“Clout in venture capital is earned through success and in recent years Nagraj Kashyap, the head of Qualcomm Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of US-based semiconductor company Qualcomm, has been making a lot of noise.”
This was the introduction to Kashyap’s 2014 Powerlist profile and remains valid even if he is no longer at Qualcomm but in charge of Microsoft’s ventures program from earlier this year. His move just gives him a bigger platform as Microsoft is four times bigger in revenues and six times bigger in market value.
Kashyap said: “At Qualcomm, I was lucky enough to be part of a company that led the charge in the smartphone revolution, enabling creation of many of big companies of the last few years including Waze, Xiaomi and Uber. I believe that the transition to the cloud will result in another wave of new large companies and I joined Microsoft to be part of this next big platform change.”
Those close to the company indicates Kashyap’s ventures program will start with about $1bn in commitments, although he declined to comment.
It is a good hire for Microsoft after Kashyap built a global corporate venturing platform at Qualcomm Ventures netting multiple $1bn exits and with plenty of others in the portfolio, such as China-based phone maker Xiaomi.
Kashyap, in a speech at the 2014 Global Corporate Venturing Symposium, said: “We have had a few successes in the past three years. We had three companies that were all $1bn on exit. Waze was the most recent, but prior to that we had NetQin and InvenSense. We then had a number of other smaller exits.”
Kashyap joined Qualcomm Ventures in 2003 and oversaw the North America ventures team until 2007 when he was appointed head of global venturing before starting at Microsoft in January.
Kashyap grew the Qualcomm Ventures portfolio to more than 100 investments last year from 10 in 2003 and established a well-regarded early-stage competition, QPrize, which rewards entrepreneurs around the world with prize money.
He began his career as a software engineer at Nortel, Motorola and 3Com/US Robotics before moving to management consulting firm PRTM, now part of PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Microsoft’s investment activity since the beginning of 2015
