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Sam Smith-Eppsteiner
Partner at Innovation Endeavors
Sam Smith-Eppsteiner is an accomplished investor and board member currently involved with ElectronX, an electricity derivatives exchange aimed at facilitating the transition to renewable energy sources. She is also a partner at Innovation Endeavors, a venture capital firm that invests in transformative technologies and emerging industries.
Professional Background
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Current Roles:
- Investor, Board Member at ElectronX: Smith-Eppsteiner is part of the leadership team at ElectronX, which recently secured $15 million in seed funding to develop a modern power market for clean energy.35
- Partner at Innovation Endeavors: Since returning to Innovation Endeavors after completing her MBA at Stanford, she has focused on investments in sectors like climate technology, industrial biology, and agtech.24
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Previous Experience:
- Smith-Eppsteiner has held various roles including management consultant at Bain & Company, where she worked on strategy and mergers and acquisitions across multiple industries. She also has experience in product management at tech startups and has worked in a social enterprise in Rwanda, which significantly influenced her career path towards impact investing.246
Education
Sam Smith-Eppsteiner holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA in Political Science from Stanford University, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa.12
Interests and Focus Areas
Her investment interests include leveraging emerging technologies to address climate change, enhance industrial processes, and improve agricultural practices. She is particularly focused on how technology can drive sustainability and efficiency in various sectors.24
In summary, Sam Smith-Eppsteiner is a prominent figure in the venture capital landscape, dedicated to fostering innovations that contribute to environmental sustainability and technological advancement.
Highlights
Building for the real world -- whatever you want to call it, building in atoms not bits, hardware not software -- is both distinctly challenging and uniquely important. Software is great (we love it, and will leverage it!), but we will need to see significant advances in hardware engineering in order be both an energy abundant and space faring society. 🚀⚡⚙️
That's why Thilo M. Braun and I are looking toward the future of building hardware, particularly in light of what AI can offer here. Read more about what we're excited to see in the next generation of tools for making engineering more efficient and effective across: 1/ Generative design 2/ Simulation 3/ Verification & validation 4/ Design for X (e.g., manufacturing, cost optimization) 5/ Collaboration & design orchestration
If you're building in the space, please reach out. We're eager to chat!
#hardware #engineeringtools #AI
While we're cheering for the rollout of renewable energy (!!), it does create more complexity on the grid. Increased renewables penetration on the grid + extreme energy demand events associated with climate change = energy market volatility.
Against that landscape, we are thrilled to announce our investment in ElectronX, a next-generation exchange for trading electricity futures. By enabling both more granularity in trading electricity (smaller time & volume blocks) and direct market access, ElectronX aims to help energy developers and operators better manage risk. We anticipate that better risk management should drive better return profiles, more capital flowing into the renewable assets, and a cleaner grid. Magic! ⚡🔋✨
We're proud to partner with Sam Tegel, CFA, Evan Caron, Philip Krim, Tong Galaxy, and many more in building this much needed infrastructure and catalyst for the clean energy transition -- we couldn't imagine a better team. And excited to invest alongside Adam Rothenberg at BoxGroup, Ali Tamaseb at DCVC, and Sheel Tyle at Amplo.
Read more about the market need, company, and what got us excited in our blog post! Josh Rapperport
#energy #climatechange #climatetech #electrification
