Andi Cross

Andi Cross is an expeditionist, growth strategist, and tech executive working at the intersection of exploration, conservation, technology, and systems change. Her career has been built around helping the people doing the hardest work for the planet get the visibility, resources, and funding they need to scale their impact.

Since 2023, Andi has led Edges of Earth, the global research expedition she co-founded to find the good environmental news the internet wasn't showing us. Over three years, she and her team have worked across more than 50 countries and 250 communities, conducting roughly 2,400 interviews with scientists, conservationists, innovators, and First Nations leaders. From coral restoration in remote island nations to glacier expeditions, jungle research stations, and underserved coastal communities, the expedition documents both the reality of environmental decline and the people actively reversing it. Through long-form editorial, photography, and filmmaking, Edges of Earth has published more than 450 case studies across 26 media outlets and works with nine global partners. At the center of the project is a belief that storytelling can act as infrastructure for change.

The expedition surfaced a pattern that became a company. The work Andi's team found in the field was extraordinary, but almost none of it was discoverable online, and that cost these teams the funding, access, and attention they deserved. In March 2026, she co-founded Flywheel Motion with Thomas Prommer to fix that structurally.

Flywheel builds "digital attention properties" for mission-led organizations and people: web presences engineered with the same infrastructure Fortune 100 brands use to dominate search and social. Technical SEO that gets real work indexed and found. Structured content built to answer the questions audiences are actually asking. The signals that get these teams cited by AI systems. Members are connected through entity co-citation, shared topic clusters, and a vetted media network, so credibility compounds across the collective rather than sitting with any one brand.

To date, Flywheel has platformed 200+ attention properties, developed brands for 25+ organizations, and built a relationship graph of 11,000+ contacts. Its work has helped members unlock capital they historically could not access, including an Indigenous-led team that secured a 65-year government contract to build ocean gardens across Aotearoa.

Andi's ability to operate across the corporate and environmental sectors comes from more than 15 years leading growth, strategy, and transformation inside global organizations. She was Vice President of Strategic Growth at Huge Inc., the global digital transformation agency, overseeing growth initiatives and operations across 12 international offices, and earlier held leadership roles in strategy, communications, and business development at Ogilvy and other global agencies, working with Fortune 500 companies. Since 2017, she has been a Venture Partner and Strategist in Residence at H/L Ventures, advising mission-driven startups and historically underserved founders.

Alongside her expedition and company work, Andi partners with the Billion Oyster Project, one of the largest urban oyster restoration efforts in the United States, leading dive expeditions in her own backyard to help restore one billion oysters to New York Harbor by 2030. Other organizations she works with today include Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Room 71 and Dalhousie University's Ocean School; past work includes Sustainable Ocean Alliance, Oceans 2050, SeaLegacy, and the Minderoo Foundation.

Her work has been recognized across both business and conservation: a Digiday Future Leader Awards finalist for advancing climate storytelling, and Edges of Earth a Fast Company World Changing Ideas honoree. Her documentary and expedition work has featured in the 2026 International Ocean Film Festival, the Arctic Film Festival, the Korean International Ocean Film Festival, and the One Ocean Film Festival.

As a writer, expeditionist, and professional diver, Andi's case studies have appeared in Forbes, UN Climate Champions, Oceanographic Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, Time Magazine, The Today Show, and numerous international publications. She is one of the first brand ambassadors in the 50-year history of Scuba Schools International (SSI), a sponsored athlete with Scubapro, a member of The Explorers Club, and the first professional diver named to the Protect Our Winters Athlete Alliance.

Her work continues to center on an idea: that the future of conservation depends on science and innovation, but also on our ability to build bridges between storytellers, explorers, institutions, businesses, and the people risking everything to protect the planet.