Curt Hopkins
Chief Executive Officer
Curt Hopkins
Chief Executive Officer
Curt Hopkins serves as CEO of Zefiro and is also chief operating partner of X Machina Capital Strategies. Curt was chairman of Sirenum, a SaaS business in workforce management recently ranked by the Financial Times as the 10th fastest growing tech company in the UK, which was sold to Bullhorn in 2021. He has significant interest in sustainable technology through his board position at World Wide Generation. Previously, Curt led the buyout of Redeem, a Sunday Times Fast Track 100 firm in the circular economy, where he served as CEO. He also held senior executive roles at Vodafone, Nortel, and Fujitsu. Curt graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with an MSc in management.
Talal Debs
Founder and Chairman
Talal Debs
Founder and Chairman
Talal Debs is the founder and managing partner of X Machina Capital Strategies (“XMC”). Prior, he worked for J.P. Morgan for 15 years. With extensive energy and commodities experience, he served as chair of the bankʼs oil and gas price deck committee, as well as in leadership roles covering infrastructure and commodities credit, insurance, and reservoir engineering and technical analysis. Talal has over eight yearsʼ experience as a researcher and lecturer within the technically demanding field of the foundations of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Talal earned his AB in physics and the history of science from Harvard College, his MPhil in history and the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge, and his PhD in the foundations of modern physics from the University of Cambridge.
Tina Reine
Chief Commercial Officer
Tina Reine
Chief Commercial Officer
Tina Reine is the CCO of Zefiro. Previously, she was Director of Commercialization for the carbon offset market at World Kinect Energy Services. She was responsible for both structuring deals and origination. Tina started her environmental markets career in London at Cantor Fitzgerald’s Environmental Markets group in 2007, selling forward contracts on carbon offsets. While part of the team there she joined in the policy debate at Houses of Parliament to develop standards and registries for the voluntary trading market. She also helped build out the environmental markets division at JPMorgan and at NextEra Energy, managing an equity investment portfolio of carbon projects. She has traded in both the compliance and the voluntary market. Tina earned her MBA from Columbia Business School.
Matthew Brooks
Head of Operations
Matthew Brooks
Head of Operations
Matthew Brooks serves as head of Operations at Zefiro. Matthew has spent his entire career focused on energy sector acquisitions, development and operations. Most recently, he served in senior roles in the Land & Legal Department for Urban Oil & Gas Group, a private equity backed E&P company with operations spanning 11 states in the US. He helped develop and implement the divestiture program in the A&D group at Urban and has extensive experience managing acquisitions and divestitures in the domestic upstream oil and gas sector. He earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Clemson University and is a graduate of the University of Mississippi School of Law.
Jeff Frase
President of Corporate Development
Jeff Frase
President of Corporate Development
Jeff Frase is on the advisory board of Zefiro. Since 1995, he has specialized in the energy markets, where he is one of the most well-respected leaders in the oil trading industry. Jeff was Goldman Sachs for 17 years ending as the MD of Global Crude Oil and Derivatives. Subsequently, he was JPMorganʼs Managing Director and Head of Global Oil. Jeff then became Co-CEO of Noble Group and President of Noble Americas until the business was sold to Vitol. Since then, Jeff has been actively investing in and advising energy and technology firms.
Tom James
Commercial Analyst
Tom James
Commercial Analyst
Tom James is an analyst at Zefiro. He is a recent graduate in Economics and Management from Durham University who began as a summer intern in 2021. He has a strong understanding of carbon markets, is very adept quantitatively and is a strong analyser of strategy.