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Mesa Minerals Partners II Announces Partnership with NGP

HOUSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Mesa Minerals Partners II, LLC (“Mesa II”) is pleased to announce it has raised $150 million of aggregate equity commitments from NGP through NGP Natural Resources XII, L.P. and NGP Royalty Partners, L.P.

Mesa II is a mineral and royalty acquisition company led by Darin Zanovich (President & CEO), Greg Balash (COO & EVP Engineering), Michelle Massaro (EVP Finance) and Josh Wiener (EVP Land).

Darin Zanovich, President & CEO of Mesa II, commented, “We are excited to partner with NGP to build a premier mineral and royalty platform focused on acquisitions of larger cash flowing royalty assets. The Mesa II team believes our expertise and track record of acquiring large royalty packages and then complimenting the position with our strong micro transaction ground game allows us to build a portfolio of assets that deliver attractive returns to investors. The partnership with NGP provides an ideal framework to invest in both mature and undeveloped assets alongside a leading private equity sponsor with extensive experience underwriting mineral investments.”

“NGP is excited and grateful to partner with Mesa II”, said Patrick McWilliamsPartner at NGP. “We are thrilled to work with Darin and team as they have a demonstrable track record of creating value for stakeholders by combining basin specific knowledge, rigorous underwriting, and active business development. We believe their entrepreneurial instincts and market vision position Mesa II for success.”

For more information about Mesa II, please visit www.mesamineralsllc.com

About NGP
Founded in 1988, NGP is a premier private equity firm with over $20 billion of cumulative equity commitments organized to make strategic investments in the energy and natural resources sectors.

For more information about NGP, please visit www.ngpenergycapital.com

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Orennia Closes Series A Funding

Investment will enable Orennia to rapidly grow its team, while continuing to support the most sophisticated renewable power investors in the world.

CALGARY, ABMay 18, 2021 /PRNewswire/ – Orennia, a technology company focused on the renewable power sector, today announced the closing of their Series A funding. Quantum Energy Partners, Global Reserve Group, NGP Energy Technology Partners III, and Stronghold Resource Partners were all significant investors. The financing will enable Orennia to scale rapidly as it provides highly innovative analytics in the renewable and zero-carbon power sector.

Orennia provides trusted commercial analytics to help inform investment and capital allocation decisions for investors taking advantage of this generational opportunity in renewable energy. Orennia’s unique approach to objective insights begins with the aggregating and cleansing of massive amounts of commercial, engineering, pricing, transmission facilities and demand data. Our insights, curated by highly experienced industry experts, help investors in the renewable power sector accelerate their time-to-value and make confident investment decisions.

“The energy transition represents the most prolific investment opportunity of our lifetime. Orennia’s high quality analytics and insights help teams uncover and execute investment decisions, build accurate valuation models, and develop new insights,” said Brook Papau, chief executive officer of Orennia. “We are thrilled with the support of our investors as well as our visionary early-adopter clients, both of which represent the most sophisticated investors in the space today.”

“With trillions of dollars of future investment around the world supporting sustainability and renewable energy, Orennia is well-positioned to support operators, developers, investors, lenders, and regulators,” said Jeffrey Harris, founder of Global Reserve Group. “Orennia’s strategy to provide consultative advice to its clients underpinned by comprehensive data and leading-edge analytics will make it a required resource for those participating in this space.”

“Orennia fills a critical market gap between thematic macro-level energy transition research and high-frequency power trading data to help capital allocators make better informed decisions,” said James Wallis, Partner at NGP Energy Capital Management.  “We are thrilled to partner with Orennia and look forward to collaborating with Brook and team to build the preeminent provider of clean data and advanced analytics to the renewable power industry and its capital providers.”

Joe Bob Perkins, former CEO and chairman of Targa Resources, now chairs Orennia’s board of directors. Prior to Targa, Joe Bob was a senior executive at Reliant Energy. Additionally, Orennia’s board consists of industry veterans with unparalleled expertise in private equity, energy data and technology, and independent power production.

Quantum Energy Partners, founded in 1998, is a leading provider of private equity capital to the global energy industry, having managed together with its affiliates more than $17 billion in equity commitments since inception. To learn more, visit www.quantumep.com.  

Global Reserve Group was established in 2012 by Jeffrey Harris following a 29-year career at Warburg Pincus.  As a senior partner at Warburg Pincus he had a long history of successful investing in technology and energy-oriented companies. Orennia represents the ninth venture investment supporting innovative technology and data analytics companies serving the energy and sustainability ecosystem that GRG has made in partnership with Quantum Energy Partners, including ChargePoint, workrise, and Dragos. To learn more, visit www.globalreservegroup.com.

NGP Energy Technology Partners III (“NGP ETP III”) invests in innovative technology companies with products, services or technologies serving the renewable energy, power, energy storage, energy efficiency, environmental, and transportation sectors.  NGP ETP III is affiliated with NGP Energy Capital Management (“NGP”). Founded in 1988, NGP is a premier investment franchise in the energy industry, with over $20 billion in cumulative equity commitments organized to make strategic investments in the energy and natural resources sectors. NGP’s 32-year history gives it unique insight into the drivers of value creation in all facets of the energy industry. For more information visit www.ngpenergycapital.com.

Orennia, Inc., provides trusted commercial analytics to help inform investment and capital allocation decisions for renewable and zero-carbon energy. Orennia’s insights, curated by highly experienced industry experts, help investors in the renewable power sector accelerate their time-to-value and make confident investment decisions. To learn more, visit www.orennia.com.

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Voltus Raises $31 Million to Unleash the Full Potential of Distributed Energy Resources

SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / May 13, 2021 / Voltus, Inc. today announces the closing of a $31 million Series C financing. The round was led by Activate Capital and included existing investors NGP Energy Technology Partners III, Prelude Ventures, and Ajax Strategies, bringing Voltus’s total equity financing to date to over $65 million.

Raj Atluru, Co-founder and Managing Director at Activate Capital joins Voltus’s Board of Directors alongside fellow investors Philip Deutch, Veery Maxwell, and Tim Woodward. “The serviceable addressable market for DERs is extraordinary, amounting to hundreds of thousands of megawatts of potential opportunity,” says Atluru. “Voltus has built a predictable, proven, and systematic growth model anchored by a superior technology platform and an extraordinary team of experts in energy markets. We’re thrilled to partner with Voltus as they help modernize and democratize our electric grid.”

Voltus’s cloud-based Distributed Energy Resources (DER) platform, VoltApp, helps to unlock the full potential of DERs. “VoltApp is designed to identify every dollar our customers and partners can earn from every type of DER available in every market in North America and then connects the machines to the meters to the markets to the money on a single financial transaction platform that is designed to maximize their earnings,” says Gregg Dixon, Voltus CEO. With nearly 1,700 megawatts of DERs under management, Voltus’s portfolio today supports energy efficiency, distributed generation, demand response, energy storage, and electric vehicle charging.

“We intend to use this round of funding to help monetize additional megawatts of DERs in wholesale markets through product partnerships in sectors with long-term electrification potential, including electric vehicles, microgrids, smart thermostats, and solar plus storage,” explains Dixon. “We believe Voltus is helping to accelerate one of the biggest industry paradigm shifts in history, as the estimated $3.2 trillion of global electricity spend moves toward distributed and intelligent energy. We believe DERs are poised to deliver superior economic, reliability, and sustainability benefits, transforming the grid, and our lives, for the better.”

About Voltus, Inc.
Voltus aims to be the distributed energy platform that fulfills the promise of the energy transition. Voltus represents the “potential of us” to better manage energy through simple, cost and risk-free programs for distributed energy resources. Our customers and partners generate cash by allowing us to maximize the value of these assets in wholesale energy markets. To learn more, visit www.voltus.co.

About Activate Capital
Activate Capital is a leading growth equity partner to companies building smart, sustainable systems across the energy, transportation, and industrial technology markets. The firm aims to generate best-in-class financial returns while contributing to this vision of the future by investing in entrepreneurial management teams in high growth companies using technology to make the world more efficient, intelligent, and sustainable. The partners have collectively invested over $1 billion across their target sectors, resulting in 30 successful exits through IPO and M&A.

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Bird Plans IPO That Values Company at $2.3 Billion

Bird Rides Inc., the Santa Monica-based electric scooter company that tabled aggressive expansion plans during the pandemic, said May 12 it will become a publicly traded company through a merger with a Dallas-based blank check company run by oil and gas executives looking for a clean energy combination.

The combination would value the scooter company at $2.3 billion with Bird listing on the New York Stock Exchange. The company will be renamed Bird Global once the deal closes in the third quarter, according to information provided by Bird.

The acquisition represents the second clean energy-related move in four months by the Texas executives. In January, they acquired ChargePoint, the nation’s largest network of electric vehicle charging stations, a business combination that valued ChargePoint at $3 billion, including $683 million in cash.

In his Bird Cities blog, Bird Rides founder and Chief Executive Travis VanderZanden disclosed that his scooter company will go public through a merger with Switchback II, a SPAC formed by NGP Energy Capital Management and RSP Permian executives that targets the clean energy sector.

“This is the next significant step on our journey to provide the world with safe, eco-friendly transportation,” VanderZanden said.

In January, the Switchback II blank check company, also known as a SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company, raised $275 million and targeted a company “excelling in decarbonization innovation to achieve a worldwide objective of net-zero emissions.”

The combined entity would have access to $428 million in cash from private investors, and another $160 million from Fidelity Management & Research Co. and others.

Bird also would have access to $40 million in financing from specialty finance companies Apollo Investment Corp. in New York and MidCap Financial Trust in Maryland.

Switchback II is led by co-CEOs and directors Scott McNeill and Jim Mutrie.

McNeill previously served as the chief financial officer of RSP Permian Inc. when the energy firm merged with Concho Resource Inc. in a $9.5 billion deal in 2018.

Mutrie most recently served as vice president and general counsel of RSP. The company plans to focus on the energy technology arena, specifically targeting industries that meet critical emission reduction objectives.