Jonathan Tudor, technology and strategy director at Centrica Innovations, the corporate venturing subsidiary of UK-listed energy utility Centrica, has become an investment partner at Clean Growth Fund (CGF).
Venture capital firm Clean Growth Investment Management launched the £40m ($45m) CGF in May this year under managing partner Beverley Gower-Jones.
CGF was founded with equal investment from the UK’s Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and institutional investor CCLA, one of the country’s largest charity fund managers. It is targeting a further £60m from private and corporate investors.
A GCV Powerlist 2019 award winner, Tudor had joined Centrica in September 2017 having left petroleum producer BP, where he was managing director of its BP Ventures unit, and accepted “an offer I could not refuse” to head a corporate venturing unit.
Tudor brought a decade of venture experience to Centrica where Sam Salisbury, the recipient of a GCV Rising Star award in 2017, and Christophe Defert, a recipient from 2017 to 2019, were directors and co-heads of Centrica Innovations (CI).
Salisbury departed Centrica in the past year to join electric life cycle services startup Kinectrics, leaving Defert as US-based vice-president for ventures at CI and Logan Ashcraft as investment professional.
Centrica launched CI in January 2017 to invest $125m in startups over the course of five years. The unit incorporated the £10m Ignite social impact fund it formed in 2014, which won GCV’s corporate impact venturing award in 2016.
Tudor, already the winner of a GCV Rising Stars award in 2016 and part of the 2018 Powerlist, had been venture director at lubricants provider and BP subsidiary Castrol’s corporate venturing arm, Castrol InnoVentures, before its reorganisation into BP Ventures in 2017.
Tudor had worked at Castrol and BP, where he found ample support as a “self-confessed geek, who likes technology with the allure of making money in addition to shifting the corporate dial,” since 2012.
Following three years at glass manufacturer Schott, Tudor’s initial move into investing was as an investment director at government technology contractor Qinetiq’s VC arm, Qinetiq Ventures, from 2002 to 2007, before its secondary buyout backed by Coller Capital led to the formation of CG Innovation Partners.