Twelve

Nicholas Flanders worked at McKinsey's cleantech practice, where he contributed to a study on carbon capture and storage, before becoming captivated by Etosha Cave's electrochemical CO2 conversion research at Stanford. He met Cave at a Stanford space club gathering and joined her and Kendra Kuhl to co-found Twelve in 2015 after all three participated in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's inaugural Cyclotron Road incubator cohort. As CEO, Flanders leads commercialization of Twelve's carbon transformation platform, which the U.S. Air Force contracted to produce sustainable aviation fuel and chemical feedstocks from captured CO2.

Etosha Cave earned her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University in the lab of chemical engineer Thomas Francisco Jaramillo, where she developed electrochemical processes to convert CO2 into useful chemicals. Cave grew up in Houston aiming to become an astronaut before pivoting to carbon electrochemistry as her path to impact. She was part of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's first Cyclotron Road cohort and co-founded Twelve in 2015. As Chief Science Officer, Cave directs the electrolyzer stack science underlying Twelve's carbon transformation reactors, which reduce CO2 into the building blocks of fuels, polymers, and chemicals.

Kendra Kuhl earned her Ph.D. in the same Stanford lab as Etosha Cave, working under Professor Thomas Francisco Jaramillo on electrochemical CO2 reduction. She co-authored research identifying selective pathways to convert CO2 into liquid fuels and chemical feedstocks at high efficiency. Kuhl co-founded Twelve in 2015 after the Cyclotron Road incubation at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As CTO, she leads the electrochemical engineering and stack development for Twelve's CO2-to-products platform, which has been deployed for sustainable aviation fuel and polymer precursor production in commercial contracts.