Daniel Goldman

Dan Goldman is a co-founder and Managing Partner of Clean Energy Ventures (CEV), a Boston-based venture firm he co-founded in November 2017 to back early-stage companies commercializing breakthrough advanced-energy technologies that address climate change. He brings more than 25 years of energy-industry experience spanning strategy, corporate and project finance, project development, private-equity/asset investment and early-stage venture, and has been involved in more than $4 billion of energy infrastructure and venture transactions over his career.

Before CEV, Goldman was an operator as well as an investor. From roughly 2006 to 2016 he served as President and CFO of GreatPoint Energy, a clean-energy gasification company where he helped raise over $280 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Citi, Dow Chemical and China's Wanxiang. Earlier, he co-founded and was CFO of New Energy Capital, one of the first firms focused exclusively on clean-energy asset investment (backed by CalSTRS and VantagePoint Capital Partners), where a 2004–05 project portfolio was largely sold in 2006 at roughly a 2.1x net multiple and ~30% IRR.

Goldman's angel-investing roots run through Clean Energy Venture Group (CEVG), which he co-founded in 2005 and which became one of the most active early-stage advanced-energy investors in the U.S., making 30-plus portfolio investments between 2007 and 2018. Clean Energy Ventures grew out of that angel practice into an institutional fund platform.

He holds a B.S. from Cornell University and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. He is a past chair of the board of Cornell's Atkinson Center for Sustainability, has chaired the board of the Northeast Clean Energy Council, and is a co-founder and board member of Browning the Green Space, a nonprofit working to bring more diversity into the clean-energy and climate-tech ecosystem. He also holds or has held board and observer roles at portfolio companies including REsurety, SparkMeter, LineVision and ConnectDER.

• Invests at seed and Series A in capital-efficient, early-stage climate/advanced-energy startups, typically writing checks in the ~$1M–$10M range.
• Applies a hard impact screen: every investment must credibly demonstrate the potential to mitigate ≥2.5 gigatons of CO₂ by 2050, evaluated with CEV's own Simple Emissions Reduction Calculator.
• Backs deep-tech / hardware with a science-heavy diligence bar — more than 60% of the investment team holds advanced science or engineering degrees, and the firm offers technical, patent, talent and go-to-market support.
• Sees industrial decarbonization as the highest-impact frontier. In Goldman's words: *"when you think about where do we need to have material impact, and where are sectors that technology really hasn't changed for many, many decades, steel and cement rank at the top of the list."*
• Focuses on breakthrough technologies that decarbonize incumbent industries rather than incremental efficiency plays; adjacent themes include grid/transmission, long-duration storage, green hydrogen, critical-minerals refining and carbon capture/utilization.
• Takes a disciplined, contrarian view of the market — Goldman has publicly warned that the recent influx of climate capital is "unlikely to be sustainable" and expects a shakeout, favoring durable, capital-efficient companies over hype-driven raises.