Jack Ma, Bill Gates buy into US$1b zero-emissions energy fund
Long-term fund will finance high-risk projects which could bring breakthroughs in zero-emissions energy, food-supply, transport and services
E-commerce giant Alibaba Group executive chairman Jack Ma has joined Microsoft founder Bill Gates and 18 other business and innovation leaders to set up the more than US$1 billion Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund to support the next generation of zero emission energy.
The fund will be invested in early or growth-stage companies or projects which seek solutions to enable the supply of energy, food, products, transportation and services that are both affordable and have zero emission in the production and delivery process.
“Anything that leads to cheap, clean, reliable energy we’re open-minded to,” Gates told online media quartz.com.
Acknowledging that investing in energy was more difficult than investing in information technology, he was quoted as saying: “People think you can just put US$50 million in and wait two years and then you know what you got. In this energy space, that’s not true at all.”
The Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund is “an investor-led fund” contributed by members of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, that invests “patiently in developing new ways to live, eat, travel, and build,” the fund’s website said.