Stanford University awards Leia and Cambio the Climate Innovations Prize

In 2013, while helping design a solar-powered house for a project with the U.S. Department of Energy, Cambio's co-founder Leia de Guzman discovered that buildings produce about 40% of global carbon emissions. Already passionate about fighting climate change, she saw a huge opportunity to make an impact through the built environment — and realized that many of the technologies to reduce emissions already exist.

Fast-forward to today: as co-founder of Cambio, an AI-powered platform for commercial real estate decarbonization, Leia is focused on the sector’s biggest challenge — retrofitting older buildings, which account for 75% of emissions. By targeting institutional investors, landlords, and large corporate tenants, Cambio delivers data-driven insights to prioritize upgrades, access financial incentives, and streamline the retrofitting journey.

Earlier this year, Cambio was awarded the Stanford University Climate Solutions Prize — in recognition of its potential to transform one of the world’s largest and most carbon-intensive industries. The award highlights Cambio’s innovative use of AI to make building decarbonization faster, more cost-effective, and scalable across entire portfolios.

“Buildings are complex pieces of equipment with multiple levers you can pull to make them more efficient,” says de Guzman. “We give owners the 40,000-foot portfolio view, then drill down to exactly what needs to be done in each building — and the ROI for doing it.”

Her path to founding Cambio was shaped by grit and purpose — from cold-calling 70 real estate executives to land her dream job at Oxford Properties, to harnessing AI for climate impact. “When you’re disrupting your industry with an entirely new solution, you have to be passionate about the cause,” she says.

Cambio’s mission is clear: turn climate ambition into action for the world’s buildings — one retrofit at a time.

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