US and Singapore headquartered multi-stage investor, B Capital, has announced the appointment of Don Wood as a venture partner, focussed on climate tech.
He is based in Palo Alto, California and reports to co-founder and co-CEO, Raj Ganguly.
Wood joins from American private equity firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ). He told FinanceAsia that he remains a managing director in the firm’s older DFJ Fund IX and Fund X, but is not an investing partner in the more recent DFJ Growth or Threshold funds. He is however a limited partner in these latter vehicles, he explained.
Wood’s new role, which took effect in February, focusses on building the firm’s climate tech strategy, team and portfolio, the announcement said. B Capital’s climate tech portfolio currently comprises eight investments across the US and Asia, including Patch Technologies, a start-up focussed on application programming interface (API) and developer tools for the carbon markets; and Accacia, a provider of artificial intelligence (AI) decarbonisation tools for the real estate sector.
While he declined to disclose a target number of future climate tech investments, Wood said, “We are actively deploying from our early-stage and growth funds to invest in climate tech, where we seek to support ambitious founders who envision scale and disruption within the sector.”
Areas of climate tech that the firm is eyeing include decarbonisation, electrification and adaptation.
“The core mission of B Capital is to champion founders whose technologies have the potential to change how people work and live across the globe,” Wood added.
B Capital earlier this year announced the $500 million close of a new healthcare fund, B Capital Healthcare Fund I, which targets digital health and biotech opportunities in the US and Asia.
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Beyond healthcare and climate tech, the firm is eyeing the enterprise and fintech sectors and other opportunistic verticals.
In January, the firm closed a US and Asia-focussed, third Growth Fund at $2.1 billion.
Founded in 2015, B Capital invests in seed to late-stage venture growth opportunities and currently has $6 billion in assets under management (AUM). It counts approximately 45 employees in Asia, spread across Singapore, India, China, Hong Kong and Indonesia.
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