Anup Jacob, managing director of Virgin Green Fund, who will be at the WFES’08, shares his thoughts on renewable energy with Earthwitness.
Anup Jacob heads Virgin Green Fund’s San Francisco office, and has over twelve years of principal investing and investment banking experience.
Created by Sir Richard Branson about two years ago, VGF has big goals – and in coming years it intends to invest $500 million in companies in diverse sectors within renewable energy and resource efficiency.
“Our firm aims to become one of the world’s leading investors in the fight against global warming,” said Jacob. “We will do this by focusing on two major areas – helping to replace depleting reserves of conventional energy by investing in renewable energy resources such as solar, wind and biofuels, and by helping the world’s energy users more efficiently manage their use of limited natural resources through investments in areas like energy efficiency, energy storage and emissions reduction.”
Rather than invest in recent laboratory breakthroughs that are years away from commercial use, VGF looks for opportunities to propel proven technologies to the forefront. “We typically seek out opportunities to partner with superior management teams and established businesses seeking to raise expansion or growth capital. They may have early venture investments – or been bootstrapped – but they find themselves at a point where they need to expand their strategy,” said Jacob. For example, last summer VGF invested in Metrolight, a company based in Tennessee. Metrolight had been in business for over 10 years but needed the infusion of financial support and business development resources to bring its more efficient electronic ballasts to the rest of the world.
That’s not to say that VGF won’t make early stage investments. “On some occasions, we evaluate disruptive technologies in our core sectors when existing approaches do not work and a new solution has been created or is about to be created,” added Jacob. “While we feel it will be some time before biofuels are the complete answer and for a real market to develop, over the long term we do view ethanol and butanol as providing part of the answer.” In the spring of 2007, VGF backed Gevo, a next generation biofuels company that was created in the labs at Caltech.
Prior to Virgin, Jacob was a partner in TPG’s Aqua Fund, which focused on late stage investments in Water, Clean Technology and Renewable Resources companies. At Aqua, Jacob helped raise and invest over $300 million into a variety of companies across various Renewable Water and Energy sectors.
Jacob has served on the Boards of Jain Irrigation Systems Ltd, Metering Technology Corporation, and Scanship Environmental Solutions. He has also served as a CFO to portfolio companies and on several audit and strategic committees.
Prior to TPG, Jacob spent three years at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in New York and India in the Global Power and Merchant Banking groups. Jacob is involved in several children’s charities and environmental charities in India. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago.
