Nagraj Kashyap, senior vice-president of ventures and innovation at US-based semiconductor company Qualcomm, was raised in New Delhi, India, moved to the US in 1992 to gain a master’s degree in computer science from University of Texas, Austin, and never left.
He joined Qualcomm Ventures in 2003 and oversaw the North America ventures team until 2007 when he was appointed head of global venturing.
Kashyap said: “When I joined Qualcomm Ventures in 2003, we made two investments that year. In the last three years, we are averaging 18 investments per year.” This makes the business consistently ranked a top three corporate venturer in terms of activity.
Kashyap grew the portfolio to more than 100 investments from ten in 2003 and grew the team from five to 30 today with 20 investment professionals. He has secured three exits worth more than $1bn – Mems chip company Invensense and antivirus company Netqin, which were both listed, and traffic navigation app Waze, which was sold to search engine Google – and the portfolio has had more than 35 exits.
The group is now present in seven geographies – US, China, Europe, Brazil, India, Korea and Israel. The group started with a $500m US fund but has subsequently announced a $100m China fund, €100m Europe fund and $100m Qualcomm Life fund.
He began his career as a software engineer at Nortel, Motorola and 3Com/US Robotics before moving to management consulting firm PRTM, now part of PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Kashyap serves on the board or as an observer at Brain Corp and Sotera Wireless. Previous board or observer positions include Bitfone (HP), Novarra (Nokia), Gaikai (Sony) , Clicker (CBS), Avaak (Netgear) and Airvana (initial public offering followed by acquisition). In June this year the group launched a $100m fund to invest in mobile health opportunities and has so far made six investments in that field, while Qualcomm Ventures has also supported early-stage deals with its QPrize.
Kashyap said: “This is one of the most interesting and fun jobs you can have, from matching people and technologies to Qualcomm, to helping take small companies to the next level.”
The corporate venturing seed fund Kashyap started, QPrize, is able to close investments in three weeks.
In 2008, Kashyap took over business development/operations for Qualcomm’s corporate research and development (R&D) efforts and managed a team of more than 15 people.
Kashyap said Qualcomm “incubated Vuforia [Qualcomm’s free computer vision software platform for developers) within corporate R&D. Vuforia now has the largest footprint among developers for computer vision SDK’.
He added: “We are viewed as a strategic sensor for Qualcomm but the group also has very strong financial discipline. If the investment does not fare well financially, there is no strategic benefit. Corporate investors need to align with all the stakeholders in the ecosystem – entrepreneurs and financial venture capital firms and being financially disciplined allows corporate investors to do the same.”
