Johann Boukhors

Johann Boukhors is a long-tenured ENGIE executive who has led the company's corporate venture capital arm, ENGIE New Ventures, since 2018. He joined the business (the predecessor companies that became ENGIE) in 1998 and spent roughly two decades in operational and commercial leadership roles before moving into venture investing. His earlier ENGIE career spanned multiple geographies and functions, including senior business-development oversight in France, director of new business development and of marketing, sales and energy supply in Mexico, and director of the company's Belgian branch — giving him a hands-on view of the Group's energy operations across Europe and Latin America.

He holds a generalist master's degree in engineering from Arts et Métiers ParisTech and an Executive MBA from ESCP Business School (2009–2010). This combination of engineering depth and operating experience underpins his approach to investing: ENGIE New Ventures backs startups whose technology can be tested and scaled inside ENGIE's own operations, and Boukhors typically takes board seats at portfolio companies to steer collaboration with Group entities.

ENGIE New Ventures was created by the Group in 2014 and has grown into a fund of roughly €180–250m, deploying capital into more than 50 startups over its first decade as a minority shareholder. The team is small (around a dozen people of multiple nationalities, with members in France, the U.S., Israel, Singapore and Chile) and disciplined: it meets quarterly with ENGIE's business units to gather innovation priorities, screens 200–300 cleantech startups a year from international events, and ultimately makes only about three to five new investments annually. Boukhors was recognized on the Global Corporate Venturing (GCV) Powerlist 2022 (#29) for his leadership of the unit.

• Invests in early-stage cleantech / energy-transition startups globally, taking minority stakes with the explicit goal of building competitive advantage and contributing to ENGIE's profitability through pilots and eventual industrialization.
• Frames the strategy around the "3 Ds": decarbonize, decentralize, and digitize the world of energy — Boukhors: *"We had a triple ambition: decarbonize, decentralize, and digitize our activities."*
• Check size of roughly €1–5M per deal; about €30m/year deployed across new and follow-on rounds; ~3–5 new investments per year out of 200–300 startups reviewed.
• Strategic, not purely financial: an investment generally requires a credible path to collaboration with an ENGIE business unit; the fund typically takes a board seat to influence development and surface partnership opportunities.
• Conviction on hydrogen and biomethane as central pillars of the energy transition (per his Global Venturing interview), alongside renewables, storage, carbon removal, and decarbonized heating/cooling.
• Geographically opportunistic across Europe, North America, Israel and Asia, supported by local presence in Paris, San Francisco, Tel Aviv and Singapore.