Alternative asset and private equity investor KKR announced today the appointment of Charlie Gailliot as Co-Head of the firm’s global climate strategy, and rounding out KKR’s new climate-focused leadership team, following the recent appointments of Co-Heads Emmanuel Lagarrigue and Neil Arora.

Gailliot joins KKR after more than 20 years at Goldman Sachs as a private investor in the firm’s merchant banking division, most recently serving as head of the Energy Transition and the Diversified Industrials investment teams.

Gailliot will be based in New York, working alongside global climate co-heads Lagarrigue, also in New York, and Arora, who leads the strategy in Asia. Lagarrigue and Arora both joined KKR in 2022. Before joining KKR, Lagarrigue was a founding partner in growth equity firm General Atlantic’s decarbonization-focused fund, BeyondNetZero, and Arora served as head of Macquarie’s Green Investment Group for Asia-Pacific.

According to KKR, the launch of the climate leadership team marks an expansion for the firm on its focus on climate investing. The firm has made more than $30 billion in climate and environmental sustainability investments since 2010, and has made a series of recent energy transition-focused moves, including the launch of Virescent Infrastructure, a platform aiming to acquire, own and operate renewable assets in India, the launch of Aster Renewable Energy, an Asia-focused renewable energy investment platform and Stellar Renewable Power, a platform aimed at originating long-duration high-yielding solar energy investments. 

Raj Agrawal, Partner, Head of Global Infrastructure, said:

“Since the launch of the KKR infrastructure platform 15 years ago, we have invested billions into renewable energy and climate solutions. However, transitioning to a low-carbon economy at the pace and scale needed requires trillions of dollars in investment, and we are still seeing a significant gap in climate funding. By forming a dedicated climate leadership team – leveraging Charlie, Emmanuel and Neil’s decades of expertise – we can sharpen our focus on the deployment and scaling of net-zero solutions and accelerate the transition of higher-emitting assets.”