Virgin Green Fund, a clean-tech corporate venturing firm backed by entrepreneur Richard Branson’s conglomerate Virgin Group, has set up a growth equity and private equity fund in partnership with Russia state-backed investment manager Rusnano Capital.
The VGF Emerging Market Growth I fund has more than $200m commited and will target mid-sized companies in resource efficiency, consumer sustainability and renewable energy sectors in Russia, Turkey and central and eastern Europe (CEE).
The fund will be managed by Shai Weiss and Evan Lovell, co-founding partners of the $200m Virgin Green Fund, half funded by Virgin in 2007. Lovell had previously worked for buyout firm TPG Capital, while Weiss had previously been managing director at cable company NTL:Telewest, which bought Virgin Mobile, part of Sir Richard’s Virgin Group, and rebranded the merged group Virgin Media.
For the VGF Emerging Market Growth fund, they have been joined by Brooks Preston, former executive at advisory firm Wolfensohn & Company (set up by James Wolfensohn, ex-head of the World Bank,) and Tamas Szalai, who previously worked at Bancroft Private Equity.
Andrew Reicher, the former head of CEE private equity for Switzerland-based bank Credit Suisse and chief investment officer at Actis, a private equity firm for emerging markets spun off from the UK government, is the non-executive chairman of the VGF Emerging Market Growth fund’s investment committee.
Sir Richard said: “We are excited to be launching our second fund focussing on the resource efficiency, consumer sustainability and renewable energy sectors.”
Anatoly Chubais, executive chairman at Rusnano, which manages $10bn to support nanotechnology industries in Russia, added: “Developing solutions will be impossible without the use of nanotechnology. The fund will find great opportunities to invest in growth companies in Russia and take them into global markets.”