October 27, 2021

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

It was only last week that Agtech Intel News shared that Lukas Walton, Walmart heir and key financial backer of S2G Ventures, launched Builders Vision– a new investment vehicle designed to be a platform for social change on a systemic level.

As part of the launch, S2G Ventures joined Builders Private Capital (BPC) – a system-driven, multi-stage, climate-focused investment organization implementing strategies that address climate change, including real assets and energy. Together Builders Private Capital and S2G Ventures are working in partnership to invest in and support solutions that form foundational answers to these universal challenges.

To achieve this objective, Builders Vision is building on the success of S2G Ventures seeding and scaling initiatives in four climate-adjacent impact areas: food, agriculture, oceans, and seafood. And S2G’s systems investing approach will be applied through BPC with serious consideration for how investments fit within the border value chain.

Expanding upon this mission, BPC has now announced the launch of a $300 million clean energy investment platform.

Critical to our future, the world has been engaged in a global energy transition, which since 2004, has attracted more than $4 trillion in capital to accelerate renewable energy as a meaningful foundation for future electricity generation. However, this integrated energy future is exceedingly complex, and to fully bring its role to the mainstream of the 21st century economy, there needs to be more innovative capital to power transportation, industry, and other sectors among new and nuanced market structures.

It’s a formidable challenge – but one full of exciting potential. To meet this challenge, BPC has announced the addition of Stephen Feilhauer and Francis (Frank) O’Sullivan as managing directors to oversee this new strategy, and Andrea Woodside has joined as vice president, real assets, in support of investments across all of BPC’s themes including energy, food, agriculture, and oceans.

With 15 years of experience as an investor and researcher in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, Feilhauer joins BPC from Macquarie Capital where he oversaw growth equity investments in industrial tech and cleantech in the U.S. and Europe. He was previously with Deutsche Bank’s principal investing, structured, credit and corporate M&A teams in New York and Singapore, after beginning his career at Goldman Sachs in London, with its newly formed thematic equity research team.

“Having been an investor in sustainable energy for more than a decade, I am thrilled to be joining a platform that values flexibility in capital formation and a long-term mindset,” said Stephan Feilhauer, managing director, Builders Private Capital. “Not only will we invest in core clean energy themes, but we will also focus on adjacencies in industrial and infrastructure sectors, which are often overlooked.”

With a career-long focus on energy markets analysis and design, with a concentration on overcoming the economic and technical challenges with large-scale renewables integration in the power system, and the decarbonization of industry and mobility, Frank O’Sullivan will be leading the direct investment strategy in clean energy for BPC, joining the organization from Ørsted where he was head of onshore strategy, managing the company’s early-stage and growth equity investment portfolio. 

“The next decade of energy transition is about achieving massive scale and overcoming the many complex, system-level challenges that accompany deep decarbonization,” said Frank O’Sullivan, managing director, Builders Private Capital. “Our focus is on investing to solve these difficult problems. Leading cross-sectoral expertise and the capacity to provide our partners with bespoke capital solutions, tailored to tomorrow’s market needs, sets Builders Private Capital apart, and I’m looking forward to being part of this great team.”

To mainstream the transition to cleaner energy systems across industries, BPC will take a flexible, multi-asset approach to provide solutions for the next stage of the energy transition as a whole, through means that aligns current technologies with evolving market structures and regulatory frameworks.

Underlying this investment thesis, BPC will leverage its existing value-added services which include corporate development, policy and regulatory support, marketing and communications, community building, talent development, and community building.

Real assets will also play a major role in the team’s investment strategy, acting as a force multiplier and a conduit by which to deploy technology at scale. To this, Andrea Woodside brings a decade of experience stemming from the impact investing industry where she concentrated on climate transition investments across private markets.

Commenting on the impressive additions to the BCP leadership team, Sanjeev Krishnan, CIO and managing director for BPC and S2G Ventures said, ”Stephan, Francis and Andrea’s backgrounds are a great complement to our current investment platform – a systems approach to specialized underwriting by industry paired with experience in helping to scale “tough tech” technologies that drive more climate smart outcomes for our food, oceans and now energy systems. I am thrilled to be working with them to help mainstream the Energy Transition and leverage what we are building across the broader Builders Vision impact platform.”

Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.