A member of the top 100 from the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist
John Doherty, senior vice-president at Verizon, has been responsible for all corporate development activities related to the implementation of Verizon’s corporate strategy, including joint ventures, strategic investments, acquisitions, divestitures and venture investments, since the start of 2013.
Doherty had joined Verizon a decade earlier in 2003 as chief financial officer and vice-president and led strategic repositioning of Verizon’s $10bn global portfolio, including more than 20 transactions valued at over $4bn.
Over the past decade Verizon Ventures has worked with more than 40 companies covering a range of industries, technologies and market segments, and has exited 10, with six trade sales in 2014. The most recent deals this year, data visualisation platform MapD, drone system PrecisonHawk, YourMechanic’s on-demand car repair, emerging markets internet connector Jana, internet of things (IoT) Veniam, 5G mobile network provider Kumu Networks and Latino media group Mitú, reflect the increase in dealmaking and ambition of the group year by year, following eight investments in the whole of 2014.
Doherty, in his annual review, said: “2015 was a momentous year for Verizon Ventures across the board, culminating in more deals than ever before. Many of our 10 new portfolio companies [that have raised an aggregate $391.6m] reflect our commitment to investing in young, up-and-coming industries that are primed to have a huge impact.
“A great example is our series A investment in Urgent.ly, a startup that is bringing on-demand Uber-like convenience to roadside assistance. We also participated in Skyward’s seed round to help the startup build critical infrastructure that is required as commercial unmanned aerial vehicles become more widely used.
“2015 saw huge growth in IoT, and Verizon Ventures continued to invest in companies like Filament to help bring this technology to the masses in practical use cases.”
Verizon Ventures also last year made 12 follow-on investments worth $34.4m in aggregate round sizes.
Verizon Ventures also ran the 2015 Powerful Answers Award contest, set up by Mark Smith, a year-long global challenge to discover and help bring to market three technologies that show promise for addressing some of the world’s greatest challenges in the emergency response (Bounce Imaging), transportation (Zizmos Technology) and healthcare categories (Pogo).
