Bio

Rick Needham is a Partner with The Rise Fund and the fund's Sector Lead for Energy. Prior to joining The Rise Fund, Rick was the Director of Energy and Sustainability for Google, where he led teams that invested in transformative, large-scale renewable energy projects, explored ways to help accelerate energy access in emerging markets, and catalyzed actions to address climate change. Rick spearheaded Google's renewables project investing, which channeled more than $2.5 billion into renewable energy projects around the world. Prior to joining Google in 2008, Rick was a business development executive and project manager at DEKA Research & Development Corp, where he led clean energy business development efforts and managed several technology development projects in clean energy, medical products, and robotics. Rick also worked as a consultant at Bain & Company and served for eight years as a nuclear submarine officer in the U.S. Navy. Rick was on the Board of the Atlantic Wind Connection (AWC), a project company developing an offshore wind energy transmission backbone off the Mid-Atlantic coast. He was also a member of the Energy Systems Integration Technical Review Panel for NREL and a member of the Sustainability Expert Advisory Panel for P&G. Rick holds a BS in Aerospace Engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy, an MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT, where he attended as a Draper Fellow, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.