Giancarlo Savini left Shell Ventures, oil and gas supplier Shell’s corporate venturing arm, last week and joined Honeywell Ventures, the counterpart for industrial product and software producer Honeywell.
Savini told Global Corporate Venturing that he would be “working in a similar role” at Honeywell Ventures as he did at Shell Ventures, having joined the latter as manager of investment and partnerships in 2018 from the parent firm.
While at Shell Ventures, he focused on cleantech deals and helped the parent firm internally implement its portfolio companies’ technologies by facilitating commercial partnerships.
Savini was involved in Shell Ventures’ investments in energy management technology developer Autogrid, blockchain-powered energy storage solution developer LO3 Energy and Veros Systems, which provides an industrial asset monitoring system. He led the round for Veros on behalf of Shell Ventures and took a board seat in 2018.
He joined Shell in 2012 as senior innovation lead for capital equipment, a position he held for two years before serving as digitisation lead and contract manager for power generation technology until 2018.
Previously, Savini had been a business development, research and development, mergers and acquisitions adviser at industrial conglomerate General Electric.
Savini explained that while Honeywell Ventures had been in operation since 2017, the unit had not been active in the energy and cleantech sectors and his main task would entail helping conduct such deals.
Cleantech is strategically important to Honeywell, according to Savini, who added: “About a third of Honeywell’s revenues come from the energy space, primarily automation and software for the oil and gas industry.
“In addition, there are four main areas in cleantech that are of interest to Honeywell: plastic circularity, hydrogen, biofuels and energy storage.”
– Image courtesy of Giancarlo Savini
