Cory Steffek has left Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures (SAEV), the corporate venturing arm of petroleum producer Saudi Aramco where he was a managing director, to join private equity investment platform Ara Partners.
US-based Ara Partners, which hired Steffek as managing director, focuses on lower middle market investments in the energy, industrial and infrastructure industries.
Steffek joined SAEV in 2012 and his role with the Saudi Arabia-headquartered unit had, like Ara Partners, been based in Houston, Texas.
SAEV generally concentrates on technologies that improve the identification and management of energy reserves and the efficiency of their use, but its North American branch has increasingly moved into more generalised enterprise software developers, such as Parsable, Maana and Foghorn.
Johanna Schmidtke, a Houston-based investment director at SAEV since 2013, has initially taken over Steffek’s responsibilities at the unit. Neither Steffek nor Schmidtke was available for comment at this time.
Prior to joining Aramco, Steffek had been director of global development and corporate strategy for solar module manufacturer First Solar, having moved there from a principal role at venture capital firm Altira Group in 2011.
– Photo of Cory Steffek courtesy of LinkedIn.
