Phoebe Wang
Chief AI Officer, Nuvini
2022 C3E Business Award Winner
Phoebe Wang is a cleantech venture capitalist with a strong passion for fighting climate change for future generations. Currently, she serves as the Chief AI Officer at Nuvini, where she leads the company’s enterprise-wide AI strategy, investment, and implementation. Wang was previously an Investment Partner at the Amazon Climate Pledge Fund, where she also led the Female Founder Initiative, which pledges to invest $50 million in women-founded and women-led climate tech companies.
Previously, she was an Investment Director at Shell Ventures, where she led investments in early- and late-stage startups working on technologies to accelerate the energy transition, including in the areas of hydrogen, carbon management, energy storage, mobility, and power. She also chaired Shell Ventures’ early-stage investment committee and co-led its diversity and inclusion task force. In addition to her investment experience, she was an entrepreneur who built a start-up in technology commercialization and—earlier in her career—as an engineer in the chemical and semiconductor industries. During her 13-year tenure as a venture capital investor, Wang has invested more than $150 million in frontier technology startups: 14Trees, Azolla Ventures, Beyond Limits, Genecis Bioindustries, Glacier, Paebbl, Palantir Technologies, Zubie, and many others.
In addition to her role at Nuvini, Wang is a guest lecturer at Minerva University and at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a Mentor for two artificial intelligence (AI) cohorts: Endeavor and Creative Destruction Lab. Furthermore, she is an Advisor to the AI Fund, the Artificial Intelligence Institute for Progress (AIIP), AI Consensus, and the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), with a focus on the lab’s participation in the American-Made program. She is also an NLR Investor Advisory Board Member and serves on the investment advisory committees of Azolla Ventures, Prime Coalition, Rice Innovation, Second Muse, and the UCeed Haskayne Student Fund. Wang also serves on the boards of 14Trees, Counterpart Ventures, Carbon Cure Technologies, Global Corporate Venturing, Light Within, Paebbl, and the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, and she was a Founding Corporate Partner of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) Third Derivative.
Wang holds an MBA, with concentrations in finance and energy, from Rice University and a BS in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. She is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA).
+ Learn More About Phoebe Wang's Clean Energy Journey (Published October 2022)
Phoebe is an investment partner at the Amazon Climate Pledge Fund. Phoebe didn’t start out as a business-focused champion of clean tech. After earning a bachelor’s degree in materials engineering, she realized she had an interest in expanding her skills and earned an MBA from Rice University. Today, she utilizes both her scientific knowledge and business expertise to help people make their ‘dreams come true.’
Education and experience helped her build credibility in situations when she was often the only woman at the table, but Phoebe considers building strong relationships the key to her success. Today, she serves on the board of numerous organizations that value her insight and guidance. Over the past 10 years, she has invested more than $150 million in clean energy in more than 20 startups, creating hundreds of clean energy jobs and making an impact in the fight against climate change.
Completing the investment is only the start of the journey. Getting from zero to one requires commitment, patience, and time. Phoebe works closely with founders to achieve success by following three simple rules. First, she focuses on relationships with the team to build trust and communication to drive the team to set firm goals and vision. Second, she helps them to identify challenges and blind spots, and makes recommendations for training and tools that will help overcome them. Lastly, she helps them to set milestones that will help keep up team morale and instill tenacity during the early years, when success seems far to reach.
Phoebe’s work doesn’t stop at the conference room. Every day, she strives to mentor young women, grow teams, and encourage people to add new skills and training to their resumes. Phoebe’s advice to students: “If you are working toward a scientific degree, consider minoring in a business program to balance your skills.” Building a diverse set of skills can help any founder to grow a company, and Phoebe has more than a decade of success to support her advice.