Powerlist Q&A – Basil Darwish, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital

Basil Darwish, a managing director who focuses on financial, regulatory and enterprise IT technologies for US-headquartered financial services firm Wells Fargo’s Strategic Capital unit, said: “In my career of 21 years, the past 10 years has been solely dedicated to corporate venture capital (CVC) spanning three geographies: Asia/Singapore (2011-2014), Silicon Valley (2014-2015), New York (2015-2018) and back in Silicon Valley (2018-present).

“Prior to that, I was in the technology industry for nearly a decade where I switched from a VC-backed telecoms startup to a Fortune 500 tech company.”

Darwish had spent almost seven years at financial services group Citi from 2009, where he spent the majority of his time in corporate venturing, first as a Singapore-based senior vice-president at Citi Ventures for three years from 2011 before relocating to Silicon Valley in a similar role. He joined Wells Fargo in 2016 to help the firm organise and scale a strategic investments practice.

“We are now considered one of the most active bank CVC investors,” Darwish added. “In my view, one differentiator of my group from most other CVCs are a couple of things:

(a) We can lead investments and syndicate funding rounds for participation from other partner VCs and CVCs. I believe that it is critical for a CVC to be able to step forward and facilitate the funding of innovation by leading and structuring financing rounds.
(b) Emphasis on connecting our portfolio companies with the parent company.”

For 2020, Darwish highlighted the following:

1. led a $20m series A for Trovata, a company on a mission to modernise the treasury function using automation;
2. invested in Socure, a company with a modern take on digital identity verification, now a unicorn.
3. invested in Greenlight, a children-focused fintech, now a unicorn.

Previous funding rounds include:

• led a $40m series C for H2O.ai and participated in a series D round
• led a $17m series C for OpenFin