Founders now have a way to ensure that their investors haven’t taken money from countries like China, Russia, Iran or Cuba.
Over 20 venture firms have signed the Clean Capital Certification, attesting that they have not and will not take money from foreign adversaries. Some of the firms that have signed include Marlinspike Partners, Humba Ventures, and Snowpoint Ventures. “We must ensure that US adversaries do not directly profit from our success, and publicly signing the Clean Capital Certification is a way to commit to that duty as a community,” Craig Cummings, partner at Moonshots Capital, said in a statement.
The pledge was created by Future Union, an advocacy organization that works on issues related to foreign interference in the private sector. The pledge declares that new technologies, in the wrong hands, can “cast a shadow of authoritarianism, misinformation, and division.”
Future Union’s executive director Andrew King has been working on the pledge for about three years, but he’s feared Chinese interference much longer. He recalled having long conversations with a friend at the Department of Defense about “how deleterious the China operation was in the US,” and how the country was “influencing venture capital and private equity — through money and other incentives — to get access to the critical technologies.”
King said that, if a firm has Chinese investors, then it’s possible that those investors — and then the Chinese government — could receive proprietary information about portfolio companies.
In the venture capital world, it’s mostly a hypothetical fear, but one that more and more people share. In September, the Financial Times reported that the FBI was investigating California-based venture capital firm Hone Capital for allegedly passing information along to its Chinese investors. And in February, a congressional committee report called out five U.S. investment firms for investing in Chinese companies, claiming these investments helped support China’s military and enabled the country’s human rights abuses.
Congressman John Moolenaar, chairman of the Select Committee on the CCP, applauded the …