From Engineering and Climate Tech to Climate Venture: My Mosaic Fellowship at Clean Energy Ventures
Growing up on the tiny island of Malta showed me firsthand the impact climate change can have on coastal communities. It was this experience that then ignited my mission to decarbonize hard-to-abate industries. The Mosaic Fellowship helped me find Clean Energy Ventures (CEV) – a firm that invests in climate spinouts with both a financial and environmental mechanism to their thesis; it felt like fate. As part of my Mosaic Fellowship experience working at Clean Energy Ventures, I had the chance to sit on the investor side of the table for the first time — a shift from years of building and scaling projects as an engineer and strategist. The skills needed for venture capital required me to zoom out, to notice patterns across dozens of pitches, and to hold both possibility and probability in the same frame.
From day one, I was treated as an expert in my own right. I was encouraged to lean on my industrial experience as a process engineer, Industry 4.0 consultant, and climatetech founder to shape investment theses — from domestic graphite to the techno-economics of green hydrogen. The summer had me rotating through every aspect of the deal cycle: sourcing, due diligence, investment decision-making, portfolio support, and even supporting an LP strategy for CEV’s new growth equity vehicle.
A key stand-out was supporting DG Matrix, a portfolio company designing the world’s first multi-port SSTs, critical to large-scale electrification. I worked with their CFO to design a new pro-forma model as well as facilitating a bridge financing investment meeting. Another highlight was visiting Transaera’s new pilot facility after a fundraising milestone. I even joined their celebratory tradition of ‘whacking a hammer into a metal board with a 4% figure emblazoned on it’ — a tribute to how each milestone behind their next-gen HVAC system is cutting back on the 4% of global emissions from air conditioning.
What stood out most over the internship was CEV’s culture. The “magic sauce” is who they bring together: financially brilliant, engineering-savvy, but above all curious and kind. Whether it was being given a voice in weekly meetings, joining Mosaic’s “Friday Fellows” sessions that fostered community, or learning directly from mentors like their Investment Director Lou in his weekly “Lou Lessons,” the Fellowship felt like a true apprenticeship. It was an investment in us as much as we were investing our time in the firm.
I leave CEV and the Mosaic Fellowship with both gratitude and clarity. Gratitude for the founders who shared their visions, the partners and managers who sharpened my thinking, the mentors who let me shadow their decision-making, and the Fellows who became friends. And clarity that venture is one piece of a much bigger climate finance puzzle. My Mosaic Fellowship experience at CEV validated that I have a role to play in building the financial bridges for the “missing middle” behind scaling up CAPEX-intensive climate hardware and sparked the interest in assembling diversified capital stacks to bridge this valley of death. I am deeply thankful to the Mosaic Fellowship and CEV team for investing in us as Fellows and for making this summer one of the most formative of my MBA journey.