Pramila Mullan has been a senior principal at Accenture Ventures, the corporate venture capital unit of management consultancy Accenture, for three years.
Accenture Ventures’ mission is to partner and invest in the next wave of growth-stage companies that leverage innovative technologies and solutions and help Accenture become the innovation partner of choice for the consultancy’s clients.
Mike Redding, head of Accenture Ventures, said: “Pramila has a passion to learn, grow and execute. She has evolved from supporting transactions to setting Accenture’s corporate investment and partnership agenda in such fundamentally strategic domains as China and artificial intelligence. Her collaborative style has been essential in engaging the most senior business executives at Accenture and gaining their buy-in as a truly trusted adviser and strategist.”
Mullan said: “My first year in CVC was a whirlwind as I built relationships with startups, entrepreneurs, investors, academic R&D, venture capitalists and corporate R&D groups around the world. In the second year, I began to see the results of my foundational efforts and focused on nurturing the relationships while maintaining a laser focus on growing revenue and maximising return on equity.
“This last year, I expanded my responsibilities as the segment lead for applied intelligence which led me to define our broader ecosystem strategy and enhancing partnership development in this key emerging technology. In addition to identifying key startups, I played a more proactive role in driving sales and revenues.
“I am part of an active team of three that covers North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, and generates significant results. We have added investments to our active portfolio, including our first investment in China as well as several key investments in Europe. We also completed two successful exits.”
Notable additions to Accenture Ventures investment portfolio in 2018 included:
- Quantexa (UK) – a provider of advanced analytics for financial institutions.
- Malong (China) – an artificial intelligence startup focused on computer vision for product image recognition and auto-tagging using breakthrough weakly-supervised deep learning algorithms.
- Ripjar (UK) – an intelligence platform for collecting and fusing both internal risk and compliance rules with external data sources.
- Upskill (US) – a wearable technology to connect hands-on workers from the factory to the warehouse to the jobsite.
- Maana (US) – an AI Knowledge Platform accelerates knowledge discovery for oil and gas.
Mullan added: “For most CVCs, having a healthy dealflow and pipeline continues to be a problem, especially given that the size of a typical investment from strategic investors is relatively small. Opportunities to build an ecosystem that fosters a syndication of deals across the community would accelerate growth.”
Before joining Accenture Ventures, she was a senior principal at Accenture Labs.
