Contact
Brent de Jong
Chairman & Founder
Brent leads the Board of Directors for Emergent™ Technology Holdings. He represents key stakeholders, sets strategy, and is responsible for building and overseeing the team. He developed the concept for Responsible Gold™ while tracking ISIS money with U.S. Special Operations command as a Business Executives for National Security (BENS) member.
A highly successful investor and entrepreneur, Brent is currently a partner at Castlelake, an $12 billion investment fund, where he is responsible for emerging markets. He joined Castlelake in 2016; has more than 18 years of investment experience and has worked on more than 235 investments across 50 countries. Over the course of his career, Brent has developed a broad range of expertise in emerging markets in a variety of sectors, including energy, telecom, financial, natural resources, real estate, and transportation, and he has built or helped manage multiple regulated businesses.
Prior to Castlelake, Brent was the chief executive officer of Zaff Capital LP, a private equity and real estate investment firm specializing in distressed investments and emerging markets. During his time at Zaff, he also served as an executive board member of RA Holdco, which emerged from the reorganization of Arcapita, a Bahraini investment bank, and was the first sharia compliant bankruptcy in the US.
Prior to joining Zaff, Brent was Ashmore Investment Management’s lead investment professional for special situations and infrastructure investments and served on the firm’s investment committee. During part of his time at Ashmore, he founded and was seconded to AEI, a $10 billion emerging market energy infrastructure company, where he served as the chief executive officer and vice chairman of the board of directors focused on strategy and development.
Earlier in his career, Brent worked at JPMorgan’s financial institutions group in London, and JPMorgan’s structured finance group in New York. Brent earned a bachelor of arts from Georgetown University in economics. He currently serves as Chairman of Itafos, a TSX listed fertilizer company and has held various board roles in the investment, mining and non-profit sectors, including Schools for Children of the World (SCW).