New $1 billion venture fund to support emerging clean energy technology

Bil Gates, Co-Founder of Microsoft (source: flickr/ OnInnovation, creative commons)

Alexander Richter 12 Dec 2016

A new $ 1 billion ($1,000 million) venture fund has been set up by a group of successful business leaders, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The fund will be led by Microsoft-co-founder Bill Gates.

The fund’s aim is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to almost zero by financing emerging clean energy technology.

The fund – to be called Breakthrough Energy Ventures Fund – includes a variety of prominent business leaders among them, the chairman of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the founder of Chinese Alibababa, Vinod Khosla, , Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and SAP co-founder Hasso Platner.

The fund is part of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition that was launched by Bill Gates last year in December. It will help build companies based on promising technologies.

With a 20-year lifespan it is to target investments that are both broad and scientific in its investment approach and consider investments across a broad number of energy sectors, including electricity genration and storage, transportation, industrial system use, agriculture and energy system efficiency.

More details via the link below.

So the question is what geothermal technologies could be funded by a fund like this? What are possible startup scenarios and businesses that could be founded and run with funding like this?

Source: VentureBeat