IJGlobal Investor Awards 2025, Americas – Rising Star

Blackstone Energy Transition Partners senior associate Saurabh Jha was chosen by the independent panel of judges to win the Rising Star award for the Americas.

The judges were impressed by the submission with one admiring an “impressive range and scope of work” and another stating simply that he is “clearly a rising star!”

Yet another judge pointed to Saurabh having worked on an “impressive list of transaction for the year” that are “meaningful to the activity across the various infrastructure sectors”.

The judge adds: “With both technical and financial backgrounds, Saurabh seems to be on path to being a key individual in the industry. The innovative approach to finding solution for parties of different interests and commercial structures is also notable.”

Another judge admired a “detailed and compelling” submission, adding: “They provide extensive evidence of innovation, impact and success across infra and energy platform development and investments.

“Saurabh is clearly a high-quality contributor to the energy and infrastructure community – internally at Blackstone and externally.”

According to the submission: “Saurabh is a force multiplier who amplifies his team’s output, empowers his juniors, and earns the trust of management teams, advisers and peers, ensuring excellent execution.

“His track record spans eight high-impact investments across multiple sub-sectors: engineering services (Geosyntec, Westwood), energy efficiency (Legence), specialty power manufacturing (Power Grid, Accel), carbon capture (Blue Sky Infrastructure), exploration and production (Beacon Offshore) and our public markets investing strategy.

“These contributions have directly fuelled Blackstone’s leading energy franchise returns and positioned him as one of the most capable young investors in energy and infrastructure.

“With judgment beyond his years and a proven ability to drive value, his contributions extend well beyond Blackstone into the entire industry.”

The submission identifies how Saurabh innovates in 3 ways: creative structuring; pre-process sourcing; and scalable playbooks that speed execution while gating risk.

On the engineering platforms – and as a material contributor on Geosyntec – he helped design a first-of-its-kind internal ownership model for a previously 100% employee-owned firm, which balances rewards for performance with sustainable, scalable model for introducing new owners.

The bespoke models and documents he built became Blackstone’s template for people-centric platforms and unlocked a pipeline of add-ons and platform acquisitions.

And then when it comes to originating and securing a proprietary investment, Saurabh helped generate a differentiated thesis on industrial electrification, helping to position Blackstone as the partner of choice for Accel International.

Over 9 months, he helped steer a bilateral negotiation to meet the priorities of the founding family and CEO, while protecting Blackstone’s interests.

As to an economics-led decarbonisation and M&A flywheel (energy efficiency), on the Legence deal, Saurabh championed an ROI/payback-first thesis (versus policy dependence), guiding where to hunt (mission-critical, energy consumptive facilities) and how to cross-sell mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineering with HVAC.

He has structured add-on acquisitions to incentivise retention and go-to-market integration and supported the capital markets cadence to enable over 20+ add-ons in under 5 years.

Meanwhile in development-stage risk gating, for Blue Sky he introduced option-based strategies to minimise early-stage capital outlay while navigating Class VI permitting to gate risk exposure.

He helped build out the management team, secure grant support, and land the first commercial contract, creating a blueprint for early-stage CCS platforms.