Piva Capital Expands Team to Back Visionary Entrepreneurs and Transformative Industrial Companies Redefining Trillion Dollar Markets

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 14, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --  Piva Capital, a VC firm on a mission to back visionary founders and emerging technology companies transforming industry, today announced that Mark Gudiksen has joined 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 manufacturing solution Velo3D; biofertilizer startup Anuvia and Menlo Micro, known for reinventing the electronic switch.

Managing Partner Brings Over a Decade of Experience Investing in Transformational Innovation 
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,'" said 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% of greenhouse gas global emissions."

Said Gudiksen, "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 realize 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 Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from Harvard University with expertise in nanotechnology and his B.S. 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.

Roxanne Tully Joins as Investor
Piva also announced that Roxanne Tully will join the firm as an investor. Before joining Piva, Roxanne 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 M.B.A. from Harvard and a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Tufts University.

About Piva Capital
Piva Capital is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm investing in visionary entrepreneurs who are solving the world's critical industrial challenges with breakthrough technologies and innovative business models.  For more information, please visit us at Piva.vc, on LinkedIn and Medium.

SOURCE Piva Capital