A handful of billionaires have shaped and guided the cleantech industry’s development: Elon Musk through his chaotic but visionary leadership; Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos with their moonshot investments.
Now there’s a new billionaire in town.
In just a few months, surgeon and medical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong announced his acquisitions of two energy storage companies: Fluidic, the exotic zinc-air battery company with 3,000 systems deployed in remote areas, and Sharp’s commercial storage development unit, dubbed SmartStorage. They are now reconstituted as NantEnergy.
An investor with billions of dollars at hand could look elsewhere for surefire profits. The storage industry remains small, and the long-duration sector has been marked by many failures and few outright successes.
“What I saw, frankly, was the impact this would make,” Soon-Shiong told GTM earlier this month. “It wasn’t a true business analysis, [like] ‘What’s the return?’ If it was successful, the return organically would be fantastic. If it weren’t successful, it’s binary, as most of these companies have shown.”
Now he will set about making his mark on the cleantech industry, which has long grappled with the “valley of death” that cleaves promising hardware from fully capitalized commercial deployment. Great personal wealth may succeed where venture capital largely has not.
Science-based business
Soon-Shiong intends to participate in NantEnergy beyond mere financial backing.
“I don’t see myself as a financier; I see myself as a partner in the scientific challenge to make a difference,” he explained.
In particular, Soon-Shiong wants to contribute to Fluidic’s battery technology based on his long and fruitful relationship with zinc. That’s not something one typically hears from investors on Wall Street or Sand Hill Road.
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