Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2018: Kevin Eggers

Currently market development principal at Anglo American, Kevin Eggers joined the firm in 2008, having successively worked on the reorganisation and subsequent sale process of the Tarmac group, been a business partner to the Platinum business (Amplats), and jointly managed the establishment of the thermal coal trading desk.

In 2014, after these internal moves, he took on the responsibility of managing the newly formed venture capital activities within Anglo American.

Speaking of Eggers, Andrew Hinkly, executive head of marketing at Amplats, said: “From the very early days of our fund, Kevin has thoughtfully and tirelessly gone about building our portfolio, sought new and creative avenues to drive value, promoted our presence in the marketplace, and successfully managed an increasing number of internal and external stakeholders.”

In late 2013, South Africa- and UK-based mining company Anglo American, which produces about a third of the world’s platinum, launched its venture unit with a $100m fund targeting companies using platinum and associated metals.

Eggers said: “The fund was launched with the vision of our executive head for marketing [Andrew Hinkly] and was novel in two distinct ways: first, it was the only active venture fund run by a major mining company; and, second, rather than investing in mining and technology itself, it would invest in companies using our metals, thereby finding and stimulating new demand sources.”

As part of his role, Eggers looks after the core operational aspects of the fund, and has taken on leadership roles within a number of portfolio companies, managing internal and external stakeholders.

At present, he is board director of Johnson Matthey Fuel Cells and of hydrogen logistics specialist United Hydrogene Group, into which Anglo American injected $4m in 2016. He also looks after Germany-based Hydrogenious Technologies, which the unit helped spin out of University of Erlangen-Nuremburg in 2014, and after California-based electrical energy storage specialist Primus Power, for which the investor originally led a $20m series-C round in 2014.

Eggers added: “I have been active in trying to build our name, and this external focus has proven to be an effective way of building strong relationships and sourcing new deals.

“We have grown our operations, invested into new geographies and are slowly beginning to build a diversified portfolio of assets.”

But while the principal seemed to be pleased with the unit’s overall progress, he acknowledged that 2017 was “a bit of a slow year” on the deal-making side, with the unit still being affected by wider losses previously suffered by the company as a whole. Amplats had reported $5.6bn in losses in 2015, largely due to the sinking price of commodities at the time.

At the time of writing (November), no new investments had been completed in 2017, with a deal however due to be closed by year-end, according to Eggers, which would bring the total number of portfolio companies held by the unit to nine.

A number of follow-on investments, however, were completed, including a participation in a $32m round for Primus Power alongside Hong-Kong entity Success Dragons, and rounds for Hydrogenious, and for US-based Greyrock Energy, which has specialised in the production of clean liquid fuels.

Reflecting on the greatest challenges and successes of his unit, Eggers said: “Surviving an acute mining downturn taught our team some important lessons – namely, that ‘capital’ is certainly the most important word in ‘corporate venture capital’.

“We are here today as a result of being flexible, creative and having nerves of steel, and thankfully we were also small enough to fly below the radar.”

For Eggers, the success of Anglo American’s CVC unit is also due to the fact that it has its own “investment niche”. He said: “We stand out from the crowd as we do not focus specifically on all of the most popular investment topics, such as the internet of things (IoT) or artificial intelligence (AI). At the moment, you witness a rush of money focusing on these themes and, while some of them are very relevant to us, we are not defined by them.”

He added: “In venturing, it sometimes feels like a parallel universe when you compare it to the work that some of your colleagues do, or the style and approach of the corporates backing these small CVC units, and that’s why clarity of purpose is absolutely key to a CVC unit’s success.

“The overall success of the CVC industry will depend upon firms successfully managing their own focus, while neatly weaving this into the fabric of their corporate sponsors and stakeholders.”

Thinking of future developments for the unit, Eggers said he would like to see it grow into something more formalised, more structured, and with more flexibility and independence from its parent company’s internal processes. “But I would say being careful to not bite off more than you can chew is a very important philosophy for early stage CVCs,” he warned.

A South African native, the principal graduated from University of Cape Town with a bachelor of business science and went on to complete educational programs at Harvard Business School and London Business School several years later. Having started off his career as an accountant at Baker Tilly International in South Africa, in 2007, he took an extended career break to travel halfway around the world, which eventually led him to London, where he has lived for the past 11 years.

To this day, Eggers remains an outdoor enthusiast, passionate about a wide range of sports and trying to get out as much as he can in his spare time. “If I could have chosen my perfect start this morning, it would have been kayaking along a remote part of the South African coastline, near where I grew up,” he said. “There’s always going to be things you miss about your home country, but London feels like a fairly liveable big city!”