The materials that matter most are becoming harder to obtain, harder to verify, and more consequential. Very few practitioners sit credibly where scarcity, proof, and access meet. Fewer still have built the institutions that made proof possible at scale.
Neil Ventura is an independent adviser. He advises governments, corporates, VC firms, and founders from exactly that position: As Special Adviser to the DMCC, Expert Adviser to BCG, and Venture Partner at Cloudberry Ventures — combining first-hand experience of scarce strategic resources with active deal flow and board-level access across the institutions that produce, verify, and trade them. His work is built on operating experience across Africa, Asia, and Europe, and current relationships spanning the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and the United States.
Neil spent more than three decades running global businesses at the most senior levels of De Beers and Anglo American — spanning the full value chain from upstream supply, through midstream trading and auctioning, to jewellery retail. Most careers in this industry ascend through one vertical; Neil’s runs horizontally across all three. Rising to the Executive Committee as one of its youngest-ever members, he led three initiatives that reshaped the industry: GemFair, connecting artisanal mining to verified global supply chains, and Tracr, one of the first distributed provenance systems in natural resources proven at production scale — together the first proof at industrial scale that the origin, physical characteristics, and integrity of a scarce material can be established and trusted, a problem critical minerals is only now confronting. He also led Lightbox, De Beers’ move into laboratory-grown diamonds.
The centrepiece of his work is the DMCC — a major driver of Dubai’s economy and the world’s leading marketplace for scarce and strategic physical commodities, bringing together over 26,000 companies across commodities, energy, technology, trade finance, and private capital. Its digital asset ecosystem sits at the forefront of how physical assets will be digitally owned and transferred. Neil also serves as Board Member of the Dubai Diamond Exchange, the world’s largest diamond exchange.
As Venture Partner at Cloudberry Ventures his focus is the deep tech infrastructure that scarcity depends on: the compute layer that makes verification possible at scale, the industrial systems that produce and process strategic materials, and the financial infrastructure that determines how they are owned and transferred. Portfolio companies include HydGen, a Singapore-based industrial green hydrogen company developing modular on-site electrolyser systems.
He also sources exceptional natural diamonds and rare gemstones for private collections held as long-term stores of value, through Ventura Fine Jewellery, working with a small number of clients each year by introduction.
