How Greenhouse Became Australia’s Epicentre for Climate Innovation and Action

by Daniel Simons

 

In his book Screw Business as Usual, Sir Richard Branson described Creel Price as “the living, breathing definition of an entrepreneur.” With good reason.

Price started his first business at 11, selling strawberries to buy a Commodore 64, then went on to launch nine more ventures before graduating university.

At the ripe old age of 25, he co-founded Blueprint Management Group with Trevor Folsom, scaling it to over 1,000 employees before selling for $109 million, just one week before the 2008 financial crisis.

After the timely exit, he created The Kidpreneur Foundation, helping more than 8,000 children raise over $350,000 for charity through micro-businesses, developed core training for the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship, and became a vocal champion of “The Entreprenaissance,” a global movement that saw business and innovation playing the lead role in shaping the future for humankind.

Then came the next-level pivot. In 2019, Price injured his ankle on a hike and found himself stuck in a cave for days waiting for rescue. Alone with his thoughts and reading Sarah Wilson’s This One Wild and Precious Life: The Path Back to Connection in a Fractured World, he found his new north star.

When Price finally emerged from that cave, he had the next chapter of his life mapped out: He would dedicate his skills, resources and energy to tackling the climate crisis and protecting the biosphere, and he would do it by nurturing ecosystems and empowering communities.

Fast-forward to 2026, and Price has launched a $100 million Climate Tech Fund through his firm Investible and co-founded Greenhouse, the innovation hub that has rapidly become the epicentre of climate action in Australia.

Opened in October 2023 with $31 million in support from the City of Sydney, the 3,800-square-metre space, spanning three floors of Salesforce Tower at Circular Quay now serves as a vertical village where innovators collide, scale solutions and accelerate efforts to tackle humanity’s greatest challenge.

Greenhouse serves over 1,000 members from 200 companies and is home to the full spectrum of climate innovators and activists.

Walk around Greenhouse on any given day and you’ll find scale-ups like Loam Bio — who recently raised $105 million for their soil carbon capture technology—working side by side with The Nature Conservation Council and the Climate Action Network Australia.

A few steps down the hall, circular fashion innovators Reverb scribble on their whiteboards, while solopreneur Alex Horton, tinkers away at his green skills workforce engine Econome.

Crafted and curated to foster serendipitous collisions, Greenhouse brings together NGOs, government departments, large corporations, startups, and investors under one roof, creating a buzzing hive of cross-pollination and radical collaboration.

But Greenhouse is far more than a landlord. It’s a lighthouse.

In addition to facilitating close to 200 events as part of its annual calendar, the Greenhouse team are also founders and supporters of Climate Action Week Sydney, which attracts over 10,000 attendees annually.

Beyond convening, Greenhouse aims to pull the national conversation forward through initiatives like its Green Iron series, Green Steel challenge, and their Catalysing Climate Capital report – the first comprehensive playbook for accelerating climate innovation across Australia and Southeast Asia.

Recently Greenhouse partnered with Flow Power to run their entire operations on 100% renewable energy using battery storage to match every watt consumed with wind and solar generation 24/7.

By moving beyond offsetting and “net zero” towards “true zero,” they’re hoping to prove that commercial real estate, which consumes a quarter of Australia’s electricity, can rapidly decarbonise at scale without sacrificing profit.

With the climate crisis accelerating and demand for climate tech surging, Greenhouse is planning national and international expansion through reciprocal sites.

The vision is a connected global network of climate innovation hubs, sharing insights, resources and opportunities across borders to accelerate climate action on a planetary scale.

Charlotte Connell joined Greenhouse when it was just an idea, before the physical location even existed.

As the former Head of Impact and current Director of Innovation and Investment, she’s helped build it into the thriving ecosystem it is today.

A board member of Surfers for Climate, former Climate Salad team member, and LinkedIn Top Voice for sustainability, Connell knows a thing or two about the new wave of climate action sweeping the world.

We sat down with her to discuss the magic that happens when the right people come together, Australia’s booming climate tech ecosystem, and why she’s hopeful about the future.

What is Greenhouse and what is its mission?

Greenhouse is a collaborative ecosystem for climate innovation and investment.

We have three levels in the city center, in Salesforce Tower in Sydney, that house Australia’s crème de la crème of climate tech scale-ups,  Australia’s best climate tech investors, as well as climate action foundations and supporting businesses.

Walking through the doors of Greenhouse is such a wonderful, uplifting, and hope-filling exercise, because you see all the incredible solutions there, how successful they are and how much funding and support they are receiving. It’s an incredibly vibrant hub with over a thousand members.

For example, we recently conducted a survey, which was completed by about 30 of our members. We found that collectively they had raised over $400 million since joining. This is the power of community!

Greenhouse was created to foster community and collaboration across the entire climate tech and innovation ecosystem, but we also recognised that while there are amazing accelerators like I2N, Energy Lab and the UNSW Founders Program that support early-stage climate tech, there was a huge gap when it came to supporting scale-ups.

So a lot of the work we do is also focused on helping those businesses get to their next stage of growth or global expansion.

 

You were previously the Head of Impact at Greenhouse and now you’re the Director of Investment and Innovation. What does your role involve and what does a typical week look like for you?

My role is to serve as an ‘ecosystem steward’ for the climate tech innovation ecosystem, and to help build the connective tissue between all the different players and sectors, not just in Sydney, but across the country.

We’re also strategically positioning Australia in the Asia-Pacific region and our sister company Investible has an office in Singapore. So my role is to help startups succeed in Australia and to scale up internationally.

A typical week looks like being across what’s happening globally and nationally. For example, we’ve got a record number of grants available at ARENA at the moment, so part of my role is to make sure our members know about those.

This week we hosted a delegation from Korea, who wanted to learn about what’s happening in climate innovation in Australia. When international delegations want to learn about climate action in Australia they come to Greenhouse, so there is always something exciting happening.

My favorite part of the week is just hanging out in the kitchen and making coffee and chatting to the wonderful community members and hearing about what they’re up to, and celebrating their successes.

Another huge part of my work is growing the pool of ‘catalytic capital’. That’s investment money willing to take on more risk to prove new solutions can work.

We’re bringing together everyone from banks and philanthropists to superannuation funds, because climate solutions need different types of funding at different stages.

We’re also working on some really exciting initiatives around data centres and AI and how we can harness their power while also addressing the massive amounts of energy they use.

Greenhouse is also a founder of Climate Action Week Sydney. How and why did you launch such an enormous event?

Climate Action Week came about because we needed to go bigger than just the walls of the Greenhouse tech hub.

A driving philosophy behind Greenhouse is that we need to get people together, and when people are working together, magic happens. But we also know that climate action and all the solutions that we need to solve climate aren’t just coming from technology. They come from community action, collective action, and systems change.

We’d been to New York Climate Week, some of the team had been to London Climate Action Week, and we thought, let’s do Sydney Climate Action Week.

Our original plan was to do an MVP event in 2023 and host 11 events, but that first year we ended up with over 150 events. Last year we had more than 15,000 attendees across all of the events.

That’s why Climate Action Week is so important. We want to get the message out there that climate action’s for everyone, not just those that work in the tech space.

What are the 2026 CAW Sydney events that you’re most looking forward to?

I’m really excited about the Climate Innovation and Investment Summit that Greenhouse is hosting. We describe it as a ‘get sh%#t done event’. It’s not just about listening to panels, it’s about rolling our sleeves up, diving deep and getting to work.

The other event I’m super excited about is called Shut Up and Take My Money, which is a climate investor reverse pitch where the investors have one minute to convince the audience in the room why they should take their money.

It’s just a really fun spin, because a lot of founders pitch, but this time it’s the investors up there.

Last year we had 16 climate tech investors pitching, including Investable, Giant Leap, Virescent, Main Sequence, Advance, and Climate Tech Partners. It’s always a great way to get the whole ecosystem in the room, making those connections, but without the pressure of founders feeling like they’re always on show.

Has working at Greenhouse made you hopeful about the future?

Oh my gosh, absolutely. I feel incredibly privileged to be working at that real nexus of climate innovation and climate investment.

I get to see that we have all the solutions we need, and I get to see that they are scaling, and I also have an inside-track view of the abundance of capital that is flowing towards the solutions.

We have an abundance of solutions, from nature-based approaches like drones dropping seeds to regenerate forests (Airseed) through to cutting-edge technologies that create ammonia using electricity and plasma (PlasmLeap), dramatically reducing carbon emissions.

The solutions are vast and expansive, and what’s really exciting is that our investment market is maturing alongside them.

In the Australian government right now, we have over $81 billion across federal and state government money committed to climate and decarbonisation technologies. That is a lot of public funds committed to this space.

And recently Australia’s largest climate fund, the NRF’s $5 billion Net Zero Fund announced that it will be catalytic, concessional and risk tolerant to early stage technology – these are exciting times!

Australia has the second fastest growing startup ecosystem in the world, we have the lion’s share of critical minerals, and we’re the most capital-efficient producer of unicorns globally. We’ve got all the key ingredients to be global leaders in the climate innovation and investment space.

It was also really encouraging to see that the demise of America’s Inflation Reduction Act didn’t slow us down at all. It actually made our ecosystem realise we have this incredible, exponentially growing market right at our doorstep in the Asia-Pacific region. We don’t have to chase the allure of the US anymore.

Another exciting thing is that people are finally starting to realise that climate action isn’t a cost. It’s actually a hugely profitable opportunity.

This is about making money, creating jobs, and building economic prosperity. We need to frame it that way, so governments see renewable infrastructure as a pathway to cheap, abundant energy that attracts business, spurs growth and builds resilience.