Bridging the gap

Charlotte, North Carolina-based Liberation Capital is a global private-equity firm founded in 2010 by Jeff Garwood, Frederic Schmuck and Earl Jones.

Its founding members bring a complementary mix of experiences in both running global technology and service businesses and structuring asset and project finance deals.

Prior to forming Liberation Capital, all three founders were executives with various segments of GE. Garwood and Jones were part of GE Water & Technology, a $2.5 billion global infrastructure business. Schmuck had 20 years of capital investment experience.

While GE Water & Technology would fund several multimillion dollar projects through the company’s build, own and operate business segment. Some of the projects were small infrastructure which Jones refers to as packaged infrastructure plants. These plants are typically built in a factory, deployed at the site, placed on concrete and hooked up to mechanical/electrical.

“We really liked that model,” says Jones “We had a lot of plants that fit modular, repeatable, decentralized infrastructure.”

GE could easily finance these projects, but Jones says he and his partners discovered that if you are not GE and you just can’t write checks for these plants, it is very difficult to get smaller infrastructure projects funded. So, he says, “We started Liberation Capital to do that.”

Jones says he and his partners took what they learned around underwriting and financing smaller infrastructure projects and created a capital markets vehicle to do that.

“We are a private equity fund. We do project finance and asset finance,” he says. “We don’t do company equity, and we finance modular, repeatable, decentralized infrastructure and we focus literally at the intersection of clean water, renewable energy and resource reclamation and reuse.”

Liberation Capital is not placing bets on which technologies are going to win, says Jones, but it delivers to a pro forma. He emphasizes that the company is not in the equity game, but it is in the plant financing game.

Liberation Capital has provided financing to Vadxx, based in Cleveland, which allowed it to build a commercial scale plant in Akron, Ohio. (See the cover story “Becoming a reality.”)

Jones says Vadxx was not unlike many of the clean-tech firms his company works with. “You can get to a certain point but without funding it is hard to get the plants built,” says Jones. “It is a difficult space to get funded and that is exactly what Liberation Capital was geared up to go do.”