Claudia Herbert, PhD

Claudia Herbert, PhD, is an investor at Merenti Capital, a Swiss, principal-led family office investing its own balance sheet across liquid strategies, direct investments, and commitments to specialist funds. She focuses primarily on private markets.

Claudia’s background spans environmental science, spatial data, product development, and the commercialization of climate-related physical systems. Across academic and operating roles, she has repeatedly worked where models and technical claims meet physical constraints, evolving standards, and actual buyer behavior. That experience shapes an evidence-first approach to assessing whether a promising technology or market mechanism can become a durable commercial system.

Claudia earned her PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022. Working across Berkeley’s Fire Ecology and Land Use Change laboratories, she used remote sensing, spatial data science, econometrics, and time-series analysis to study fire-prone forests and the tradeoffs among wildfire risk, forest management, and carbon objectives. Her published research examined the effectiveness of green landscape buffers, competing landscape-management objectives, and the performance of forest-growth models. One validation study found that a widely used model materially overpredicted carbon growth in California.

This work established a lasting habit of testing analytical models against observed systems rather than accepting their outputs at face value.

While completing her doctorate, Claudia began advising Carbon Direct on the emerging tokenization of carbon credits. Following a product-management role at wildfires.org, where she gained experience in zero-to-one product development, she joined Carbon Direct as a product manager. Working within cross-functional startup environments taught her how to translate specialized technical expertise into products and how to coordinate effectively across domain experts, design, engineering, sales, and marketing.

After moving to Switzerland in 2024, Claudia joined Atlas Agro as Head of Carbon and Nature. There, she developed commercial offerings around the environmental benefits of producing nitrogen fertilizer with green hydrogen. She worked with global food and agricultural companies to pilot chain-of-custody approaches while applicable standards were still developing, and with industry organizations and NGOs to explain how mechanisms such as global book-and-claim could accelerate demand for emerging green commodities. She also helped develop take-or-pay agreements for environmental attributes, creating customer commitments intended to support fundraising and final investment decisions for capital-intensive production projects.

These experiences gave Claudia a practical appreciation of the distinction between technical merit and commercial readiness. In Merenti’s private-market work, she considers not only whether a claim is plausible, but whether the evidence is fit for the decision at hand, its assumptions are visible, genuine demand exists, and the relevant organization can execute across disciplines. She is attentive to the standards, contracts, incentives, and coordination required to move from an attractive technical proposition to a functioning market.

For founders and emerging managers, Claudia offers a counterpart who can engage with technical detail while remaining focused on organizational design, adoption, and commercial structure. Her cross-functional background helps her assess how effectively a team integrates specialists and converts differentiated knowledge into a coherent product, strategy, and operating system. At Merenti, she applies that perspective across private-market research, diligence, and investment work.

Claudia also holds two Bachelor of Science degrees from UC Berkeley, in Conservation and Resource Studies and Society and Environment, with minors in Forestry, Geospatial Information Systems and Technology, and Public Policy. She completed an honors thesis and received the Departmental Citation Award from Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.