Spencer Maughan

Spencer Maughan

Finistere’s Agtech Venture Fund

Co-Founder

Spencer Maughan is a co-founder of Finistere’s Agtech Venture Fund and heads the Silicon Valley office based in Palo Alto, California. Previously Spencer has been an entrepreneur-in-residence at KPCB working alongside members of the Green Growth Fund on AgTech opportunities and as an investor at Venrock, a Venture Capital firm with >$2b under management. Spencer’s investment focus has been centered on technology-driven companies that intersect with sustainability and agricultural. Spencer sits on numerous boards including being a catalyst member of University of Wisconsin’s WARF accelerator program as well as an advisor to the ARENA-sponsored Renewable Energy Venture Capital Fund managed by Southern Cross Venture Partners.

Spencer has a BSc and PhD in Genetics from the University of Melbourne where he was a Melbourne Research Scholar with funding from Bayer CropScience. Upon finishing his PhD, Spencer was named a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Cambridge (UK) within the Institute of Biotechnology. While at Cambridge, Spencer’s work on malarial drug-resistance type proteins received a commendation from the UK Houses of Parliament. Spencer also holds an MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business where he was the American Australian Association’s Macquarie Bank Fellow.