Matthew Cowan, veteran venture capitalist and the co-founder and managing partner of growth equity firm Bridgescale Partners, has joined industrial conglomerate Siemens’ Next47 corporate venturing unit in California.
Cowan co-founded Bridgescale with business partner Rob Chaplinsky in the mid-2000s. Their exits include the flotations of cybersecurity company Proofpoint and compensation software provider Xactly, and the sales of Jasper to Cisco, Rypple to Salesforce and Dayforce to Ceridian.
Germany-based Siemens set up Next47 in June 2016 to invest €1bn ($1.25bn at current rates) over five years, though the fund will shift to an evergreen model over the next few weeks or months according to an insider, meaning it will be able to reinvest the profits from its deals.
Next47 was formed out of the corporate’s former Siemens Venture Capital unit but with greater autonomy from business units to try and find new markets and disruptive companies.
The fund has a three C’s model of providing ‘capital’, ‘creating’ intrapreneurs through a partnership with accelerator Techstars and being a ‘catalyst’ to business units to open markets for startup portfolio companies.
Although Next47 is run by Lak Ananth out of California, the corporate venturing unit has teams in Europe and is expected to expand in China in 2019.