Bill Gates is leading a new $1 billion "Breakthrough Energy" investment fund. (photo credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Billionaire philanthropist and investor Bill Gates is launching a $1 billion fund, called Breakthrough Energy Ventures, to invest in new forms of clean energy.
Gates has gathered a group of about 20 like-minded investors, including Silicon Valley venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, former hedge manager John Arnold, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Bloomberg LP founder and former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, and a handful of others to join him in the fund.
In a post on his Gates Notes blog, Gates said the fund will invest in “scientific breakthroughs that have the potential to deliver cheap and reliable clean energy to the world.”
“We need affordable and reliable energy that doesn’t emit greenhouse gas to power the future—and to get it, we need a different model for investing in good ideas and moving them from the lab to the market,” Gates said in his post.
The announcement comes a year after the United Nations climate change talks in Paris, where Gates unveiled the Breakthrough Energy Coalition – a group of some 20 billionaire business leaders from around the world, plus institutional investors, who committed to investing in new forms of energy. The coalition partnered with Mission Innovation, a group of 20 countries and the European Union that pledged to double their investment in clean energy research over five years. Gates explained that some of the members of the coalition are investing in energy on their own, and others have joined him in the new Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund.