Some of the world's top investors headed by Bill Gates formed a new firm that aims to provide up to $1 billion worth of funds to upcoming clean tech companies. This advocacy aims to minimize green house gas emission to as low as zero in the next 20 years.
The firm is called Breakthrough Energy Ventures and it includes giant investors like Amazon head Jeff Bezos, Alibaba's Jack Ma, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers head John Doerr, and SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner, just to name a few, Fortune reported. The other inverstors also include Laura and John Arnold Foundation co-chair John Arnold, Vinod Khosla, and more.
Bill Gates, who is heading BEV, said he is honored to partner up with the investors to establish a strong foundation of investments aimed at supporting basic research. He said they aim to build companies that will develop the next generation of emissions-free energy. And make sure they are reliable and affordable.
BEV is committed to fund tech ventures at whatever stage they may be, Tech Crunch reported. This means from seed until commercialization. The firm will support tech ventures mainly in the field of transportation, buildings, electricity, agriculture, and manufacturing.
Cleantech used to be one of the most popular ventures in Silicon Valley, with a total investment reaching $6.1 billion back before the recession in 2008. However, cleantech ventures became controversial after startups squandered the capitals investment. These companies even took huge amounts of funds from grants, government loans, tax credits, and even subsidies.
Some of the companies that shut down and never given a decent return of investments for the investors were solar panel developer Solyndra, fuel-efficient car maker Aptera, and waste-to-fuel startup Kior. Most of them, nobody remembers anymore.
But at present, there is a growing demand for cleantech once again with the problem of over population, the need for clean energy, and the need for efficient but cheap energy.
BEV was created to cater for this demand. This firm was created out of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, which was the group that was officially launched during the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference.
BEV also came up with the "Landscape of Innovation" framework, which aims to guide other investors who plan to help companies involved in addressing the issue of global greenhouses gas emissions.
