Parker Malone, investment manager at Equinor Ventures, is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2025.
Parker Malone is a long-time Equinor employee, having started his career more than a decade ago at the Norwegian energy company, then known as Statoil. He started his career in the upstream oil and gas industry, working as a ‘landman’ – a commercial agent responsible for negotiating contracts and securing the rights to develop energy resources.
But Malone’s interests soon expanded beyond the operational side. Working on a corporate strategy project at Equinor opened his eyes to the bigger picture of the energy system and the forces shaping its future. “It really lifted my head and gave me the opportunity to think about these macro forces,” he says.
This led him to join Equinor’s corporate strategy team, where he played a key role developing the company’s energy storage strategy. “I wanted to jump into the renewable space and support global renewables projects,” he says. Projects in Brazil, South Korea, Japan, the UK and the US East Coast gave him a broad perspective.
“I felt like venturing was really the place to be, not only to catalyse innovation, but to provide the resources and corporate exposure to manifest and scale the most promising solutions.”
He then moved to Equinor Ventures, the company’s corporate VC arm. “I felt like venturing was really the place to be, not only to catalyse innovation, but to provide the resources and corporate exposure to manifest and scale the most promising solutions,” he says.
The ventures team has a staff of 25, spread across the US and Europe. Boston-based Malone focuses on what Equinor calls “electron-related technologies” – from generation to transmission, distribution and storage of electricity. Malone is personally excited by new technologies for enhancing power grids.
“When we look at bottlenecks in the [energy] transition, grids are at the forefront of challenges. We see that in our own projects deploying renewables. But there are a lot of hardware and software solutions that are trying to address those constraints.”
Equinor Ventures has also invested in longer technology bets such as nuclear fusion, backing MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
See the full list of Rising Stars 2025 here.
