Candice Ammori

Founder and CEO Climate Vine

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Candice Ammori is the founder and chief executive of Climate Vine, a membership community for people working on climate whose members are admitted by competitive application and drawn from policy, investment, corporate, activism, non-profit, entrepreneurship and science backgrounds. She came to the work sideways: after reading the 2018 IPCC report she left the ethics of artificial intelligence for climate, and built On Deck’s Climate Tech programme into a cohort network of more than 650 people before founding Climate Vine on the same premise. Her training is in biostatistics, and she uses it — Climate Vine’s member matchmaking is an algorithmic problem she treats as one, pairing members without repetition and with a stated reason for every match.

Career Highlights

• Founded Climate Vine and serves as its CEO; membership is by competitive application and the programme runs expert sessions, curated peer matchmaking and off-the-record small-group masterminds organised by career stage.
• Founded On Deck Climate Tech, convening more than 650 people across the climate ecosystem in multiple cohorts; by her own account fellows went on to raise over $350 million in venture funding and more than two dozen companies emerged from it.
• Selected as a Primer Scholar in the Aspen Policy Academy’s 2025 cohort.
• Invests in and advises early-stage climate technology companies, which she describes as how she maintains vertical depth in the sector.
• Holds both an undergraduate degree in environmental policy and business and a graduate degree in biostatistics from the University of Michigan, and applies the latter to the community’s selection and matching systems.

Professional Journey

Ammori’s two University of Michigan degrees sit oddly together on paper — an undergraduate degree in environmental policy and business, then a graduate degree in biostatistics from the School of Public Health — and the combination turned out to be the point. The policy and business side gave her the subject; the statistics gave her the tools she now applies to running a network.

Reading the 2018 IPCC report was the hinge. She was working on the ethics of artificial intelligence at the time and concluded that the constraint on climate action was cross-disciplinary collaboration rather than any single discipline’s output. She moved into climate and started On Deck Climate Tech, a fellowship-style programme intended to get scientists, investors, operators and policy people into the same room. Across multiple cohorts it brought together more than 650 people; she has said its fellows raised over $350 million in venture funding, that more than two dozen companies emerged, and that hundreds of participants moved into climate innovation work from other fields.

Climate Vine is the continuation of that thesis without the cohort structure. It is a standing membership community rather than a fixed-term programme, built on selection, curated matchmaking and small-group conversation held off the record. Ammori’s stated view is that the greater part of community building is filtering and selecting the right people rather than programming events, and the operational expression of that is the admissions process and the matching algorithm she writes herself. Alongside Climate Vine she invests in and advises early-stage climate technology companies, and in 2025 she was named a Primer Scholar by the Aspen Policy Academy.

Education

University of Michigan

Undergraduate degree, Environmental Policy and Business

University of Michigan School of Public Health

MS, Biostatistics