In a move to shake up its corporate venturing strategy, Spain-based telecoms company Telefónica is stepping up its open innovation and putting its late-stage venturing on hold.
Ana Segurado, investment director at Telefónica, said the group is now placing significant emphasis on its new open innovation effort Open Future. Segurado said: “The idea is to focus our efforts, helping entrepreneurs in a more efficient way. Open Future will allow us to identify talent all over the world and connect all our programmes and investment tools so that we can focus investments on companies we know well and from a very early stage.”
Tracy Isacke, who headed Telefónica’s late-stage investment unit Telefónica Ventures from Silicon Valley, has moved to US-based Silicon Valley Bank, where she will work on corporate venturing relationships alongside Claire Lee.
Segurado said Telefónica Ventures’ investment is on hold pending a strategic review. “We are reviewing a number of companies in the portfolio of Telefónica Ventures and will focus on those with clear alignment with Telefónica strategy, before we start investment activity again, probably managed from Spain.”
The group’s most recent exit was the sale of digital media company Eventful to CBS.
Jack Leeney, now US investment head of Telefónica Ventures, said: “The core of Eventful’s platform solves a problem the biggest consumer internet players have all struggled with, which is nailing down local events with complete contextual accuracy. I have been thrilled to work with the board of Eventful for some years now, and see them join CBS as they bridge traditional and digital media, a theme Telefónica continues to evolve and expand on globally.”
Telefónica plans a significant overlap in investment involving its new Open Future initiative, as well as its accelerator programme Wayra, its fund-of-funds programme Amerigo, which backs venture firms, and Telefónica Ventures, once it starts investing again.
Telefónica’s Javier Placer is overseeing the four initiatives. Segurado, previously of Amerigo, is now directly responsible for Telefónica Ventures, while Valentin Fernandez Garcia is directly responsible for Amerigo, and Gonzalo Martin Villa-Peňa is in charge of Wayra. Doron Shpasser is Israel head of investments.
Segurado said the Open Future programme had set up partnerships with local and national governments in Spain and Latin America, including with the Spanish provinces of Andalucia, Extremadura and Galicia, as well as launching programmes with other governments, including Costa Rica, Ecuador and Chile.
She cited examples of the programme. “Extremadura is an area of Spain where one of the pillars of the economy is agriculture. We are helping them develop agricultural technology such as drones and sensors to help the agricultural areas become more efficient. We are also in discussions with a big technology corporation to work on activity in smart cities.”
Segurado added the programme was also looking globally, with Telefónica considering a presence in Germany, and it had also closed an agreement with Chinese university Xinhua and local telecoms company China Unicom to pursue open innovation activities in China.
The business is also looking to pursue many of its activities virtually. Segurado said: “We are using a virtual incubator we have developed. This is a cloud platform any entrepreneur can enter and be connected to our network of incubators and connected with Telefónica to progress in their project.”
She said the most interesting projects would be offered a presence in co-working spaces of Telefónica.
