Emily Tench, MBA ’25: Reimagining How Energy Infrastructure Gets Built

Emily Tench, MBA ’25, built her career launching clean energy projects, but she was repeatedly surprised and frustrated by how often they failed to take off.

As a consultant at Geneva-based Dalberg Advisors and Sustainable Ventures, advising on over $100 million of energy transition and infrastructure projects, Tench witnessed a common pattern: Communities wanted energy solutions, investors wanted to fund them, and developers wanted to build them. Yet despite these tailwinds, many projects never materialized.

The disconnect fascinated Tench: “I wanted to understand why it was so hard to turn good ideas into real infrastructure,” she says.

With support from the Stanford Impact Founder (SIF) Fellowship program, Tench has spent the year since graduation from Stanford GSB working on this problem. Her solution was to create PermitPal, a company that uses artificial intelligence to help infrastructure project developers and investors identify development risks earlier and navigate permitting and political challenges.

“We’re building an AI partner for the people developing and financing infrastructure,” says Tench. “The earlier you understand risk, the more likely you are to get good projects built.”

A Global Perspective

Tench brings a global perspective to the problem. At Dalberg, she led projects in more than 10 countries across Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia. Her work spanned clean energy, nature-based solutions, and infrastructure development.

While the details differed across regions, the narrative was the same. Local communities worldwide were eager to take action on climate change, she says, based on her interactions on the ground. “I remember walking in the Seychelles, bleached corals crunching under my feet, and hearing our guide speak about his community’s concerns about the future. It was a similar refrain from farmers in Cambodia and in Madagascar.”

Tench emerged from this work convinced that accelerating the deployment of climate and infrastructure projects could benefit communities worldwide.

The Path to PermitPal

Tench arrived at Stanford GSB thinking about what role she could play in accelerating climate and infrastructure projects. She had already started several companies before arriving at Stanford — including one at age 18, for which she was awarded Oxford University’s Social Enterprise Award.

While pursuing her MBA alongside a master’s in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, Tench explored a range of climate venture ideas, including through Stanford Climate Ventures and LaunchPad. During this time, she teamed up with Camila Nicollier, who was pursuing her master’s degree in statistics and data science at Stanford and eventually became PermitPal’s AI and data lead.

Tench and Nicollier set out to identify the primary barrier for energy infrastructure projects. Through hundreds of interviews with project developers, they found that permitting was a manual process, often conducted with incomplete information.

In the U.S. alone, 43,000 different local jurisdictions oversee new projects. Elected officials constantly change, and community sentiment is dynamic. As a result, tens of billions of dollars for renewable energy and storage have been canceled in recent years. More than 90% of clean energy developers cited permitting as a cause of project delays or cancellations, according to a recent Crux survey.

As a result of their research, Tench and Nicollier focused on tackling permitting, with AI underpinning platform operations. PermitPal’s first product, Clara, is an AI permitting consultant that analyzes more than a million scattered government documents each month related to zoning, planning, and infrastructure. By trawling through official records, Clara uncovers what local watchdogs or lawmakers have said about, say, solar power, or how related projects have fared in the past. Beyond unearthing policies and hard data, the service supports developers to listen to the needs of local residents and decision-makers.

The SIF Fellowship: A Lifeline for PermitPal

Tench was awarded the SIF Fellowship to work on PermitPal in the year following graduation. She and Nicollier also received a TomKat Grant to support their work.

After running pilots through early 2026 and launching officially in March, PermitPal has already increased its monthly revenue tenfold. It now provides geographic coverage for every state, county, and township in the U.S. and has helped to de-risk $100 million in project capital for developers and investors.

But PermitPal’s path has not been without obstacles. When Tench graduated, changing renewable energy policies presented headwinds to new renewable deployments in the U.S. The SIF Fellowship was critical, providing the financial and tactical support Tench needed to stick to PermitPal’s vision.

“For us at that moment, SIF was a lifeline for the company,” Tench said. “It gave us the ability to stay with the renewables sector during a time that was quite challenging for the industry.”Fellowship support helped Tench troubleshoot early startup issues and build new skills, such as in sales. It also helped smooth out the roller coaster of entrepreneurship by connecting Tench with a peer community.

Building the Operating System for Infrastructure Development

With a year of experience under her belt, Tench now sees permitting as only the first chapter. Her vision is for PermitPal to become the intelligence layer that supports every stage of infrastructure development.

Bringing a major infrastructure project to life requires dozens of specialists, from permitting consultants and environmental advisors to land agents, lawyers, engineers, and financial analysts. Critical decisions are spread across disconnected software, spreadsheets, and millions of fragmented documents.

“We think infrastructure development is one of the last trillion-dollar industries that is still largely manual — and for good reason,” Tench says. “Unlike consumer applications, where occasional mistakes are acceptable, project development decisions involve millions of dollars in capital and years of development. A single incorrect answer can derail an entire project.”

Moving beyond Clara, customers have already begun asking PermitPal to solve adjacent problems, from screening acquisition data rooms to identifying promising sites before land is purchased. For Tench, the opportunity is transforming how the world plans and delivers the infrastructure it needs, more quickly and in closer partnership with the communities it serves.

As the company scales, Tench says she wants growth to remain tied to projects she and Nicollier believe in. She also wants the projects to match the needs of the communities where they’re sited.“We want to try and prove that there’s a different way of doing business — that you can be a hugely financially successful company but also do it in a way that is good to people and good to the world,” Tench says.