A year after her first entry on the Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards and Pramila Mullan, senior principal at Accenture Ventures, the corporate venture capital unit of the consultancy, is back and increasingly confident her mix of technical skills and understanding of portfolio management and networking across multiple stakeholders is helping her towards becoming a partner.
She said: “I would like to become a partner at a CVC. During these initial years, I have learned how to make investments.
“I am focused on demonstrating a repeated pattern of picking winners, and this requires time. I want to continue to inspire women and young girls to pursue a career in CVC. I have done it well, and they can get there too!”
The sea change in attitudes across the venture industry and society over the past year have encouraged a more inclusive attitude and focus on diversity.
“It is important that we all continue to give back and pay it forward. I have loved working with organisations like Build and Girls Who Code. These organisations focused on youth, and it is inspiring to help develop this young talent. They definitely make sure we all bring our A-plus game. I recently joined the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s education policy team to promote high-quality education with a focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics to ensure a strong, regional workforce. This is for our future leaders, and I want to do my part to make it exceptional inside and out!”
After previously being a senior principal in Accenture Labs focused on research related to industry X.0, internet of things (IoT) and digital health, following a wide range of industry roles, Mullan’s approach to making things exceptional has shown in her first two years in the industry. She said: “My first year in CVC was a whirlwind. I was focused on building relationships with startups, entrepreneurs, investors, academic R&D, venture capitalists and corporate R&D groups around the world.
“The second year, I saw my work in action. I now had a great foundation and was ready to spend time nurturing these relationships while maintaining a key eye on financial results – revenue growth and return on equity.
“I love that I can bring a unique set of skills to the table. I am always excited to bring both my technology expertise and business acumen to the table. CVC provides me with a unique opportunity to leverage these skills in an exciting new way. I can look at technology trends, meet startups and other investors, and enable Accenture to achieve its growth objectives by identifying new market opportunities or expanding existing ones through these investments.”
Not that the move has been without challenges. Mullan said: “Having spent most of my career in research and development, this move to CVC required me to quickly get up to speed in some unfamiliar areas.
“The technology part was easy for me. I was armed with the right set of skills to conquer any challenge. The financial and legal due diligence required wading through a sea of terms – cap table, valuations, term sheets – a myriad of terminology.
“Sometimes I wanted to just go back to my familiar world of coding and the comfort zone of my robots and research. It was not always easy, but I knew I could get up to speed quickly and meet the challenge. This past year stretched me further into the financial nuances of portfolio management, for example cost method accounting, calculating internal rates of return [a form of annual performance measurement]. Terms and functions, I never thought I would see or conquer.”
It has in some ways helped being in a small, active team. Mullan said: “We are an active team of three covering multiple geographies and generating significant results. In my first year, we completed 10 deals in key technology areas such as blockchain, security, developement operations, vertical cloud, and so on.
“This required developing an efficient, streamlined investment process from deal identification through due diligence and closing. We continued this momentum in the second year with an additional seven investments.”
These deals included Maana, WorkMarket, Paxata, Nomis Solutions, Mighty AI, while an earlier investment in 1Qbit presented at a GCV-led quantum venturing roundtable discussion hosted by Accenture Ventures and another holding, Digital Asset raised a follow-on round.
Accenture has also seen the sale of portfolio companies, including Aptelligent to VMWare, Apigee to Google for $625m, Soasta by Akamai and Predixion Software by Greenwave Systems. The purchase of Applause by Vista Equity Partners saw Accenture Ventures roll over its stake to retain a minority investment.
Accenture Ventures also hired Arnaud de Scorbiac to oversee its European investments and manage the Partech Ventures relationship after committing to Partech’s latest fund, while the group has also committed to Team8, which includes R&D.
But while things have been going well for Accenture Ventures, Mullan is aware of the challenges of CVC. She said: “For most CVCs, having a healthy dealflow and pipeline continues to be a problem especially given that the size of a typical investment from strategic investors is relatively smaller than VCs. Opportunities to build an ecosystem that fosters syndication of deals would accelerate growth.”