Frederic Rombaut, the UK-based head of corporate development international at US-listed computer network equipment supplier Cisco Systems, has this month left to run his own investment and advisory service, FR Development.
The move is the latest change at Cisco, which in October promoted Hilton Romanski, its senior vice-president of corporate development who covers mergers and acquisitions as well as the company’s $2bn private equity and venture capital portfolio, to chief strategy officer.
Romanski in turn promoted Rob Salvagno to head of Cisco corporate development and investments reporting to him.
Rombaut said his replacement had yet been chosen but that Cisco was looking at a number of options, including hiring people to run the digital acceleration initiative in Europe. Rombaut set up Cisco commitments to invest in VC funds as well as £150m ($210m) directly in the UK, $200m in France, $100m in Italy and, this month, $500m in Germany.
Cisco said its planned investments through the Deutschland Digital initiative would include specific digitisation projects, research projects and an expansion of the Cisco Networking Academy, as well as human resources and infrastructure spending along with investments in VC funds, with priority areas such as security, cloud, and internet of things (IoT).
Cisco has also recently made an investment in Berlin, Germany-based IoT provider Relayr, which closed its series A round in November with $11m from VC firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Munich Venture Partners, and angel investors Tom Noonan, who co-founded energy management company JouleX (acquired by Cisco in 2013), and Josef Brunner (now CEO of Relayr).
These European national commitments, including to noted VC firms such as Partech and Index, were seen as a shift back towards indirect investing – making limited partner commitments to third party venture capital funds – with direct investing as usually a co-investment alongside a VC.
Cisco had committed to multiple VC funds more than a decade ago but despite strong returns from some, notably Softbank’s China fund which invested in online retailer Alibaba, had in aggregate lost money.
Rombaut said the latest approach was a way to put more money out more quickly and, as it required less due diligence on deals, meant more of the digital disruption and innovation affecting Cisco could be covered.
At FR Development, Rombaut said his initial work was in advising an entrepreneur raising a VC fund to help bridge the gap between startups and larger corporations, and advising on the acquisition of a larger corporation of which he would sit on the board.
Before joining Cisco in January 2012, Rombaut had been managing director of US-listed chip company Qualcomm’s European ventures unit for six years, and for nearly the same amount of time at private equity firm Apax Partners.