ABB Technology Ventures (ATV)

Meet the team

Girish Nadkarni

Kurt Kaltenegger

Grant Allen

Girish Nadkarni
President, ABB Technology Ventures

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Nadkarni has been at ABB since 2003, during which time he has been responsible for ABB’s global cost migration program and ran the global automotive business for the Robotics Division. In October 2009 Nadkarni started ABB Technology Ventures, ABB’s corporate venture fund.

Nadkarni started his career as an attorney on Wall Street focusing on international banking and M&A. His business career spans Prudential where he was responsible for creating the Pru-Shelf financing facility which at the end of 2014 had 805 customers with a portfolio value of $82 Billion, GE Capital and GE where he worked for Jack Welch on strategy and business development, and United Healthcare as chief operations officer. He has also had a stint as an entrepreneur when he founded and ran vSimplify, a VC funded startup.

Nadkarni earned his undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Bombay where he was a gold medalist, his masters of law degree from the University of Virginia which he attended as a DuPont Fellow, and an MBA from Harvard where he was designated a Baker Scholar.

Nadkarni is on the boards of companies in the US, China, Israel and the UK. He is a frequent speaker at venture capital and industry conferences and was listed on the Global Corporate Venturing Power List 100 in 2012, 2013 and 2014.

Location: Wilton, Connecticut, USA

Kurt Kaltenegger
Head of Technology, ABB Technology Ventures

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Kaltenegger holds two graduate degrees in solid state physics, a MSc from Karl-Franzens University Graz and a PhD from Montanistic University Leoben, and is the holder of more than 30 patents.

Prior to joining ATV, he spent three years as Director of the ABB Corporate Research Center (CRC) in China. He was based in Beijing and Shanghai and was involved in future technology research and development, specifically around insulation coordination in harsh environments, fault current limitation, bulk power transmission (HVDC), UHV, rural electrification, distributed generation and robotics.

From 2000 till 2007 he was Global ABB Technology Manager for Medium Voltage products development with responsibility for 14 Development Centers worldwide. For the nine years prior, he was responsible for high voltage circuit breaker R&D at ABB headquarters in Switzerland and led projects for basic high voltage CB development and high voltage insulation and contact material development. He invented a new self-blast circuit breaker technology enabling SF6 Technology for ratings of 160 kA and higher, a world first. He was also head of the ABB Power Test Lab.

Kaltenegger is a member of the CIGRE Study Committee C6, Distributed Generation and received the CIGRE Technical Committee Award in 2007. In 2008, he was appointed to the industrial advisory board of Suzhou University.

Location: Zurich, Switzerland

Grant Allen
Senior Vice President, ABB Technology Ventures

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Grant Allen is Senior Vice President of ABB Technology Ventures (ATV) and is based in Palo Alto, California. Grant leads ABB’s innovation efforts in Silicon Valley and invests in companies across North America and Western Europe. He has personally led investments in Industrial Defender (cybersecurity for industrial control systems and other critical infrastructure; acquired by Lockheed Martin), Validus DC Systems (datacenter power conversion; acquired by ABB), Persimmon Technologies (vacuum robots and 3D printed motor parts), Scotrenewables (offshore tidal power) and TaKaDu (cloud analytics for water utilities). Areas of interest include Internet of Things (IoT), industrial sensing, analytics and other software, robotics, and energy efficiency.

Before joining ABB in 2010, Allen was with Core Capital Partners, a $400 million venture fund based in Washington, DC focused on investments in enterprise software and network security. Prior to that, he was with Microsoft in their Mobile & Embedded Devices division; Jingle Networks (backed by First Round Capital and Goldman Sachs; acquired for $63 million); and several start-ups including a web services firm he founded at 19. Allen has also invested personally in a number of companies including Uber, Alibaba (NYSE: BABA), LivingSocial, AltspaceVR, Avizia and EquityZen, and is a founding member of NextGen Angels. He is an advisor to numerous startups and an invited speaker at SXSW, the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit and the Watt D’Or Swiss-US Energy Innovation Day where ABB received Best Achievement in the Energy Sector. Grant holds degrees from Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering and The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and has completed executive education at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Location: Palo Alto, California, USA

More about ATV and our investment portfolio

ATV's market outlook

ATV investment portfolio

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