Cheryl Beninga
Managing Director, American River Ventures
http://www.arventures.com

Panelist

Session 1: Technology Development and Clean Tech Investments
Monday, October, 27, 2008

Cheryl Beninga joined American River Ventures in 2006. Over the past eighteen years, she has acquired operational management and venture capital investment experience in the software, semiconductor and mobile wireless markets. Prior to joining American River Ventures, Cheryl built an investment portfolio of twenty companies in the Mobile and Wireless Communications Sector as a Director and Senior Investment Manager at Intel Capital over a six year period. Four companies in the portfolio have had IPO’s and three companies have been successfully acquired.

As a Marketing Manager within Intel Corporation, Cheryl spent over ten years building several new businesses from scratch to well over a billion dollars in revenues. New businesses she worked on at Intel include the PC Upgrade Processor, Retail Boxed Processor, PC Graphics and Small Business PC Management Software businesses. Prior to joining Intel, she worked at Hewlett Packard where she managed product marketing for the LAN and Distributed Computing Software Operation.

Cheryl began her career in the energy industry working for Chevron Corporation, applying new information technology solutions to improve financial operations in the oil and natural gas businesses. She is passionate about applying her previous professional experiences to investing in and commercializing new technologies that impact industrial and manufacturing energy efficiency. She organized the first Energy Efficiency Panel at the Clean Tech 2007 Conference and has been active on investor panels with the University Of California Davis Energy Efficiency Center and with California based organizations such as the Desert Lyceum Energy, Environment & Economic Change Conference.

Cheryl holds a B.S. in Finance with Highest Honors from Indiana University and an M.B.A. from The Harvard Business School.