Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2017: Rohen Sood

Rohen Sood, investment manager at Reinventure Group, the corporate venture capital unit of Australia’s second-largest bank, Westpac, admits he has been “in a unique position of being the first and only employee for two years at the firm – joining at the fund’s inception”.

But he has turned this unique position to advantage as Reinventure is Australia’s largest fintech-focused VC managing two $50m funds sponsored by Westpac.

Sood said: “I worked on 13 ventures as well as 10 follow-on investments. I led the due diligence and investment process for seven of these deals – where we were the lead investor on each. I was also intimately involved in the raising of the second $50m fund.”

Simon Cant, head of Reinventure with co-founder Danny Gilligan, said: “Rohen Sood would absolutely be a great choice for this Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars 2017 award.

“He has been integral in a number of our more recent deals – Auror, OpenAgent and HyperAnna. He is incredibly astute and insightful, a hard worker and ruthlessly honest in his advice and decisions. He is a calm mind under pressure and a clear future leader in corporate VC or VC generally. He could well be described as the glue in the unit, but that would be to understate his talents as a VC in his own right.”

Cant added that Reinventure was structured as a “clean, traditional VC – with management fee and carry [a share of performance] only and a strict focus on disruptive ventures, leaving sustaining ventures to the bank.

“However, we still draw on a deep relationship of trust with the bank starting with the CEO to have them lean in to support our ventures.”

In August, OpenAgent raised $9m, while in October Hyper Anna, the Australia-based creator of a virtual assistant for corporate information enquiries, secured A$1.25m ($960,000) in seed funding from Reinventure and AirTree Ventures. New Zealand-based crime prevention software developer Auror (formerly Eyedentify) had completed a round of funding in September 2015.

Sood, who was promoted in July to investment manager from associate in July, said its other deals included Coinbase, Fillr, FlareHR, HeyYou, Nabo, PromisePay, SocietyOne, Valiant and Zetaris and, in particular, “I am proud of the work I did to champion one venture through to investment which has seen a 10-times increase since our initial investment”.

And Sood, a former consultant at AT Kearney and PwC, added that what attracted him to CVC was its potential impact. “Traditional strategy and implementation projects have short to medium term impact on businesses. CVC allows you to have a truly long term impact on the evolution of an industry and be part of the disruptive forces that have a deeply transformational impact.

“The biggest challenges have been managing and confronting my own internal mental biases when looking at new opportunities. We have a strong philosophy of ‘strong opinions loosely held,’ which is necessary in early-stage CVC given the lack of traction and market data at times.

“I am continually challenging myself to view things from this lens in order to find non-consensus (and correct) opportunities.”

As to the future, Sood said he wanted to “continue to develop my skills in venture capital for the medium term but ultimately I believe getting strong startup experience is vital to perform effectively as an investor.

“I would like to pursue this later in my career either as a founder or a senior member of a startup I am passionate about.”