Saudi Aramco ventures, the venture capital arm of the state-owned Saudi oil giant, has increased its investments in early stage and high growth companies in energy, petrochemicals, and renewables recently with two investments into U.S. companies, according to Forbes.
The Dhahran, Saudi Arabia-based VC can is looking to invest $1 million and $30 million per transaction into growing companies with leading technologies in key sectors.
In its most recent investment, Saudi Aramco ventures led a $26 million Series B round in Maana, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup. According to the company’s Crunchbase profile, Maana makes it easy for enterprises to turn data from multiple silos into continuous insights in days.
Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures invests in high-growth companies of interest to its parent company.
Enterprises such as GE, Chevron and many more Fortune 500 are optimizing key assets and business processes with Maana by operationalizing big data insights and recommendations into line-of-business applications for thousands of employees to make better decisions.
In April, Saudi Aramco invested $10 million in Series C funding in NanoMech, which manufactures application-specific nanoparticle additives, nanoparticle-based coatings and coating deposition systems.
The Fayetteville, Arkansas-based NanoMech was founded in 2002 and creates advanced engineering materials through “patent and patent-pending nano-inspired and nano-manufactured product development.”
Aramco’s investments in high-growth, new technologies in related fields aims to expand the massive company’s holdings in fields related to upstream and downstream energy production. These investments are made with the “strategic importance to its parent, Aramco” in mind.
As Forbes reports, Saudi Aramco’s venture capital arm was examined in a case study at Harvard Business School in April.
“Saudi Aramco and Corporate Venture Capital” was the title of the case study spotlighted with about 90 students in attendance. HBS faculty invited key Saudi Aramco representatives to visit the class that analyzed the case study. “The case examined the situational analysis that led to Saudi Aramco’s decision to create a corporate venture capital (CVC) fund to invest globally in early-stage and high-growth technology companies,” according to the Harvard Business School website.
