Mark Brooks, associate director for innovation and strategic partnerships at the US-based Association of International Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA), will join corporate venture capital unit Syngenta Ventures in mid-January.
Syngenta Ventures is the corporate venturing arm of Switzerland-based agribusiness Syngenta, which has been a subsidiary of Chinese state-owned enterprise ChemChina since 2017.
Shankar Shubhang and Colin Steen, respectively Switzerland and US-based managing directors of Syngenta Ventures, had been looking to expand the team through new hires after the departure of figures including Derek Norman, who joined peer Bayer in March this year.
Of his move to Syngenta, Brooks said: “It will be a neat match for me in that it combines my early career experience in ag/science, my own startup experience, and recent fintech experience with the AICPA/CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants) startup accelerator.”
The organisations set up an accelerator in 2017 to fuel disruptive technology in the accounting industry, partially through automation, and has provided an inaugural group of four startups with seed money and access to market expertise and leaders.
At 2018’s GCV Symposium, Brooks said: “The accounting profession is going to change profoundly over the course of our lifetime, mainly because of automation processes with artificial intelligence and blockchain, and also because the way people are learning is changing.
“These changes are the reason we started looking at startups, because we know that the most provocative and coolest innovation emerges from them.”
Photo of Mark Brooks courtesy of LinkedIn.
