Osei Van Horne is a founding member, managing partner and global head of sustainable growth equity investing of JP Morgan Private Capital, US-based financial services and investment group JP Morgan’s new strategic investment arm formed in June this year.
He is joined by Christopher Dawe, a former co-head of Goldman Sachs’ private investment group, in the team. Van Horne focuses on investments across industries, especially companies that focus on climate action, inclusive growth and environmental, social and corporate governance, while Dawe leads the unit’s technology and consumer growth equity business.
Van Horne and Dawe report to the group’s chief executive Brian Carlin, who had been head of JP Morgan’s wealth management solutions group. Rick Smith, who led private investments at JPMorgan Chase, serves as chairman of the group while Meg McClellan leads private debt. The group falls under the auspices of Anton Pil, global head of alternatives.
Previously, Van Horne was a founding member and managing director of the technology practice of Wells Fargo Strategic Capital (WFSC), a $2bn growth and private equity investment vehicle for the US-based bank.
Van Horne has 20 years of principal investing and corporate finance experience. Prior to joining Wells Fargo, Van Horne was an investment professional in the merchant banking division at Goldman Sachs in New York, where he executed equity and mezzanine transactions from an on-balance sheet, multi-strategy growth capital fund.
Before that, Van Horne was a mergers and acquisitions technology investment banker at Wells Fargo (formerly Wachovia Securities), where he executed transactions in business services and technology industries. Additionally, Van Horne worked in the United States Senate in Washington, DC for Senator John McCain. Van Horne is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, where he teaches private equity and M&A.
“Corporate venture capital (CVC) has the potential to provide meaningful, differentiated value-add to management teams through the CVC’s parent company’s ecosystem and resources,” Van Horne said.
After co-founding the WFSC group in 2017, Van Horne was responsible for recruiting and retaining a staff of investment professionals. He helped devise and execute the multi-strategy investment mandate that focuses on growth stage and private equity investments in technology companies across the Wells Fargo geographic footprint including North America, Europe and Asia.
Additionally, Van Horne co-led Wells Fargo’s equity investments in online shipping platform Flexport, working space provider Industrious, property technology developer Reonomy, on-demand storage provider Clutter, property manager Mynd Property Management and Sitetracker, the asset-tracking software developer formerly known as Sitetraker, among others.
Regarding what all corporate venturers can do to improve the industry, Van Horne said: “CVCs should constantly self-examine and innovate on their own internal processes and approaches to venture investment. The industry should apply first principles around serving the entrepreneur and adjust its approaches wherever possible: be swift, transparent, realistic and align interests.”
