Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2018: Amy Francetic

Amy Francetic, managing director of the Invenergy Future Fund, has the inside track on a new venture fund sponsored by Invenergy, the world’s largest independent renewable power developer, and with third-party corporate limited partners that include GE, Wisconsin Energy and a number of family offices, foundations and endowments.

Francetic, senior vice-president for new ventures and corporate affairs at Invenergy, was hired in February 2016 to create the fund, which has already made three investments in its first year, including SparkCognition, a US-based cognitive computing analytics company that raised $32.5m in its series B round last summer, and software provider Aquilon Energy Services, which raised $19m in its B round last February.

The fund, which has raised more than half of its total goal and is expected to have a final close in the first half of this year, invests in digital technologies trying to make clean energy more affordable, reliable and secure.

Francetic said this was much-needed in her sector. “In the energy industry, startup companies need to deploy their solutions most often through intermediaries like utilities, manufacturers, and system integrators.

That means that large players control the destiny of startups, so entrepreneurs must engage with these stakeholders early and carefully.

Additionally, traditional sources of venture capital fled the energy industry following the losses of cleantech 1.0. I wanted to work with investors who could be important customers for startups and who could help the energy industry transition to a cleaner future.”

And while she was “proud of how much we have accomplished in our first year of operations,” she said the challenges were in “flying the airplane while building – doing investments while fundraising,” and “trying to stay focused on our vision of a clean energy future while our federal leadership tries to resurrect the past”.

Fortunately, her experience has helped. After two years as a principal at MVC Capital, Francetic was CEO and co-founder of a technology accelerator, Clean Energy Trust, in Chicago. She said: “We made over 30 early stage seed investments in clean energy companies across the Midwest, including some really difficult to fund companies that were doing hard technology science innovation.

“Earlier in my career I co-founded and then ran a consumer electronics company, Zowie, that spun out of a lab that connected toys to the computer. We sold that company to Lego in 2000.”

And, having been a photographer right out of school [Stanford University] who travelled through West Africa documenting the role of women entrepreneurs in rural villages, Francetic has a clear way for the corporate venturing industry to do better: “Bring more women executives in the fund, into the board room, into the portfolio.”