TOP 100 MAGAZINE

Matthew Rising

​

Matthew Rising co-founded Emergent Strategic Partners to bring together two worlds. The company scales sustainable innovation by building partnerships between the world’s most exciting emerging businesses and the largest corporations. Emerging businesses benefit from the scale of large corporations, while corporations benefit from emerging businesses’ most valuable innovations.

​

Driving Matt’s work is his mission to meet the needs of the time. His vision is to create cycles of mutual benefit for his partners, for Emergent, and for the broader world. To achieve that, he and his co-founder, Kevin Vilkin, take great care getting to know the leaders of startups and corporations. They understand the challenges and opportunities specific to each. That gives them the unique ability to bring them together in distinctive partnerships.

​

Emergent has proven its model many times. It built a partnership between a sustainable home improvement finance company and a national contractor. The contractor’s sales grew by 20%, while the finance company realized $100 million in new revenue. In another Emergent partnership, Matt and Kevin brought together a fintech company and a Fortune 500 restaurant group. The restaurant’s 100,000 employees were given new financial wellness tools, while the fintech gained an enormous new customer base. These are just two of many examples that share the same ambition, scope, and scale.

​

Matt and Kevin attribute their success to what they call “principled entrepreneurship,” grounded in their belief that we live lives of meaning when we use our gifts to benefit others. Their goal is always to become a preferred partner of everyone they work with. To do so, they hold fast to a strong code of values—including continual transformation, self-actualization, humility, openness, and integrity—and they partner with those who share the same ethic.

 

Before Emergent, Matt co-founded Swell Energy, the first company to provide residential energy storage at scale. Swell pioneered a new model for home energy management: the aggregation of home energy users into “virtual power plants.” Matt exited the business following a controlling investment by Ares’s Climate Infrastructure Fund.

​

Earlier in his career, Matt worked in food policy for the White House Domestic Policy Council, in corporate finance for renewable energy, and as a corporate attorney. 

​

Matt was a scholarship football player at Duke University and served as associate editor of the Journal of Environmental Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law.  

​

Matt says, “When emerging businesses and large corporations partner, they win, and the world wins with them. That is why Kevin and I named our company Emergent: when the right partners come together in the right way, extraordinary value emerges, and the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts.”

​

Matthew Rising
Co-Founder, Managing Partner
Emergent Strategic Partners

Website: https://www.esp.co
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewrising