Diana Propper de Callejon

Bio

Diana has more than twenty years of experience investing in and building sustainability focused businesses. Her work has spanned diverse sectors including energy, forestry water, agriculture and advanced materials. Diana brings to Expansion Capital Partners her recognized Cleantech domain knowledge and her global network of entrepreneurs, investors and large corporations that are active in Clean Technology. Diana is involved in all aspect of Expansion Capital's investment activities and she serves as a Board member of DIRTT Environmental Solutions and Tiger Optics, and formerly was a Board member of CPower (sold to Constellation Energy Group), Orion Energy (AMEX) and SensorTran (sold to Halliburton). Prior to Expansion Capital, Diana was a founder and Managing Director of EA Capital, a firm she co-ran for more than ten years. Diana worked with Fortune 500 companies, financial institutions, and private equity firms to identify new business and investment opportunities related to resource efficiency and sustainability. Her financial advisory, fund formation, and consulting work included work across industries and clients included Texas Pacific Group, Bechtel, Duke Energy, Ted Turner, Stephan Schmidheiny, International Finance Corporation, National Renewable Energy Lab, and the MacArthur Foundation. Diana has been a frequent conference speaker and has written on Cleantech and sustainability investment opportunities for such publications as Morgan Stanley's Investor Outlook, the Sustainable Business Investor, and the Lifestyles of Health & Sustainability Journal. She is also was an editor of the landmark report: 'Cleantech Venture Investing: Patterns & Performance', which evaluated more than 700 private equity investments and the financial returns in Clean Technology over the last fifteen years. Diana's speaking engagements have included the Milken Institute, Wall Street Green Trading Summit, the Family Office Forum, Cleantech Venture Network, and SRI in the Rockies. She has also been a speaker at the Philanthropy Workshop for the Hewlett and the Rockefeller Foundations, where she has presented a framework to philanthropists to combine investments with philanthropy to maximize impact. Diana's work in mobilizing investment capital to solve environmental and social problems has its roots in her sustainable development work in the 1980s and early 1990s. Diana worked for six years in Africa and South America, including her work in Brazil with a trading company that extended loans to small businesses in the Amazon that harvested, processed and exported non-timber forest products such as fruits, nuts and essences. Customers included Ben & Jerry's, Body Shop and Knudsen's. The investments were designed to build a local economy in the Amazon that was not dependent on deforestation. Diana is a Board Member of the Echoing Green, which provides fellowships to social entrepreneurs and is a founding Board member of Capital Institute, an new center of innovation focused on evolving the financial system to align it with the long term health of ecosystems and societies. Diana is a Founding Member of the Clean Economy Network, and an Advisory Board member for the New York City Accelerator for a Clean and Renewable Economy. Diana has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Duke University. Diana speaks French and Spanish. She lives with her family in New York City.