Piva Capital, a VC firm that’s backs ‘visionary’ founders and emerging technology companies transforming industry, has appointed Mark Gudiksen as the firm’s second Managing Partner and Roxanne Tully has joined as an Investor.
Founded in 2019, Piva Capital believes emerging companies need investors who are global, fast-moving, engaged, supportive, and connected. The firm takes a thesis-driven approach that includes using an Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) framework to create value, having invested in 11 companies redefining trillion-dollar markets such as agriculture, manufacturing, chemicals, transportation, and energy.
Recent investments include Boston Metal, a company accelerating industrial-scale deployments of molten oxide electrolysis (MOE) technology for emissions-free steel, Solidia Technologies, a producer of low-carbon cement and concrete; 3D printing service Velo3D; biofertilizer startup Anuvia and Menlo Micro, known for reinventing the electronic switch.
As the firm’s second Managing Partner, Gudiksen will help raise subsequent funds, leverage his extensive investing experience to identify unique and ambitious founding teams, help the companies to rapidly grow, and fuel Piva’s ongoing expansion. He has spent a good portion of his career investing in technology companies looking for ways to solve the climate-related issues created by the gap between a growing population and a finite amount of resources.
“Mark was investing in the breakthrough technologies and the new business models necessary to solve climate change a decade before it was the ‘thing to do,’” says Piva Capital founder, CEO and Managing Partner, Ricardo Angel. “We have now reached an inflection point: there is a significant opportunity to invest in great companies aligning with the planet and profit. His deep experience will spark our efforts to solve the most critical challenges in the industrial and energy sectors, which account for over 70 per cent of greenhouse gas global emissions.”
Gudiksen says: “It is a genuine privilege to join the Piva team, not only because of my long-time relationship with Ricardo, but also because of the firm’s exceptional talent and the fund’s alignment with everything I’ve worked toward my entire career. Piva is the ideal place for me to continue to realise new ways to leverage technology and capital to invest in great companies working to solve some of our most important challenges.”
Gudiksen was most recently a Co-founder and Partner of Circularis Partners, an investment firm focused on supporting technology-enabled companies that promote sustainability and increase resource efficiency. Circularis is a sub-advisor to the TPG Alternative and Renewable Technologies (TPG ART) fund, which holds investments in industrials, agriculture, and energy, and of which Gudiksen was previously a Co-founder and Managing Director. Prior to joining TPG, in 2008, he was a consultant at McKinsey & Company.
Gudiksen received his PhD in Chemical Physics from Harvard University with expertise in nanotechnology and his BS in Chemistry from Stanford University. His doctoral work in nanotechnology was widely recognized and was licensed as part of the founding intellectual property at Nanosys.
Before joining Piva, Tully spent four years with BioLite, developing innovative consumer energy products for off-grid communities around the world. There she managed the manufacturing, sourcing, and quality of various consumer electronics, including renewable energy generation and storage systems. Prior to BioLite, Roxanne worked as an R&D engineer for The Clorox Company, where she developed sustainable packaging solutions for a variety of brands.
Roxanne is focused on identifying and supporting visionary entrepreneurs who are leading the world’s major industries to a more sustainable and resilient future. Roxanne holds a MBA from Harvard and a BS in mechanical engineering from Tufts University.
