As a thematic rather than regional investor, Energize doesn’t invest in manny Chicago-based companies. In fact, we have more European investments than midwest investments. But there is an exciting momentum building in Illinois around the electric vehicle boom. In addition to a number of manufacturing sites (Rivian, Lion Electric) the state is trying to enable …
At Energize each investor has 2-3 ongoing “deep dives” at any give time. These deep dives are accumulating research projects whereby we are learning from our network and the entrepreneurs- and most usually have at least two professionals collaborating on them. I believe that one of Energize’s greatest assets is our research-based investment discovery. Mark …
Today is an exciting day for Energize as we are officially revealing that we have closed on $330M for our latest ventures fund! Through this new fund, Energize Ventures Fund II, our team will continue to invest in the best companies accelerating the energy and sustainability movement. In our first ventures fund, a $165M vehicle …
Earlier this year Ford announced a number of commitments to their electric vehicle platform. In addition to over $30 billion in capex guidance, the firm revealed their Ford F-150 electric and then announced a partnership with Sunrun. Those announcements are exciting, but watching how the firm actually intended to deploy the commitments was the important …
When I give talks to our portfolio companies I go through my experiences as an operator. During these talks I hit on 5 main points I learned in my start-up roles. Next week Energize will have a pretty exciting announcement. Looking back and ahead, it feels like three of my own pieces of advice are …
As seen with Hurricane Sandy and recent summer heat waves, New York City’s power supply is less resilient than needed to serve the local population. And what’s hidden behind the scene is that most of the power for Manhattan is still traditional carbon-based power supply. In 2019, the New York State Energy Research and Development …
Our investment into Matroid in Q3 2020 was the culmination of nearly a 2.5-year deep dive into the types of problems that computer vision can help address in energy industrial applications. In that process we learned that the industry subject matter experts wanted to be involved in the software training – and in fact, their …
One of the bigger surprises for me is how much dealflow at Energize continues to come from Europe. If you know the energy markets, it makes some sense: Higher incumbent energy prices allows faster payback from new energy products Greater adoption of EVs and associated incentives in select regions (Nordics) and immense investments in German …
In the past two weeks Energize has had job offers accepted by 3 new employees. One of them is a new investor and the other two are going to be taking leadership positions on our platform team. We were 10 people going into last week and will be at/near 15 by the end of the …
Last week was pretty exciting for Volta. On Friday they celebrated their first day of trading under their new stock symbol, VLTA. I was at the New York Stock Exchange with the cofounders, Chris & Scott, other board members and many of their employees. We were there for the first trade and the closing bell …