Prudential Retirement, a business unit of New York-listed financial services conglomerate Prudential Financial, has closed its seed stage-focused corporate venturing group, Gibraltar Ventures.
Most of the Gibraltar team, however, including managing director George Castineiras, are being “repositioned” inside Prudential as they help the company build a new innovation strategy around designing, acquiring and partnering with startups rather than investing in them at seed stage.
Prudential confirmed the changes through a spokesperson, who said: “We implemented an organisational change in early July to help us to adopt a more unified culture of innovation at all levels of our organisation.
“Specifically, we’ve integrated many of the fintech capabilities, lab work, and external networks of Gibraltar Ventures across our organisation, and will channel much of Gibraltar’s work through a new, developing, internal organisation and through our existing businesses. Gibraltar’s leadership has helped with the integration, and most of the team has been repositioned within Prudential.”
Castineiras started Gibraltar at the beginning of 2015 and built a team including vice-presidents Christopher Penner, Linda Knox, Roshina Nandra, Julia Salnikova, Kamran Hameed and Shari Van Cleave, and investors Gordon Stead and Mark Zhu.
One of the Gibraltar team said: “It was amazing that Prudential decided to shut down the corporate venture group after only about a year. And we had accomplished so much in the short period.”
Gibraltar’s deals included an April 2016 investment as part of a round of undisclosed size for bitcoin and blockchain-focused firm Digital Currency Group, which also received investment from money transfer service Western Union; China-based HCM International Company, a corporate venturing unit of Taiwan-based Foxconn; and family offices and investment managers such as pensions fund Omers Ventures, Horizon Kinetics, Kingsbridge Wealth Management and Wood Investment Partners.
Gibraltar’s deals had also included Blooom, Dyme, InforcePro, Levanto, LifeYield, LiveOak.net, Crowdriff, Student Loan Genius and Pressly, according to its team.