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Eric Desai
Eric has over 15 years of sustainability investing, M&A consulting and corporate strategy experience. He has worked in venture capital for many years, but also spent time working directly for startups in finance, operations, and strategy leadership roles, giving him a strong blend of investment and operational experience in high growth, venture-backed companies.
Eric's Story
Before joining Vidavo, Eric was a Partner at Greenhouse Capital, a venture growth capital firm. Eric helped develop Greenhouse’s strategy of investing in high-growth technology companies to drive efficiency, resiliency and new means of value creation across legacy industrial supply chains and infrastructure, including food & agriculture, energy, waste, water, transportation and the built environment.
Eric began his career as a generalist, but quickly developed an interest in the sustainable food & agriculture sector. As his involvement grew in the industry, he saw that a funding gap existed for emerging, product-focused startups in this space, and thus developed Greenhouse’s investment thesis around closing the gap, ultimately raising a Fund II to directly address this need. One of his focus areas at Greenhouse was at the nexus of agribusiness and climate tech, a similarly underserved market with passionate, committed founders and limitless potential. Eric sees this same mission-driven passion in Vidavo’s team, which has the operational and industry expertise to build a world-class venture fund that invests in leading companies demonstrating a clear path towards significantly impacting climate change and adapting to its effects.
An investor who enjoys collaborating closely with management teams of multiple high-growth companies, Eric is most noted for helping transform finance departments into strategic functions, along with developing customer insights, value propositions and go-to-market strategies. He currently serves on the boards of HydroPoint Data Systems (smart water management), FoodLogiQ (food safety & traceability) and 120 Water (water quality program management). Previous board director and observer roles include TemperPack (sustainable thermal packaging), Neura (AI for transportation), Revive Kombucha (better-for-you beverages), and Lifefactory (reusable glass beverage bottles).
Before joining Greenhouse, Eric was an investment professional at Robin Lane Capital, a lower middle-market growth equity family office focused on the consumer goods sector.
Eric spent the early years of his career in corporate strategy and M&A consulting, where he advised strategic and financial buy-side clients on multi-billion-dollar public and private transactions across Europe and the US. These previous roles include CFO of MobiledgeX, a mobile-edge software platform incubated within Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners; Head of Finance and Operations at Neura, an AI behavioral intelligence platform for transportation, retail, health and other applications; Corporate Strategy Manager at Philips, and M&A Transactions Advisory Group Manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in the Netherlands.
Eric grew up in Arizona, and after living in Hong Kong, Amsterdam, London, and Chicago, he currently lives in Mill Valley, California. An active outdoorsman, he is an avid skier and enjoys hiking, mountain biking, and going on new adventures with his two small children. He is also a board member of Justice Outside.
Eric earned an MBA from the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business, and also attended London Business School. He holds a BS in Finance and Accounting from the University of Arizona, and also attended Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.