Utah Fintech entrepreneur Clay Wilkes and his wife Marie donate $20 million to new climate center at University of Utah

Utah fintech entrepreneur Clay Wilkes and his wife Marie are donating $20 million to the University of Utah to launch The Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy, the university announced Wednesday. The interdisciplinary center will promote research, study public policy and propose entrepreneurial solutions to “mitigate and combat the threats posed by climate change to human and environmental health,” the university said in a statement. The gift must be distributed over seven years.

“Climate is the single biggest problem facing humanity,” Wilkes, founder of Galileo Financial Technologies, told Forbes in an interview. “The solutions are going to be just as involved.” The Wilkes Center will include faculty and students from across the university, and will regularly award an award to entrepreneurs with a scalable climate solution.

“Clay and Marie have an intense passion for the environment,” said University of Utah President Taylor Randall, describing how Wilkes told him, “I want this center to be different” — a place that takes action. Randall, former dean of the university’s business school for more than a decade, wants students to assist faculty with research as well as encourage them to take part in entrepreneurial climate solutions.

Utah residents have already lived through some changes in climate. Wilkes pointed out that the state is upwind from California, Oregon and Washington. “We get the smoke from the fires, and Utahns end up breathing it,” he said. (The three states have suffered some of the largest fires in history in the past five years.) Water levels in the Great Salt Lake have dropped dramatically in recent years; if the lake continues to dry up, the air could become toxic due to the arsenic in the lake being exposed and blown by wind storms, as described by New York Times in an in-depth article in June, calling it a possible “environmental nuclear bomb.” It is not just the lake that has lost water; the state’s reservoirs are less than 50% full, Wilkes says.

The University of Utah is on its own journey to reduce its carbon output. It initially pledged to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. President Randall moved that goal a decade earlier, to 2040. “We’d like to do it even faster,” he says. “That will be where we point this [climate] center.”

The Wilkes’ are funding the donation from their Red Crow Foundation, which they established last year with a $75 million donation. These funds were made possible following the 2020 sale of Galileo Financial Technologies to online bank and financial firm SoFi for $1.2 billion in cash and stock. Launched by Wilkes — now 62 — in 2000, Galileo Financial Technologies had raised some funding from friends and family as well as a venture capital round in 2019 from Silicon Valley firm Accel and Utah software entrepreneur Ryan Smith. Wilkes, who owned more than 50% of the company at the time of the sale, likely walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars after taxes. Back in the mid-1990s, Wilkes founded a company called I-Link, which operated in the Voice over Internet Protocol, or VOIP, sector, for which Wilkes authored some of the patents. He says he and his wife plan to dedicate much of their fortune to philanthropy.

Wilkes’ support of the University of Utah comes despite not being an alumni; he attended the University of Oregon and then Brigham Young University. But many of Wilkes’ 10 children have attended the University of Utah, he said. The idea for the climate center came up during a U of Utah football game last fall. Wilkes, who had been friends with university president Randall for some time, began talking at the game about what he was working on with his foundation. “He said ‘Let’s work together,'” Wilkes recalled.

Even as he built Galileo Financial Technologies, Wilkes kept the environment top of mind. The company gave $5,000 to employees who bought electric vehicles, and promised to pay half of the monthly electricity bill for those who switched to some form of renewable energy, such as solar panels. “We were trying to encourage awareness,” he said. At its peak, the company had 500 employees, and some took him up on his offer. “I would like to see 499 [do so]. It wasn’t that loud.”

Through the Galileo Foundation, Wilkes paid for staff to go on service trips to places like Peru, Colombia and Nepal — for projects like building women’s centers. They weren’t directly climate-related, but “an emerging part of what we were doing,” he explained, describing it as a “global citizen approach to the world.”

Looking ahead, Wilkes hopes the new climate center will prompt others to follow suit. “There is work to be done here. It is not going to be a simple solution, he says. “I would like to see every university have a climate-related program.”