Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2017: Courtney Robinson

Courtney Robinson, a principal and founding member at Advance Vixeid Partners (AVP), an independent investment firm established in partnership with US-based media group Advance Publications, is good at spotting an opportunity.

In August, Robinson and AVP led a $15m series B round for US-based Curology, which runs an online platform that enables users to share photos of their skin with qualified healthcare professionals who can then prescribe them with topical medication customised to their needs.

She joined as a founding member of AVP in October 2014, having previously held the same role as a founder at Amex Ventures, the strategic investment group of credit card company American Express, in 2011 “to help launch the venture efforts there and open the Palo Alto office”.

While the parent companies’ core businesses at both institutions are in different fields, Robinson has brought her own insights into helping set up AVP. For the GCV Rising Stars 2016 awards, she said: “I am proud of having been a founding member of both Amex Ventures and AVP, creating the infrastructure and processes to lay the foundation for a successful and efficient team.

“Many of the biggest challenges in corporate venturing are related to the sponsorship model. There is a fundamental disconnect between business units, who are focused on delivering results for this quarter or year, and corporate venture units that are thinking about how the world will look in five to 10 years.

“There are several examples of this structure preventing investments in companies that will go on to produce outsized returns.

“Part of what attracted me to the opportunity at AVP is that we made the decision, along with Advance, to operate outside of this structure and make decisions autonomous among our small team.”

Before joining Amex Ventures, Robinson worked at Plum District, a local commerce company targeting the amom and family vertical’, for less than a year in 2011. She started her career in investment banking at GCA Savvian after going to Columbia University to study economics, “where I played varsity field hockey”.