Burak Gursel, acquisition and integration manager at Simpson Strong-Tie is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2025.
Burak Gursel has spent more than 20 years at building products company Simpson Strong-Tie, but in recent years he has taken on a new role – leading the company’s venture investing efforts as the unit’s acquisition and integration manager.
“During the covid-19 pandemic, we started to see more VC-backed companies in our domain,” says Gursel. Recognising the need to tap into this new ecosystem, Gursel began making investments in venture capital funds to capture some of the innovative startup ideas.
More recently, he has also started to make direct investments, including taking a stake in Higharc, which provides cloud-based software for managing home building. The investments are made from the corporate balance sheet with a typical cheque size of around $1m and a focus on series A.
“The investment part is easy, but the challenge is the time commitment and technical expertise needed to really get value out of these investments.”
Direct investing has brought a steep learning curve. “The investment part is easy, but the challenge is the time commitment and technical expertise needed to really get value out of these investments,” Gursel says. To address this, the company set up an innovation team to manage the startup relationships. This has given Gursel more time to devote to the networking and relationship-building aspects of the role.
Gursel is particularly excited about technologies that can help Simpson’s builder customers, such as design and customisation software. “Builders are a key focus for us, so solving their problems and staying relevant to them is important,” he says.
He says that building the types of structures in which Simpson’s products are used – mainly wood-framed residential structures in the US – is relatively easy to automate using AI, so there is an imperative for the company to stay up to date on these developments.
Training and specification software is another area of interest, as the company looks to use technologies such as AR and VR to upskill its workforce.
See the full list of Rising Stars 2025 here.
