Girish Nadkarni (pictured), president of Switzerland-based power and automation group ABB’s corporate venturing unit, ABB Technology Ventures, has left, with ABB Switzerland CFO Rene Cotting taking over his position on an interim basis.
Nadkarni said: “Working on a couple of interesting fund concepts. Watch this space!”
The other members of the ABB Technology Ventures team remain with the unit. Grant Allen is covering the US and Americas, Kurt Kaltenegger is responsible for Europe and Africa, and Arvind Vasu for Asia.
Nadkarni had been president of ABB Technology Ventures since 2009 and made strategic equity investments in areas of interest to ABB, including in alternative energy, clean energy, smart grids and superconductivity. He had instigated the refounding of ABB’s corporate venturing unit seven years ago.
Nadkarni said when receiving his 2014 GCV Powerlist award: “We were sitting on a lot of cash and due to the financial crisis the venture capital community was sitting on its hands not doing a lot of investing.
“Like most large companies, we too suffered from the not-invented-here problem, and setting this up would address a whole bunch of issues. We now have a tremendous amount of acceptance internally.”
That was some understatement for a team that has invested more than $150m in 15 industrial technology and energy companies, exiting six of them.
With regard to this year’s GCV Powerlist award for Nadkarni in May, Ulrich Spiesshofer, president and CEO of ABB, said: “In the digital environment, technologies are being developed and are converging at a rapid and accelerating pace, challenging business models and transforming industries.
“As a pioneering technology leader, ABB created ABB Technology Ventures seven years ago to broaden our options for the future by scouting emerging technologies and business models, and making strategic investments.
“In this regard, Girish and his team at ATV has done an outstanding job of identifying and investing in areas such as robotics, machine learning, augmented reality and cybersecurity. All of us at ABB share in Girish’s pride in having been chosen once again for this honour by Global Corporate Venturing.”
ATV’s investments so far in 2016 include intelligent sensor developer PointGrab, robotics technology provider Soft Robotics and robotic arm developer Automata.
Prior to setting up ABB Technology Ventures, Nadkarni was senior vice-president of ABB’s robotics division. He also worked at venture capital firm View Group, and as an entrepreneur at startups VSimplify and Uniprise.
Among other roles, Nadkarni has worked at industrial conglomerate GE, financial group Prudential and law firm Shearman & Sterling. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and studied law, economics and statistics at University of Mumbai.