This interview highlights Su Sanni, co-founder of Dollaride, a Visible Hands portfolio company. Su is a social entrepreneur and tech executive from Brooklyn, NY. As CEO of Dollaride, a clean mobility company building transportation infrastructure for underserved communities, he leads the company’s $25M clean transportation project, a public-private partnership with NYS government agencies, to electrify commuter transit in NYC. A two-time founder, Su previously led WeDidIt, a nonprofit fundraising platform that helped 2,000+ organizations raise over $50M before its acquisition by Allegiance Group in 2019. Su has also served as President of Technology at Allegiance, and earlier in his career, managed billions in investments at Brown Brothers Harriman.
Q: Building a climate company often means navigating the intersection of deep tech, policy, and commercial markets simultaneously. What's been the hardest part of that, and what surprised you most?
A: The hardest part isn't any one of those three — it's the timing mismatch between them. Commercial customers want vehicles tomorrow. Policy moves in 18-month cycles. Technology (vehicles, chargers, software) ships on its own schedule. You're constantly underwriting bets where the inputs are out of phase.
What surprised me most: the public sector is opportunistic and more sophisticated than founders give it credit for. In New York, NYSERDA, Empire State Development, and New York Green Bank are real, rigorous capital sources…not consolation prizes for companies that can't raise venture. Government contracts and the EV financing credit facility we’ve obtained aren't ‘soft money’; they're better-priced, more patient capital than most equity investments I've seen, and the diligence is just as sharp. The mistake I see climate founders make is treating government as a grant-writing exercise instead of a customer and counterparty. Once you flip that frame, the whole capital stack opens up.
Q: How do you think about the tension between speed and systems change? Climate has a hard deadline, but many of the most impactful solutions require long development cycles or slow-moving incumbent industries to shift. How does that reality shape how you build?
A: Honestly, I’ve stopped thinking of speed and systems change as a tension to resolve. The way I see it, in a highly regulated industry like transportation, the real constraint is never tech or capital. It’s trust. And trust keeps its own clock.
There’s a paradox I’ve come to rely on. When trust is high, everything moves faster and costs less, because nobody is reexamining your motives at every step. But trust itself can’t be rushed. Relationships in a community or with a regulator form slowly, and the moment you try to compress that timeline, you invite the exact skepticism that stalls the whole project. So I’ve learned to move at the speed of trust. It feels slower at the front and turns out faster everywhere downstream.
Practically, that shapes how we build. We don’t parachute into a neighborhood with a pile of capital and a deployment schedule and expect to be welcomed. We build alongside the operators, drivers, and agencies who are already trusted where we work, and we let those relationships do the heavy lifting on the slow parts: permitting, licensing, interconnection, policy. What most people read as the obstacle, the slowness of relationship-dependent and heavily regulated markets, is the part I find most interesting. It’s the terrain the big players skip precisely because trust there can’t be bought. That’s where it compounds, and once you’ve earned it, you’re very hard to dislodge.
Q: What does the path to scale actually look like for you? How are you thinking about what "winning" means in your category?
A: 275 EVs deployed by December 2027. Then ~1,000 vehicles across the greater NYC area. That's the near-term path, already in our pipeline.
But winning isn't a fleet count. Winning is owning two assets that compound: a network of trained EV drivers and operators rooted in disadvantaged communities, and a portfolio of EV charging hubs on real estate we control or anchor. Vehicles get replaced every 5–7 years. The drivers, the routes, the broker relationships, and the infrastructure don't.
The longer-term vision: we're building the operating system for clean mobility in markets the big players ignore. So that’s NYC boroughs first, then comparable corridors in other cities. If a public agency, a Medicaid broker, or a paratransit operator in NYC needs an electric trip, the most reliable answer should be Dollaride. By winning that, the rest (e.g., financing, policy influence, talent) will compound on top.
Q: What do you wish more climate investors understood about what it takes to build in your space? Conversely, what has great investor support looked like for you?
A: I wish more investors would recognize that building regulated, infrastructure-heavy mobility operates on a different, slower clock than the expected venture curve. The milestones that actually de-risk the company, like a signed government contract, a financing facility, or a charging hub reaching interconnection, move on institutional and regulatory timelines…not quarterly ones. So if you're pattern-matching to SaaS, you'll probably misread healthy progress as slow.
The second thing is that the capital stack is part of the product. For example, Dollaride is not a pure-equity story, and we shouldn't be. The real skill is blending equity with public and project capital so every dollar does more work. Many investors treat government money as soft money or a distraction. In reality, it's often cheaper, more patient, and subject to equally stringent oversight as the equity capital we’re often seeking…but without the dilution. Nonetheless, founders and funders can create more innovative and affordable solutions with blended capital embedded in the product offering.
Great support looks like financial partners who extend trust through the slow parts instead of pulling back when a timeline stretches. Mission-aligned equity investors like Elemental Impact, Powerhouse Ventures, Visible Hands, and the Sorenson Impact Foundation backed the thesis behind Dollaride early, and kept showing up as the picture got more complex. Catalytic lenders have been just as decisive: the Candide Group, Chestnut Run Capital, and New York Green Bank brought the rigor of serious credit investors and the flexibility to lend before a deal looks easy. Beyond the check, the support that mattered most is the kind that compounds: warm introductions to the next layer of capital, assistance with policy/regulatory issues, and honest operational pushback.
Q: What's your contrarian view or nonobvious insight about where climate tech is headed in the next five years?
A: The nonobvious one for me: AI is widely cast as climate's problem because it's such a power hog. I'd argue its appetite is the best thing to happen to the clean energy sector. The constraint becomes the catalyst.
The surge in electricity demand from AI data centers is what pulls capital, battery storage, and cheaper technology together at scale..and quickly. Grid interconnection now runs years, so developers are turning to on-site generation and battery storage to come online in months instead, either bridging the queue or skipping it entirely. That makes distributed storage a hard requirement for AI to scale, not a nice-to-have. And the same AI driving that demand is getting pointed back at the supply side, compressing the discovery of better batteries, catalysts, and carbon capture materials from years into months. Two trends that usually activate years apart, surging demand and falling production cost, end up running in sync.
Overall, I think the next five years will reward a larger group of "winners." This means less breakthrough technology chasing a problem to solve, and more operators who wrap software and financing around real physical assets. That combination is what makes the unit economics work. And it's what makes the capital show up.
Learn more about Dollaride at www.dollaride.com
