GCV Powerlist 2016: Matthew Koertge, Telstra

Telstra Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the Australia-based telecoms company, deploys a two-pronged global strategy.

At the GCV Symposium in London last year, Matthew Koertge, managing director
of Telstra Ventures, said: “We are looking for opportunities to expand Telstra’s core business, predominantly into Asia. And we are trying to find the world’s best solutions to apply in Australia.”

This work has been going well. For the Powerlist, Koertge said: “Telstra Ventures continues to make solid progress. We have just closed our 29th investment, since we started four years ago, and we have had six liquidity events to date, which have realised a significant amount of capital.”

The most recent exit was November’s sale of Elastica to Bluecoat for $280m, only eight months after its $30m B round closed, while its other similar events include Box’s flotation and trade sales for Dimmi, Elemental and Ooyala and the merger of Enepath with Itech.

In Janaury, Telstra Ventures, invested in its largest round so far, China-based cloud-storage service provider Qiniu’s $100m series D round.

The round also included Harvest Global Investments and China Broadband Capital (CBC) but Telstra Ventures’ share was “not too far away from” the $5m to $10m it typically invests, Koertge told The Australian.

It might have the resources to do even more, following Telstra’s agreed sale of most of its stake in China-based Autohome, for an accounting gain of about A$1.8bn.

Of its investments, Telstra Ventures’ most recent was its backing of web server Nginx. This was led by Koertge’s co-managing director, Mark Sherman, in their 14-strong team based in Australia, China and Silicon Valley.

Koertge was formerly a general partner at Accede Capital Venture Partners, having previously spent more than eight years in banks’ investment teams, at Macquarie and Deutsche Bank, and earlier as a project manager at Fujitsu’s telecoms products group.