Intel Capital has promoted four to managing director (MD), a rank that now comes with “expanded responsibilities,” after a team structure review and following the departure of some vice-presidents, including Lisa Lambert, last month.
The new MDs (all pictured) are:
- Ameet Bhansali, covering new technologies, which will include augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), wearables, robotics and drones;
- Anthony Lin, for the Greater Asia region;
- Trina Van Pelt, for the internet of things sector; and
- Bob Nunn, leading mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and business development on the datacentre, cloud computing and big data sector, while Bryan Wolf continues to head equity investments in the sector.
In other new or expanded assignments:
- Marcin Hejka will head activity for greater Europe and India following the departure of Marcos Battisti, vice-president for western Europe and Israel, in May;
- Ken Elefant has added software to his portfolio after the departure of Lambert (to become managing partner at Westly Group), while continuing to lead Intel Capital’s security group;
- Ramamurthy Sivakumar will lead Intel Capital’s new focus on industry verticals, which will include areas such as sports, healthcare and other investments that span multiple Intel business units.
Dave Flanagan will continue to be responsible for mobile client and communications, while Keith Larson continues to lead manufacturing, memory and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).
As one insider said: “Keith Larson and Dave Flanagan also oversee M&A and biz dev [business development] and equity…similar to Marcin, Trina, Anthony, Ken, Siva….they all mirror Wendell’s role…essentially driving decision making one layer down.”
The new structure gives most of its managing directors expanded responsibilities to include equity investing, mergers and acquisitions and business development, such as Marc Yi, vice-president at Intel Capital, whose portfolio company Sprinklr bought Postano from TigerLogic earlier in the year.
In its statement of the promotions and team changes, Intel Capital said: “With a single senior Intel Capital leader overseeing the entrepreneurial community’s engagements with Intel’s business units, we can pursue collaborations and transactions with greater agility; better leverage our deep industry and technical knowledge; and focus resources on supporting entrepreneurs post-deal execution.
“Our new framework equips us to focus even more keenly on the ‘virtuous cycle’ of technology in our future investing and build on the incredible track record of Intel Capital, which is set to close a strong first half of 2016.”
In an earlier blog post that followed its decision to keep its portfolio after a review of secondaries options, Wendell Brooks, president of Intel Capital, had hinted at a new team structure to “streamline our investment process, give our startups more exposure to the breadth of Intel’s business units, and ensure we are servicing our portfolio in even more valuable ways long after we make the investment”.
The potential $1bn secondaries sale of a group of portfolio companies was rejected after a review but Intel has been increasingly active in turning over its shareholdings this year.
Intel Capital was ranked first by data provider PrivCo for venture-backed exits as of April 22, up from sixth last year.
A review by Global Corporate Venturing through its GCV Analytics database of at least 10 Intel Capital exits so far this year include:
Nexmo to Vonage for $230m
Onefinestay to AccorHotels for $168m
Ascending Technologies to Intel
Rocketick to Cadence Design Systems
Joyent to Samsung
Icontrol to Comcast and Alarm.com
Revolution Analytics to Microsoft
Coldlight Solutions to PTC
Intrasoft on the India stock exchange
Emotient to Apple
And the planned flotation of Impinj on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
However, Intel Capital has remained active on investments with at least 33 tracked, excluding additional rounds from third-parties for existing portfolio companies.
These investments include:
Leading Lightbend’s $20m round, Voke’s $12.5m A round and Lumiata’s $10m round;
Co-lead on Ninebot; and
CoreOs’s $28m B round, Apache Flink’s $6m round, Enovix’s strategic investment, ProGlove’s $2.2m A round, PrecisionHawk’s $18m round, Manaa’s $26m round, HelpShift’s $23m B round, Hungama’s $25m round, Skyport System’s $30m C round, IndiaMart’s C round, Inpria’s follow-on round, Reflektion’s $18m B round, DataRobot’s $33m B round, MariaDB’s $9m round, GigaSpaces’ follow-on investment round, Savioke’s round, Mark One’s $4m round, Viridity’s $8.5m round, Reno Sub Systems’ $14m B round, Data Artisans’ $6.3m A round, Bromium’s $40m round, Airware’s $30m round, Stratoscale’s $27m round, Enlighted’s $25m D round, IP Commerce’s undisclosed sum A round, Cymbet’s $10m round, FreedomPop’s $50m C round and What3Words’ $8.5m B round.
Other deals include Intel Education accelerator graduate GotIt (in which Intel committed $100,000), raising $9m, Strategic Cyber Ventures extending TrapX’s Intel-backed series B round, 1mg raising $15m after Intel’s backing last year, Arrayent gaining $4m from Orix Ventures, adding to the $11m it raised in September from Intel Capital and others, Atlantic Bridge adding $10m to the $20m data integration software provider Striim raised from investors including Intel Capital in September, Mirai Creation Fund proving $5m to Intel-backed UIEvolution and Molex investing an undisclosed amount in USIntel-backed Ossia.
Under Brooks, Intel Capital is active beyond traditional corporate venture capital, with the latest batch for its Intel Education Accelerator starting after applications closed on 22 April and Intel agreeing to acquire Itseez, a computer vision algorithms and implementations service.
Intel, Chunghwa Telecom and SanJet also agreed to collaborate to create a connected transportation platform service to enable cars with usage-based insurance or interactive fleet management capability.
Picture: L to R: Ameet Bhansali (MD, New Technologies); Anthony Lin (MD, Greater Asia); Trina Van Pelt (Vice President & MD, IoT); Bob Nunn (MD, Cloud Computing and Big Data); source: Intel Capital