David ‘Dede’ Goldschmidt has been appointed head of Samsung Catalyst Fund (SCF), an evergreen vehicle for South Korea-headquartered consumer electronics manufacturer Samsung Electronics, to lead the unit’s global activities.
Goldschmidt has been in the venture capital ecosystem for two decades. SCF hired him in 2015 as an Israel-based managing director to oversee investments in the country and in Europe, covering areas including 5G, artificial intelligence, automotive, cloud, healthcare, quantum and robotics technologies.
Managing directors Christopher Chu, Scott Levine and Nicolas Autret – selected as Global Corporate Venturing’s Rising Stars in 2019 and 2018, and Emerging Leader 2021 respectively – will form part of SCF’s leadership team alongside Goldschmidt.
GCV Powerlist 2020 members Shankar Chandran and Francis Ho have meanwhile departed their SCF co-head roles after more than eight years at the unit.
They will join Young Sohn, who was included in the Powerlist 2019 roster while serving as Samsung chief strategy officer for Samsung Electronics, to form a deep technology and new data-focused venture capital fund dubbed Walden Catalyst.
Sohn took up a senior adviser role at Samsung in January 2021 and continues to serve as chairman of the board for Harman, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the corporate.
Chandran said in an email: “I joined Samsung in February 2013 to start this effort with Young Sohn and Francis Ho. We have succeeded in building a world-class global corporate venture team that has backed outstanding entrepreneurs.
“It has been an honour to have the opportunity to build a team that has backed companies like Ring, Habana, Babble Labs, Preventice, Graphcore, Sambanova, Fungible, IonQ, Valens, Innoviz, Wefox, Blaize, Genome Medical, Avicena and more.”
Photo of Dede Goldschmidt courtesy of LinkedIn.
