Yogan Appalsamy brings fintech investment experience to the table, joining the bank from Standard Chatered's CVC unit.
Yogan Appalsamy, photo courtesy of LinkedIn
Yogan Appalsamy has joined the UK corporate bank Barclays as director of the principal investments team, which oversees the company’s corporate venturing activities.
Appalsamy has experience working in strategic fintech investment. He joins after three years working for SC Ventures, the CVC arm of Standard Chartered, another bank. Before that, he spent two years with Standard Chartered in its fintech investment banking division, which he joined as an associate director before moving up to a director position.
Barclays runs a number of corporate venture capital funds including Climate Ventures, which invests in cleantech startups. The team also launched the Barclays Black Formation Investments (BBFI) in 2023, which is managed by Zeal Capital Partners. The BBFI invests in pre-seed companies with black leaders.
In January, Barclays’ Climate Ventures fund took part in the $13m series A funding round for Origen Power, which makes a limestone-based carbon dioxide removal technology. In the same month, BBFI took part in Kaya AI’s $5.3m pre-seed funding round. Kaya makes supply chain optimisation software for the construction industry.
The bank mostly invests in fintech startups, however. In September last year, it was part of the $60m series C extension round for Form3, a payments processing platform, which also drew funding from Visa and Mastercard.
