Before becoming an investor, Maria Buitron worked across the oil-and-gas industry and later in business development at Stem, and while advising Pemex she helped the company save $100 million a year by cutting resource leakage. As a founding member of Piva Capital, she has backed companies like Menlo Micro, Boston Metal, Oobli, and Plantible, written about Piva’s investment in Alloy Enterprises, spoken at industry events covering industrial biotech and EV charging, and been recognized on Forbes 30 Under 30 in both the Energy and Immigrant categories, with a chemical engineering degree from Tecnológico de Monterrey and an MBA from Berkeley Haas.
About their Fund
Piva Capital started with $250 million funded entirely by PETRONAS, and while it operates independently, this gives portfolio companies access to a global energy company and Southeast Asian markets; the firm focuses on later-stage, hardware-heavy climate and industrial companies—in areas like steel, cement, and aviation—that need patient capital to scale, led by a team with backgrounds from major energy companies like GE Ventures, Chevron Ventures, Shell Ventures, and BP Ventures who are comfortable taking on technical risks other investors avoid. Piva also stands out for publicly measuring its own carbon footprint (carbon neutral since inception, offsetting 147 metric tons of CO2 in 2023 at $150 a ton), helping build climate-investing standards through groups like the Venture Climate Alliance and VentureESG, backing frontier ideas like natural hydrogen, and maintaining a majority-female team in a field where that’s uncommon.
















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