Our Team

Clay Collier

Co-founder and CEO of three companies that developed software systems for GPS navigation, energy smoothing, and EV - grid integration.

Clay was the Founder and CEO of Kivera, which delivered the first Location Based System application for smart phones – FindFriend - first deployed by AT&T Wireless.

Clay was the Co-Founder and CEO of Akuacom, the inventor of the full suite of software and hardware that created the Automated Demand Response market and led to the OpenADR standard. Honeywell acquired Akuacom in 2010 and Clay spent three years in Business Development domestically and internationally.

Clay was the co-founder and CEO of Kisensum, the company that developed Electric Vehicle smart charging for grid integration. The company merged with ChargePoint in 2018.

Bard.Google.com

Bard is head of marketing and content development for the Sugar Creek Partners web site.

Bard is a conversational AI service from Google that is helping SugarCreek brainstorm ideas, spark creativity, and accelerate productivity. It is powered by PaLM 2, a state-of-the-art large language model, and can generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content.

Here are just a few things that Bard has done:

  • Generated text in a variety of formats, including poems, code, scripts, musical pieces, email, and letters.

  • Translated languages between over 100 languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

  • Answered questions in a comprehensive and informative way, even if they are open ended, challenging, or strange.

  • Helped brainstorm ideas by providing suggestions, prompts, and feedback.

  • Sparked creativity by generating new ideas, concepts, and perspectives.

  • Accelerated productivity by automating tasks, generating reports, and summarizing information.

Bard is new to the team, but will be a valuable asset to Sugar Creek Partners going forward.

Mark Licht

Mark Licht is an entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in the formation, financing and operations of IOT, and connected car companies. Mark founded several high profile companies including: Teletrac, now part of Teletrac-Navman with 550,000 fleet management subscribers (Nasdaq traded: Vontier) and Ituran (publicly traded on Nasdaq) with 2,000,000 connected passenger and commercial vehicles in service.  He has a long track record of defining significant market trends in the IOT industry and evaluating and executing M&A opportunities.

Mark Licht is both an investor and serves on the Boards and Advisory Boards of fleet management, UBI, last mile delivery, video telematics, predictive analytics, cybersecurity and OEM focused tech companies.  

Paul Lipkin

Paul Lipkin has spent his career at early stage startups as a co-founder and product and technical leader. He has had a number of successful exits and is applying that experience to create M&A activity in partnership with Private Equity and Venture firms.

Paul developed software products in a variety of fields including Electric Vehicle charging optimization, energy management, demand response and energy trading, medical records , gps and mapping, banking and image processing

Paul has held the titles of Senior Director of Energy Solutions at ChargePoint, Co-founder and COO of Kisensum, co-founder at iKnowMed, Director of Operations at Akuacom, COO at Kivera, he developed real-time and map-based products at Tele Atlas and was instrumental in the rapid growth of TRW Financial Systems.