Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2017: Kurt Kaltenegger

“He was my right-hand person and has migrated from being the chief technology officer to actively doing deals,” according to Girish Nadkarni, founder and head of ABB Technology Ventures (ATV), the corporate venture capital unit of Switzerland-based industrials group Asea Brown Boveri, as he departed to “work on a couple of interesting fund concepts” in November.

The “he” was Kurt Kaltenegger, group vice-president and head of technology at ATV, who has had his hand in almost all the successes of the corporate venturing team since 2010.

Kaltenegger, who joined ABB in 1991 after receiving his PhD in physics from Montanistic University in Austria, said: “After I built up the ABB research centre in China and established and pioneered the role of chief technology officer China for ABB from January 2007 to February 2010, I returned to the ABB headquarters in Switzerland to build up ATV together with Girish Nadkarni, who had already started late in 2009 working on the CVC concept for ABB.

“In ATV’s first years I was in the role of head of technology to screen the global technology development landscape for disruptive game changing technologies in scope and in vicinity to ABB’s business, was leading a number of due diligences in regard to equity investments and finally started to lead investments in early 2015.

Besides my involvement in [18] investments together with Girish Nadkarni, I lead the deals for PointGrab, an Israel startup in deep-learning-based vision sensor technology for home automation, in the E round investment and took the lead in the investment into Automata, an early stage robotics startup.”

His third deal as ATV’s lead was Scotrenewables, a UK-based tidal turbine developer that Kaltenegger said as a board member he helped “reorganise” and hire a new CEO we well as supported its successful application for a European Union grant of about $12m.

And in all three Kaltenegger is a board member.

He also mentioned his role in selling cybersecurity developer Industrial Defender to Lockheed Martin in March 2014 and Validus, a low voltage DC technology, to ABB in May 2011 just months after its minority investment.

Given his already near-20 years at ABB by the time he joined ATV, Kaltenegger said he was swayed the force of Nadkarni’s personality to join its then-nascent CVC unit.

He said: “First of all, it was Girish Nadkarni, an outstanding personality and a well-known name in the venture capital environment who attracted my attention to the ABB CVC discussion.

“My main motivation to be active in the CVC environment is that a corporate venture unit doing scouting and direct investments has a much stronger lever to impact the long-term future of the mother company than most of the other functions in the company.

“Equity investment give a limited-risk way to probe the future with high-risk disruptive technologies and gives an early learning to the company.”

These insights can be impactful, Kaltenegger said, noting that he had “changed ABB business units’ minds in regard to 3D printing, from a lukewarm interest to a number of activities and one investment, Persimmon, which I did the investment together with my team colleague Grant Allen.

“I could affect some directional changes in our R&D roadmaps, because of the insight into global dealflow and technology trends in our sector.”

However, he admitted that convincing ABB that corporate venturing was more than pre-acquisition dealflow and that startups could be as valuable partners as big name companies and the not-invented-here syndrome was a challenge.

As to the future, Kaltenegger said he was looking “to find new ways how a CVC institution could be combined with other elements of business development to get a well-established element of future agile business growth via technology leadership”.

And for the CVC industry he encouraged greater exchange of information, invitation to co-investments and a cross CVC dialogue, “as long as there is a non-competing situation” and they have “a clear mission and mission-aligned key performance indicators”.

As a parent of three children and skiing and hiking enthusiast, among other activities, however, Kaltenegger is used to climbing new peaks.