Shashank Samala is CEO of Heirloom, a company building Direct Air Capture technology that harnesses the natural properties of limestone to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at billion-ton scale removal. Shashank is a serial entrepreneur with a background in financial software and electronics manufacturing. He was previously Entrepreneur in Residence at Carbon180, a leading climate policy NGO working solely on atmospheric carbon removal. His passion for remediating the climate was forged from a childhood spent in southeast India, where he saw those who had done the least to cause the climate crisis suffering the most from its impacts.