Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos create multi-billion cleantech fund

Bill Gates will lead a new investment fund called Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Alibaba CEO Jack Ma are also investing in the fund, which focuses on stimulating cleantech.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures pledges to invest at least $1 billion in cleantech companies over the next twenty years. This concerns venture capital for both new and more established technology companies, in the fields of electricity, manufacturing, construction, transport and agriculture.

By the middle of this century, the world will be using twice as much energy as it is today and new tools will be needed for this, the fund says. Breakthrough Energy has set itself the goal of investing in new technologies to find better, more efficient and cheaper energy sources.

The challenge, according to BEV, is to take the ideas of research institutes out of the laboratory and use them commercially. The investment fund is an outgrowth of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition. Founded last year by Bill Gates, this partnership, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and HP’s Meg Whitman, are supporting this initiative to help the world achieve carbon-neutral sources of energy.