Jon Harms, senior director at Cisco Investments, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2025.

Jon Harms joined Cisco Investments in 2020 after a successful career in investment banking, where he advised large-cap technology clients such as Google, IBM and VMware on their major acquisitions. Harms was attracted to Cisco Investments for its dual focus on M&A and venture workstreams. 

Harms leads coverage for Cisco’s Outshift incubation unit and also supports Cisco’s observability franchise. He played a key role on the team that led Cisco’s $28bn acquisition of Splunk, announced in September 2023, which was the largest acquisition in Cisco’s history. Following the acquisition Cisco became one of the largest software companies globally. 

He also played a pivotal role in launching Cisco’s $1bn AI Fund, announced in June 2024. Cisco also announced three foundational investments in Cohere, Mistral AI and Scale AI and Harms led Cisco’s investment in Lightning AI, where he sits on the board as an observer. 

“You want to make sure that something you do over here does not conflict with something that is happening over there, but also you want to do what is right for your portfolio companies”

The Cisco team backs startups in a number of areas, from security and data centres to networking and mobility, but AI is a common thread woven through most current investments 

According to Harms, working at Cisco is exciting because it grants access to a large ecosystem of innovators. “There are a lot of great minds here and I learn a lot from our engineering leaders. To me, this is the best part about being in house, because the practitioner’s view is one you do not always get externally.”  

However, it also presents unique challenges. “It is important to keep up to speed with different roadmaps and reconcile those – both because you want to make sure that something you do over here does not conflict with something that is happening over there, but also because you want to do what is right for your portfolio companies,” he says.  

“You do not want to invest in something if you are building a competing product that is going to launch. You need to stay on top of that, which can be a lot in a company of Cisco’s size.”

See the full list of Emerging Leaders 2025 here.