About us

Managing Partner - Nicholas Parker
Nicholas Parker is Chairman and Managing Partner of the Cleantech Group, which he co-founded. He introduced the cleantech concept to the investment and business community in 2002. Previously Nicholas accumulated over 15 years experience starting and investing venture funds worldwide through limited partnerships, family offices, corporate funds and endowments. During this time, he pioneered the first "sustainability" driven private equity funds and participated in one of the first solar IPOs. In the 1990s, he also founded, built and sold an environmental finance firm. He has served as an advisor to multilateral agencies and major corporations.

Nicholas earned a BA Hons. in Technology Studies (Carleton University, Ottawa) and an MBA (City University, London), and has authored or edited more than ten publications related to cleantech, finance and international business, starting with Investing in Emerging Economies in 1993. He serves as Chairman of E+Co, a public purpose investment company for clean energy enterprises in developing countries, and is on several boards, including: Government of Singapore Cleantech Advisory Board, Canadian Centre of Excellence for Commercialization of Research and the X PRIZE Energy & Environment Council. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Nicholas has lived and worked in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America and currently resides with his two children in Toronto.

Managing Partner - Sheeraz Haji

Sheeraz Haji is based in Cleantech Group's San Francisco office. Previously, Sheeraz spent eight years co-founding and leading GetActive (merged with Convio), a venture-backed software-as-a-service company providing CRM tools to nonprofits, associations and educational institutions. As CEO, and later as President of the merged entity, Sheeraz built a company with 1,200 clients and 300 employees. He has also worked as a strategy consultant for McKinsey & Company, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) for El Dorado Ventures, an operations executive for GMO and a Product Manager for Digital Impact (acquired by Axciom). Sheeraz launched his career as an environmental engineer in the Washington, DC office of Environ International. He has a BS from Brown University and an MS from Stanford University, both degrees in Environmental Engineering. Sheeraz is a U.S. and French citizen.

Rafael Coven is managing director of the Cleantech Group's Cleantech indices. He has a combination of extensive cleantech industry and institutional investor experience, and has spent most of the last 21 years in cleantech as a manager, entrepreneur, equity investor and management consultant.

Rafael has global experience working with or consulting to such leading cleantech firms as Abengoa, Dynatech, Philips Lighting, Siemens, and numerous private equity and venture capital investors in the sector. During the 1990s, Rafael was an international equity analyst at Dietche & Field Advisors where he evaluated, made, and managed a US $700 million segment of the firm's $5.6 billion equity holdings (including many cleantech companies). He has also founded three cleantech companies and still actively reviews numerous cleantech businesses. He has lived and worked in several countries and speaks Italian and Spanish.

He holds a B.A in Developmental Economics from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School. Based in Baltimore, Maryland, Rafael is a CFA level II candidate and a member of the US Green Building Council.