The rest of the 100 (in alphabetical order): Aymerik Renard, director, Western Digital Capital
It is a risk of mergers and acquisitions that the buyer will prefer its existing team and overlook the talents of those joining but, instead, Western Digital recognised the venture talents coming over with SanDisk and promoted Aymerik Renard to be director at Western Digital Capital.
Daniel Flynn, vice-president of corporate development and strategy at Western Digital, said: “As you are probably aware, Western Digital closed its acquisition of SanDisk in May. As a result of the combination, we have combined our respective corporate venture capital arms into a single Western Digital Capital.
“On our team of about 10 team members, Aymerik is only one of two professionals dedicated full-time to Western Digital Capital. As such, Aymerik has been instrumental in driving this integration, leading efforts around managing our combined portfolio of companies, launching our Western Digital Capital website, and our go-forward investments in innovative startups that improve how data is generated, saved, managed, and consumed.”
Renard said by heading the North American venture capital investing efforts at Western Digital, he also had “an eye on Europe and Asia as well, investing across startups relevant to all of our major brands and divisions – WD, SanDisk, HGST and G-Technology”.
Before the integration, and “at the request of SanDisk’s CEO,” Renard said: “I defined and launched a targeted fund of funds activity to complement our direct investment strategy, supporting great investment teams.
I have also expanded our investment domains from classic storage systems and technologies to frontier tech, covering the internet of things (IoT), drones, augmented reality, virtual reality. computer vision, automotive systems, and space imaging and sensor fusion.
On the consumer IoT front, for instance, it is exciting to see a portfolio company like August go from concept to having multiple award-winning products in the market, and being featured on stage by Apple during one of the iconic keynotes.”
Earlier in his career, Renard headed North American investing for France Telecom-Orange for a dozen years across hardware, software, and services, with some of its portfolio companies listing on Nasdaq and New York stock exchanges, and others being acquired by Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Cisco, SAP, IBM, Cox Automotive, and Cable & Wireless.
In between France Telecom-Orange and Sandisk, Renard headed startup business development for supply chain firm PCH International, helping consumer electronics and IoT companies with design, manufacturing, fulfillment, and distribution aspects, spending extensive time in Hong Kong and China’s greater Shenzhen region. While there he also co-founded the Highway1 accelerator for hardware startups.
As Renard said of why he was initially interested in corporate venturing: “I have essentially always been interested in the how information technology is conceptualised, created, marketed, sold, used and regulated.
“That was reflected in my academic pursuits at Carnegie Mellon University, where I majored in information and decision systems as well as policy and management.
“That has also been reflected in the jobs I held while in university, such as teaching a third year software engineering methodology course lab, developing reservation software for CMU’s housing office, and being a campus representative for Apple.”
Given such an interest in the overview of how technology works, his hobby of drone-based aerial photography comes as no surprise.
