MANAGEMENT | PARTNERS | ADVISORS
David Firshein
Partner
David Firshein has been a commercial financier and financial entrepreneur for 40 years, working in most aspects of corporate lending, private equity, venture capital, and startup management operations. Mr. Firshein is the President and Owner of Cascade Capital Corporation, a 30-year-old, licensed commercial finance lender/broker and financial advisory firm in Fairfax California. During his career, Mr. Firshein has completed roughly $1 Billion worth of a wide variety of private debt or equity financings for various development stage, middle market, and Fortune 1000 companies to date. Such financings have included senior, subordinated or venture debt, mezzanine capital, equipment leases, bank revolving credit and term facilities, and seed, venture stage or private equity financings. Project types included various forms of growth capital, venture capital, turnaround, restructuring, co-op financings, and M&A or buy-out financings. While industry agnostic, the majority of the enterprises that were financed often included clean-technology or environmental, high-tech, wireless and telecom, medical devices/drug-delivery/biopharma, food and agriculture, and various heavy industrial or other manufacturing businesses. Through Cascade Capital, Mr. Firshein has also been an angel investor in ten different early-stage ventures. In relation to such investments, since 1997 he has intermittently held six early-stage CFO or CEO roles, including two co-founding positions, in six start-up companies, involving two high-tech, one energy-petrochemical industrial, one clean-foods, and two clean-tech ventures. Earlier in his career, he was a co-founder and managing executive of the senior team that started the first ever North American venture debt fund, dedicated solely to financing environmental companies or environmental assets, with $110 Million of committed capital.
In addition: Since December 2011, David Firshein has also served as the contract Chief Financial Officer of Brillouin Energy Corp. (“Brill–oo-in” - https://brillouinenergy.com). Brillouin is a leading later development-stage venture in a new field of renewable alternative energy known as “Low Energy Nuclear Reaction” (LENR) technology. To date Brillouin’s unique form of LENR, which is effectively micro-scale nuclear transmutation, has demonstrated a controllable, safe method of producing potentially large amounts of commercially useful, ultra-clean, very low-cost thermal energy (heat). There are No radioactive or other hazardous wastes, and no carbon gases of any kind created in the reaction process (ZERO pollution) and virtually No fuel cost (only the initial device capital expenditure cost). Brillouin’s technology can potentially power everything from small water heaters and commercial boilers to small utility-scale independent power plants for the generation of low-cost, carbon-free, ultra-clean electricity. Brillouin’s technology originally was jointly advanced under a 6-year formal research agreement that previously concluded with the Stanford Research Institute and SRI’s leading LENR scientists in Menlo Park California. Among various experts, the remaining Director Emeritus of the SRI LENR Research Program continues to assist the company today as its senior science advisor. Since becoming its CFO, Mr. Firshein has closed the large majority of the $64 Million in total development stage equity capital, plus grants, and early commercial license, sales or other income revenue that the company has raised from its 2009 inception to 2025. He has also generated most of its original investor and strategic business communication materials and is a senior manager of all master document edit, archive and business library functions. He continues to co-lead all financing efforts of the company and further assists with related senior business development and senior management development efforts for the acceleration of Brillouin Energy’s business growth.