George Ugras (pictured), former general partner and advisor at venture capital firm Frost Data Capital, has joined New York-listed technology company IBM as managing director of its corporate venturing unit.
Ugras replaces Claudia Fan Munce, who announced her retirement from IBM at the end of January during the Global Corporate Venturing and Innovation Summit.
In an interview with Global Corporate Venturing (GCV) embargoed until today, Ugras said: “I have been engaged with the corporate venturing community for many years and have seen it evolve to become a significant element in almost every corporations innovation agenda and a larger player in the venture landscape overall.
“Now I am delighted to join the group as a full participant and look forward to contributing to making it even more impactful.”
He said his approach at IBM would be in line with the insights developed during 15 years as a VC and work at Frost helping General Electric and other clients develop startups suitable for acquisition, which it called “intentional M&A”.
This Frost comment described intentional M&A as: “Frost Data Capital specialises in launching startups to solve specific analytic and big data problems identified jointly with corporate partners. It believes that while corporate venturing, development and internal research and development address certain needs, they have frequently fallen short in providing predictable, scalable outcomes.
“The venture model relies on a blow-out success in each fund to provide a good return, while at Frost our model looks for more predictable outcomes at a lower sale-price to our partners and network. For this to work we need fewer write-offs and have to be very capital efficient.”
In 2014, Frost announced a partnership with General Electric to launch up to 30 companies over three years.
In a panel discussion at our GCV Symposium last year, Ugras explained his model of corporate venturing, which involves finding people with innovative ideas inside corporates, and developing those in line with corporate objectives. He described it as “another asset class, to be added to M&A and R&D.”
Fan Munce, who will speak at the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium in London on 24 May and will introduce Ugras onstage there, in January had explained her search for her replacement had wanted to find someone able to bring a fresh perspective on corporate venturing from outside the industry, albeit one who understood it and IBM well.
In an interview with VentureBeat, Ugras said: “IBM has tremendous technology assets around cloud and cognitive technology like Watson.
“We measure our own success in IBM Ventures in our impact on the corporation.”
IBM has partnerships with Apple, LinkedIn and Box and Ugras told VentureBeat that IBM would do more of these kinds of partnerships and was “open-minded in how we engage with startups”.
IBM said last year it invested more than $13bn in research and development – filing more than 7,000 patent, capital expansions, 14 acquisitions and strategic investments.
Kevin Reardon, IBM’s vice president of corporate development, said in a statement seen by VentureBeat: “George will be a valued member of IBM’s Venture organizations, bringing years of expertise in strategic areas such as big data, analytics and cloud.
“In addition to his work with the VC community, George will extend IBM’s reach into the global community of entrepreneurs and unleash new opportunities that drive growth and innovation for IBM.”
Regarding his predecessor, Ugras told VentureBeat he met Fan Munce 17 years ago when corporate venturing was less well-respected. He said: “There has been a change in the traditional corporate venture fund. Every company has one. But Claudia played a huge role in transforming the corporate venture capital industry. I give her all the credit for that.”
Ugras in his LinkedIn profile said he was founder of CyteGen, a healthcare startup, and had been a partner at Adams Capital Management (ACM) after joining from private equity firm Apax in 1999 until his move to Frost in 2015.