Timmeko Moore Love joined US-based energy utility Entergy, which is committed to transforming the energy utility space, and co-founded its corporate venture capital (CVC) unit Entergy Strategic Ventures as managing director in February 2020. She is the first African American woman to lead a CVC fund for a Fortune 500 company.
Love’s areas of focus are digital transformation, energy, digital health, e-commerce, software, business development, entrepreneurship and strategic planning. Her role will involve managing strategic investments and transforming the emerging technologies and innovative insights from these engagements into actions across the parent company.
She has been tasked with developing Entergy’s CVC capabilities, gathering ideas for the corporate’s innovation pipeline, entering into business partnerships with startups and seeking out investment opportunities.
Through engaging with the startup ecosystem, Love will build Entergy Strategic Ventures’ vision, long-term tactics and year-on-year plans for the CVC team. She will additionally facilitate relationships between Entergy business units and entrepreneurs.
Her goal is to identify emerging electricity generation, distribution and consumer-oriented technologies that will disrupt the electric utility industry and enter into strategic alliances with these startups.
These areas may include distributed solar concepts, utility-scale solar (distribution voltage-connected), battery storage, micro-grids and electric vehicle infrastructure. Love will leverage these insights to steer the Entergy’s future direction.
Love had previously spent five and a half years with US-based health research and care provider Mayo Clinic where she had overseen business development (BD) and been seen internally as a rising star.
James Rogers, Mayo Clinic BD division chairman and Moore Love’s former manager, nominated her for the 2017 GCV Rising Stars award, saying at the time: “Timmeko Love would be great as a GCV Rising Star. She is relatively new to Mayo [having previously invested while at Best Buy Capital]. She has made a big impact in her time here on the Rochester campus.
“We recently moved her to Arizona and she is heading up our activities in the southwest. She leads our accelerator activities across the enterprise and our outside outreach. She is also responsible for our Benefactor Innovation Fund, which allows us to fund clinical trials in exchange for equity.”
During her time at Mayo Clinic, the BD division and its CVC arm, Mayo Clinic Ventures, had been active in corporate venturing deals, most recently investing in cybersecurity software developer Order, chronic disease medicine developer Novome Biotechnologies, digital diagnostics technology developer Progentec and medical data software developer Nference.
In 2019, the firm also invested in health product maker Elysium Health, gene therapy developer Hui-Gene Therapeutics, neuromodulation therapy developer Cadence Neuroscience and FundamentalVR, a developer of virtual and mixed reality technology for use in surgery.
Prior to joining Mayo Clinic, she had been a principal at Best Buy Capital, retailer Best Buy’s corporate venturing subsidiary. The unit had made investments in biometric sensor technology developer Valencell, bioplastic technology developer Solegear Bioplastics and in-home sleep tracking technology developer Zeo.
Love holds a bachelor of science in applied physics from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, bachelor of arts in physics from Dartmouth College, an MBA from Columbia University’s Columbia Business School and master of engineering in engineering physics from Cornell University.
