Portrait No. 001
Jumana Al Hashal
Co-Founder & CEO
Snowline
Raised — $1.55M in pre-seed, Seed Open Now
Snowline began as a slow-burn obsession with food security and climate, shaped by both my work and parenthood journeys. While working on Google’s Internet in Africa project in Uganda, I saw how routine power outages destabilized food systems. Reliable cold chain wasn’t abstract, it was the backbone of our communities. That understanding became personal years later. After having my first child, I received insulin for gestational diabetes under orange smoke-filled California skies while a truck idled outside. Climate harm was no longer theoretical—it was in my children’s future. When Google shut down our Area 120 incubator where I was working on AI projects, I was offered a safe landing elsewhere. Instead, holding my second newborn, I chose to leap. Snowline is my response to that call: to protect the very access to food and medicine in a warming world, stabilize livelihoods, and act now before these losses become irreversible.
In her words
“For Snowline, our mission is to safeguard the very access to food and medicine and critical temperature sensitive cargo on a warming world while improving economic opportunity for those who produce, distribute, and deliver their critical goods and improving the health outcomes for the communities along refrigerated routes. On a personal level, by buidling at the intersection of purpose and profit, I want future generations to feel permission to care, to lead without apologizing, and to trust their own ambition. You have nothing to prove. Begin.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
Building Snowline meant building a critical infrastructure company while raising two young children.The startup ecosystem is not designed for founders with caregiving responsibilities. Those constraints forced clarity, speed, and prioritization. I had to brave the usual startup rollercoasters while also fighting people’s assumptions about who “belongs” in this space. Regulations and incentives shifted under our feet. What keeps Snowline alive is relentless execution—and community. My spouse carried more than their share so I could build. Talented engineers believed in the mission and said yes before it was obvious. Early supporters took meetings and made intros. As the agentic AI wave pulled Silicon Valley capital and attention away from the physical world. We stopped trying to win attention in a trend cycle and were rewarded with an amazing coalition of investors, customers, and operators that share our passion. Over the past year, we raised an oversubscribed round, secured early pilots, and developed proprietary systems. Our very first software-defined transport refrigeration unit can be seen on a truck delivering life essentials, guilt-free, on a Bay Area street near you. Grit showed up as structure that used my fears as data and fuel. The climb isn’t comfortable. But the journey is magic.
Chapter II
Your vision.
I’m obsessed with protecting access to fresh food and medicine in a warming world. We lose enormous value because cold chain transport is brittle. If we get this right, we’ll cut food and product waste at scale, strengthen local food chains, and improve economic opportunity for truckers and operators—better margins, less idling, fewer breakdowns. And we’ll replace brittle processes with elegant systems designed for human nature: supporting good decisions, recovering from mistakes, and keeping essentials safe anywhere. The shift also protects public health closer to home: cleaning up air along refrigerated routes that run through our most vulnerable communities, where diesel exhaust is treated like collateral damage. I envision trucks using Snowline to serve as mobile cold rooms in disaster zones, low-grid regions, and refugee camps, so the basics don’t fail when everything else does. I want to build a cold chain that’s clean, affordable, and dependable so fresh food and medicine aren’t a privilege of geography.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
I want my kids to have seen what it looks like to answer a calling with courage and find it in themselves to do the same. I hope they learn what it looks like to try honestly, to build something that protects people, and to keep going when it would be easier to quit. I want the world they inherit to waste less, breathe cleaner air, and treat access to food and medicine as non-negotiable for their communities. I want future generations to feel permission to care, to lead without apologizing, and to trust their own ambition. You have nothing to prove. Begin.