Richard Templer

Professor Richard Templer is the August von Hofmann Professor of Chemistry at Imperial College London. For the past 15 years his work has been focussed on support for innovators and entrepreneurs seeking to combat the causes and effects of climate change. In 2010 he co-founded the Climate-KIC and became its UK Director and the Director of Education. He launched the UK’s first specialist accelerator for climate innovations at the end of 2011 and by 2012 was supporting pre-seed investment start-ups developing innovations to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it away. He left the Climate-KIC at the end of 2015 but continued to run the accelerator programme and support climate innovation more broadly.  

Over the past decade the accelerator has supported 148 pre-seed start-ups to raise over $1bn and create over 1,500 jobs in the new economy. With the accelerator at its core, he founded Undaunted as London’s centre for climate innovation, with the support of the Mayor of London. Undaunted is the London home for CO2RE and CGFI, state-funded national collaborations to support atmospheric greenhouse gas removal and green finance innovation respectively.