Susana Quintana-Plaza, a partner at Next47, the corporate venture capital (CVC) unit of Germany-based industrial group Siemens, has a straightforward way of describing her career: “I am a rocket scientist [trained at University of Washington] who started her career as an engineer at Boeing [in 1998]. After my MBA at Harvard [from 2004 to 2006] I went into strategy consulting [at what is now called Booz & Co] and in 2009 joined Eon on as a strategy manager for its renewables division.”
She quickly rose at Eon, setting up in 2012 its CVC activities and by 2015 being promoted to senior vice-president leading all Innovation activities for the Germany-based energy group, which included a budget of more than €100m ($120m) for scouting, testing, development and initial launch of new products and business models as well as its CVC function. She was a member of the GCV Powerlist 2016, her final year at the company before joining Siemens.
At Next47, the €1bn CVC unit of Siemens set up by Lak Ananth, she runs the London office from where she also covers France, Scandinavia, Ireland, Benelux and the Iberian penninsula.
Her stated goal for the GCV Powerlist 2016 profile was “inspiring and moving leadership and teams in established large corporations into the innovation world and the digital age”.
And this can require partnership with entrepreneurs.
Quintana-Plaza said: “In the business to business segment, the largest deterrent to growth for startups is access to market.
“Corporates can provide that access to market. We not only add brand value and credibility to the startup, but especially access to our internal teams and customer base which could make the difference to these startups between being able to scale or not.
“And if I believe commercially in these startups and would help them scale, I definitely want to invest in them and not only have a commercial relationship.”
But this requires transparency. She added: “I think there is a no rightly deserved bad reputation of CVCs that should close doors. For that reason, it is key that CVCs show the value they bring in helping startups scale, instead of creating complicated contracts that limit their growth.”
One of her first investments at Eon was Opower, which Quintana-Plaza helped set up a commercial contract with the Eon UK team that gave the portfolio company “the internationalisation angle that was key for their IPO [initial public offering in 2014 before Oracle acquired it two years later for $532m]”.
She added she was also very proud of backing integrated energy provider Thermondo, “the fastest-growing German startup this year,” which raised €21m in November, although Next47 was not mentioned in its press release at the time.
In a panel at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit she said: “The long-term future of energy will be different. For me it is in distributed energy.
“The long-term future of energy, especially when you look at developing countries, is not going to look anything like what we have here.
“In developing countries there will be no need to build large plants, transmission and distribution.
“You need billions to make these plants. With renewables it is accessible to those with millions so they are no longer the big players.”
“It is what happens with (for example) solar PV – the fact that everyone could have a solar panel on their rooftop. Renewables is a revolution.
“A bigger revolution is distributed renewables. That’s where the true revolution lies– it is not about managing the big assets, how do you deliver the equipment, install and maintain it – we will see compulsive microgrids and localised systems connected.”
Distributed electrification and connected e-mobility are two of five interconnected investment themes for Next47, the other three being autonomous machines, artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain,
Next47’s other deals last year include Germany-based mobile electricity meter Ubitricity with support of the business unit Siemens Energy Management, and US-based solid-state circuit breakers maker Atom Power, industrial 3D printing platform
Markforged’s $30m C round, Veo Robotics’ $12m A round and manufacturing software provider Identify3D’s multi-million-dollar round.
And Quintana-Plaza, who is “the very proud mother or two beautiful children, to whom I dedicate any time that I am not working,” said Europe could produce the next-generation of large companies in these fields. Her ambition was to “invest in the next European unicorns [private companies worth at least $1bn] and bring them to Siemens and our customer base”.
A straightforward career goal to reach the heights few others achieve seems appropriate for someone who knows how to reach the stars.