The €1bn NATO Innovation Fund (NIF) has hired two new partners to replace its depleted investment team, following the departure of a fourth of its original five founding partners in the last year.
Kelly Chen, one of the fund’s original partners, is leaving the fund at the end of August, the NIF confirmed to Sifted. The fund said Chen is stepping down to launch her own venture. Chen did not reply to a request to comment.
The NIF, which invests in defence and deeptech startups and VC funds and is backed by 24 NATO allies, has seen a lot of turmoil and turnover since it launched its fund about two years ago.
Apart from the departures of nearly its entire original investing team, the fund has also run into mounting tensions with its board and had concerns raised over potential conflicts of interest largely around its chair, German tech investor Klaus Hommels, as detailed in a recent Sifted investigation.
The Europe-based fund has now hired Ulrich Quay, formerly the founder of German auto titan BMW’s venture arm and most recently the VP of corporate investment management and joint ventures at BMW, as a partner.
The fund also hired Sander Verbrugge, formerly a partner at Dutch deeptech VC Innovation Industries, as its second new partner. Prior to VC, Verbrugge worked at Dutch semiconductor manufacturing company NXP, and has an academic background in molecular biophysics.
The last remaining original founding partner, Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky, who previously founded deeptech seed firm Beast Ventures, remains at the fund.
It's all part of what Fiona Murray, vice chair of the NIF, said is the “sharpening” of the NIF’s vision to focus more on providing capabilities for NATO nations to buy, she told Sifted in an interview last month.
“Our big goal is really to make extraordinary investments that are delivering capabilities across the alliance, both to the pressing, immediate defence and security needs, but also to finding future capabilities for industrial resilience,” she said.
NIF’s head of communications Amalia Kontesi tells Sifted the new team combines experience with industrial adoption of technology, an engineering background and political familiarity with its three partners. Murray told Sifted last month that the new partners are “significantly strategically aligned” with its new vision.
The NIF did not comment on whether the changes in the NIF’s ranks included a change in chair Hommels’ position following criticism of his role.
