Raj Atluru has stepped down as the managing director of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, where he has led cleantech investments since 2001 and its India investment operations since 2005, reports Fortune.
Alturu is moving on to Silver Lake Kraftwerk, the energy-focused growth equity platform formed earlier this year by Silver Lake Partners and Soros Fund Management, the magazine adds. Atluru becomes the second Kraftwerk partner, alongside ex-Foundation Capital investor Adam Grosser.
Atluru has been leading DFJ’s cleantech investments since 2001, and he sits on the boards of start-ups like CoalTek, Great Point Energy, Konarka and Scientific Conservation.
Although DFJ has a defined practice on cleantech investing, it appears that there was a huge mismatch in its investment philosophy and that of the firm. Fortune reports that Atluru wanted to go one way in cleantech and fund companies looking to bridge the commercialisation gap while DFJ wanted to focus its cleantech investments more on where cleantech meets IT.
Silver Lake Kraftwerk is likely to focus more on scaling some of the already proven cleantech innovations than adopting the DFJ style of ‘cleantech-lite’ deals or early-stage software/IT companies that happen to have a cleantech component or sell into the energy vertical.
