Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2017: #12 Trina van Pelt

Trina van Pelt was last year promoted to co-lead Intel Capital’s diversity fund, after the departure of last year’s GCV Rising Star 2016 Lisa Lambert to be managing partner at VC firm Westly Group.

Intel is one of the few technology firms to champion gender equality, and under Wendell Brooks, president of Intel Capital and head of the US-listed chip maker’s mergers and acquisitions’ team, this emphasis also reaches its corporate venturing unit and portfolio companies.

Intel Capital’s five-year $125m Diversity Fund targets startups launched by women and minorities and is run by Van Pelt and Christine Herron, director at Intel Capital. Van Pelt also manages and develops Intel Capital’s talent pool of junior deal professionals.

The fund’s goal, Brooks said at its annual CEO conference, was to reach out to entrepreneurs often overlooked by mainstream corporate venturing and venture capital investors.

As vice-president and managing director of internet of things and automated driving, Van Pelt has worked closely with Brooks and said she was responsible for all equity investing, M&A and strategic business development in those segments.

She was promoted in June to managing director and has led more than 70 technology acquisitions and investments worth more than $30bn, and has been the recipient of two Intel Achievement Awards, which are won by fewer than 2% of employees annually.

She said her biggest achievements included Intel’s $4.1bn research and development and equity investment in Netherlands-based chip developer ASML, the acquisitions of Altera for $16.7bn in late 2015, Wind River in 2009 and the Axxia business of LSI/Avago for $650m in mid-2014, and the strategy development in autonomous driving.

Van Pelt said she was attracted to corporate venturing due to its “strategic role and impact – connecting deals into business strategy” and she wanted to “be a key influencer in Intel’s autonomous driving and internet-of-things growth strategy and execution”.

With about 20 years of M&A experience, her advice to the corporate venturing industry was “have price discipline and do not inflate valuations”.

Prior to Intel Capital, Van Pelt was in-house at CNet, where she led more than 20 investments and acquisitions and managed a portfolio of 37 investments, and earlier in financial advisory services with Ernst & Young, investment banking with Lehman Brothers, and earlier in private equity with TA Associates following her master’s degree from Stanford Graduate School of Business.