The Team

Three operators, one fund.

The Kora Power Ventures partners spent their careers in power systems engineering, utility-scale project development, and industrial materials science before turning to venture capital. We back founders building what we know how to build.

Partner profiles

Elena Vasquez

Managing Partner

Elena spent eleven years in the power sector before founding Kora Power Ventures in 2020. She started as a power-systems engineer at Xcel Energy in Colorado, advancing to Director of Resource Planning where she led procurement of 1.2 GW of renewable capacity. She holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from CU Boulder. In 2017 she joined a New York climate-tech VC firm as a Principal, developing the operator-to-investor pattern that Kora is built around.

  • Grid storage
  • Geothermal
  • Distribution infrastructure

Marcus Whitehorse

Partner

Marcus was Director of Project Finance at a US developer of utility-scale renewable projects, where he closed or structured over $3B in completed solar and storage projects across eight years. He joined Kora Power Ventures in 2021 to bring project-development credibility to early-stage capital decisions. He holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

  • Project finance
  • Solar and storage development
  • Utility offtake

Dr. Sasha Okafor

Operating Partner

Sasha holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from MIT and spent eight years as a process engineer at a Fortune-100 industrial-gases company before transitioning to climate venture. She leads Kora's technical diligence on materials, electrochemistry, and CO2 utilization — evaluating the engineering fundamentals before commercial diligence begins. She joined Kora in 2022.

  • Electrochemistry
  • Materials science
  • CO2 utilization
  • Industrial processes

Why operators?

Venture capital in physical infrastructure requires pattern recognition that comes from building, not from observing. Our partners have run resource procurement, closed utility offtakes, debugged electrochemical stacks, and managed construction timelines on projects that actually got built.

That background shapes every diligence process. We know what founders are underestimating. We know which technical risks are solvable with capital and which are not. We know how long permitting takes in Colorado and what a bankable offtake looks like.

Kora is based in Denver because Colorado sits at the intersection of grid congestion, renewable overbuilding, transmission constraint, and industrial decarbonization pressure. We are close to the problems we invest in.

Get in touch.

Email [email protected]
Phone +1 (720) 555-0462
Address 1801 California Street, Suite 2500
Denver, CO 80202