Paulo Dutra, venture investor at NextEra Energy Investments, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2026.
Paulo Dutra’s first exposure to nascent companies came when he was a special agent on a cyber investigations task force during his time in the US Air Force. Most of the companies he worked with to support his investigations were startups.
“I definitely caught the bug in terms of understanding what these younger companies were doing, how their products were going to enable me to work those cases,” he says.
He later found his way to national security investment through In-Q-Tel, where he spent several years as a senior technology architect, working on due diligence and post-investment go-to-market and technical execution for cybersecurity, infrastructure and analytics startups in In-Q-Tel’s portfolio.
“His partnership style has built favourable results that have delivered technology to his portfolio investments and to his cybersecurity technology consumers in a clear, candid and open model”
Since joining NextEra Energy Investments in late 2022, Dutra has focused on investments in technologies that protect the grid and critical energy infrastructure from cyberattacks.
“His partnership style has built favourable results that have delivered technology to his portfolio investments and to his cybersecurity technology consumers in a clear, candid and open model,” says Spencer Wilcox, executive director of cybersecurity at NextEra Energy.
A challenge with these types of investments, he says, is showing the buyers – which tend to be conservative companies such as utilities with large switching costs – that the bigger risk is not working with startups, because those security problems continue to fester if not met head on.
“ What is really important is being able to understand the business that your parent company is in and then thinking about what that business is going to look like five years in the future,” says Dutra.
“We spend time making sure we have invested in technologies, processes and in people that understand what we have, how it is being used and what needs to change for us to continue to have as many options as we can to safely move an electron from point A to point B.”
The Emerging Leaders are mid-career corporate venture professionals who are making an outstanding contribution to their teams and the industry.
See the full list of Emerging Leaders here.
