Breakthrough Energy Ventures is a new fund created by 20 of the world’s richest entrepreneurs and aims at fighting climate change.
Bill Gates and 19 other investors and technology leaders pledged to put more than one billion dollars (£793 million) into the new fund which will be invested in clean energy innovations.
According to WIRED, these innovations are set to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least half a gigaton” and will need to have “existing scientific proof of concept”.
The fund was launched two days ago by Bill Gates and investments will be coming in by 2017. Other investors notably include Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Richard Branson, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
Gates, according to Quartz, said the group is “open-minded” about potential investments. “People think you can just put $50 million in and wait two years and then you know what you got. In this energy space, that’s not true at all,” he told the publication.
“Our goal is to build companies that will help deliver the next generation of reliable, affordable, and emissions-free energy to the world,” Gates added in another statement.
The 20 investors behind the fund are overall estimated at a colossal $170bn.
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