Ashish Patel, a managing director and a member of the management review committee at Intel Capital, the in-house venture arm of the US-based chip maker, has joined one of his portfolio companies.
Patel will be senior vice president of corporate development at AVG, a Czech Republic-based software maker that has the world’s most downloaded anti-virus program with more than 110 million users.
Patel was previously a board member at AVG for three years on behalf of Intel Capital after the corporate venturer took a minority stake of 20% as part of a recapitalization of the company in 2005.
Founded in 1991, AVG, formerly known as Grisoft, first received private equity backing in 2001 when Prague-based investment bank Benson Oak took a stake before becoming 100% owner in 2004. It then sold 65% to Poland-based private equity firm Enterprise Investors and Intel Capital a year later for $52m.
In October, US-based growth investor TA Associates invested $200m in AVG at a reported $900m company valuation for a minority stake, with Enterprise being cut from 45% to 35%, according to news provider VentureWire.
Patel said: "The opportunity to leverage AVG’s innovative business model to continue to take market share through product enhancement and geographic expansion is enormous."
Patel spent more than a decade at Intel Capital, having joined in 1999 as a founding member of the firm in Europe and rose to be responsible for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region and opened the London, Moscow, Dubai and most recently, Johannesburg offices. He led investments in more than 50 technology start-ups, including CSR (floated in the UK), Plastic Logic, Suse (sold to Novell), MySQL (acquired by Sun) and Russian search engine Yandex and sits on the boards of Colibrys and IP Access.
Prior to Intel Capital, Patel was an investment director with Actis, a UK-based private equity firm investing in emerging markets, where he was a member of the telecom team.
Patel’s appointment comes just six months after AVG made Dale Fuller its permanent chairman.