David S. Miller, Ph.D. served as Executive Managing Director of the Clean Energy Venture Group (CEVG) between 2005 and 2017. An engineer by training, he brings over 25 years of technology startup management experience and over 20 years of seed stage investing experience. He has served on the board of directors or advisory board of several clean energy companies, including Boston Materials (currently), Volexion (currently), Noon Energy (currently Observer), Pearl Certification, Pika Energy (until acquired in April 2019), MyEnergy (until acquired in May 2013), Azima DLI (until Sep 2014), Cambrian Innovation (Advisory Board), and has mentored many others. He also has an appointment as Research Affiliate at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Previously, Mr. Miller founded several companies, including Quantum Telecom Solutions, which developed software for programmable switching equipment. He grew the company to profitability, with over 100% annual growth over a four-year period, and then negotiated venture financing and sold the company to Excel Switching Corp., a public company that shortly thereafter was itself acquired by Lucent Technologies. At Lucent, he served as Director in the New Ventures Group, where he managed and evaluated a diverse set of early-stage investments.
Mr. Miller is a member of the Board of Directors of DEPLOY/US, a 501c(3) organization focused on enabling bipartisan climate policy, and is a New England Chapter Director of Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2, www.e2.org), a national community of business leaders who advocate for good environmental policy while building economic prosperity and has developed relationships with state and federal policy makers to support the growth of the clean energy industry. He is a founding member of the MIT Enterprise Forum’s Energy Special Interest Group and chaired the mentor program for what is now called the “Northeast Cleantech Open” for its first four years. Mr. Miller also co-founded EPrime, which is a forum for clean energy entrepreneurs to network and support each others’ enterprises, was a board member of New England Energy and Environmental Funders, which educated investors interested in energy and environmental companies, and was a founding advisory board member of the Northeast Clean Energy Council. Mr. Miller was awarded a patent for co-developing a “one number” telecom service, and taught at Rutgers University in the Electrical Engineering Department. He received his S.B. and S.M. in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT, and completed his doctorate at MIT’s Lab for Energy and the Environment, where he studied the utilization and commercialization of distributed generation and energy efficiency measures. His dissertation examined the impact of a variety of management and investment strategies and public policy initiatives on the success of new clean energy ventures. As Research Affiliate at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, he teaches, and supervises the continuation of this work, and is also an Advisory Board Member of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative. Mr. Miller lives in Newton, MA with his wife and two children.