Kasper Sage was promoted from principal to partner at BMW i Ventures, Germany-based carmaker BMW’s corporate venturing arm, in January this year.
The promotion came in the wake of Sage being chosen as one of Global Corporate Venturing’s 2019 Rising Stars recipients, which were announced at this year’s GCVI Summit. Sage had sourced three deals led by the unit, led two deals himself and helped close six new investments since he joined it in July 2017.
Sage told GCV: “I am currently involved in managing 10 of our 37 investments [of which] I am directly managing six – Urgent.ly, Blackmore, May Mobility, GaN Systems, Bus.com and Rever – and co-managing additional four companies: Nauto, Scoop, Fair and Shift.
“I also executed about 12 follow-on investments and managed the fundraising process…even if it is too early to say, the IRR (internal rate of return) development has so far been above industry average.”
Concerning his new role, Sage added: “My key objective is to keep outperforming our steep IRR goals with the current fund while adding significant value to our portfolio companies as well as BMW’s business units.
“Being a partner now, I also have the goal to successfully raise our second fund and potentially transforming it into a multi-LP mobility-focused fund.
“What we see in transportation is that in order to respond to the challenges and opportunities of electric and autonomous vehicles, players from multiple industries have to team up in order to be successful going forward.
“Taking the learnings and successes from BMW and bringing them to a larger set of the ecosystem to form strong alliances would be my goal.”
Photo of Kasper Sage courtesy of Medium.
