

• Our free and open source project called EMiTS. It is a framework and metric that we hope will be used to implement grassroots, community-level sustainability plans everywhere, starting from a cluster of only three people. We are putting more code and examples there, and will be showcasing various sustainability plans when they become available.
• Supporting a good team to handle QM development and sales for future customers, as well as R&D efforts in both renewable energy development and carbon removal/sequestration.