Bobby Kia

As a member of the Semnani family, Bauback Bobby Kia, is Advisor to the CIO for S.K. Hart Management, the Semnani family office based in Salt Lake City, where he leads the sustainable investment strategy for the private equity portfolio; leads the office’s engagements with private capital syndicates and networks such as CREO and NEXUS; and serves on the Board of the Semnani Family Foundation, where he helps managers strategic initiatives such as the One Kind Act a Day campaign.  

Bobby is Co-Founder of the Global Solution Deployment Endowment and Global Deployment Partners, implementing entities for the Global Solutions Institute, a Little-Rock based NGO building a global technology deployment system. Bobby also serves as advisor to climate-technology companies and platforms including Capital for Climate, a Net-Zero software-intelligence platform for institutional investors, and the Open Earth Foundation, which is official partner of the UNFCCC Global Innovation Hub, whose private capital working group he co-chaired, and which is creator of City Catalyst, a GHG-inventory management and climate investment roadmap platform.  Bobby is also Co-Founder of The People’s Prize, an expert-vetted / crowd-voted impact accelerator - launched with MIT Solve, Summit Impact and NEXUS - where beneficiary communities vote to fund transformational local solutions. 

Most recently, Bobby served as Private Capital Advisor for the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (“IFC”) convening co-investment roundtables in collaboration with Rockefeller Capital Management and NEXUS.  

While Syndication officer at IFC (2012 - 2017) based in Washington D.C. and Singapore, Bobby helped pioneer IFC’s first institutional debt platform – an eligibility-based emerging markets private debt tracker fund ($3 Billion with People’s Bank of China); and helped pioneer IFC’s first synthetic CLO of future infrastructure debt ($500 Million with Allianz Global Investors and $500 Million with Eastspring Investments). Bobby also led syndication of a $750 million real estate development in Yangon, Myanmar. 

Following site visits in 2009 for S.K. Hart Management on the African continent, including Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa, Bobby conducted agribusiness value chain assessments for TechnoServe, drafted credit memos and cash flow diagrams for sponsors operating in frontier markets for the U.S. Government’s Development Finance Corporation and underwrote agribusiness and medical credit facilities on the African continent at a pioneering boutique impact investment bank called Total Impact Capital.

Bobby holds an MBA in international finance from the George Washington University.