/ Jul 24, 2023
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., July 24, 2023 — Mach49, the growth builder for global businesses, announces Kevin Ye and Chris Cusack as Managing Partners of the firm’s Venture Investing practice. In their new roles, Ye and Cusack will expand Mach49’s capacity to help corporations around the globe to drive growth through venture capital, strategic partnerships, and venture acquisitions.
Led by a team of experienced venture capitalists, Mach49 designs and accelerates corporate venture capital (CVC) units. By facilitating corporations to think and execute like top-performing VCs, Mach49 helps them capitalize on their unique advantages — people, resources, knowledge, and customers — to create value and be on the right side of disruption.
“We have an incredibly talented team of experienced investors,” said Cusack. “Our focus is on driving inorganic growth through well-coordinated partnership, investment, and acquisition strategies, and those capabilities are fully integrated at Mach49.”
“The growth we have experienced in the past three years shows us that CVC should be a tool in every corporation’s toolkit,” says Ye. “While some people have assumed that they should not explore venture investing during a market downturn, we’re seeing the opposite. Companies are reaching out to us at unprecedented rates because they recognize that this is a great time to get in early on deals they may not have had access to before.”
This multifaceted strategy builds a bridge between the corporate and startup worlds that powers new forms of impact and collaboration. Venture investing allows corporations that might otherwise compete for market share to work together to diversify risk and move the needle on the world's biggest challenges.
“Corporate venture investing is a powerful way for corporations to have an outsized impact on global problems like climate change,” says Mach49 Founder and CEO Linda Yates. “Every corporate dollar that’s well invested unlocks 10 more from other investors to do the important work needed in the world.”
Among these successes is TDK Ventures, which collaborated closely with Mach49 to design and launch their first $50 million corporate venture fund in 2019. TDK's corporate venture capital arm has since had four exits in their Fund 1 portfolio and announced an additional $300 million across two funds, the more recent Fund EX1 to focus on Europe and North American-based electrification and decarbonization startups. Today, Mach49 continues to support TDK Ventures by supporting their venture capital discipline in all their early-stage investments in clean technology and advanced materials companies like Ascend Elements, AM Batteries, and Verdagy.
“Corporate VC is hard, you need to be both a very good financial VC and a very good strategic CVC,” says Nicolas Sauvage, President of TDK Ventures. “Mach49 helps us think about investments from a financial VC point of view, and this ultimately drives our corporate VC design and its execution to be trusted by the full VC ecosystem.”
Ye and Cusack, who both joined Mach49 as Venture Investing Partners, have been instrumental in that partnership and in Mach49’s work with clients including Goodyear Ventures, Halliburton Labs, Hines Global Venture Lab, Hypertherm Ventures, Vale Ventures, Zeon Ventures, and more.
Cusack has been an active investor and advisor for more than a decade, leading advisory relationships with a range of Global 2000 corporations including BHP, Delta Air Lines, Deutsche Telekom, and Whirlpool to elevate VC fund formation and operations, partnership strategies, and digital M&A. He also served in various roles formerly at Village Capital, a global early-stage venture fund and accelerator that supports entrepreneurs solving critical problems in healthcare, financial services, climate, and education. Cusack holds a BS in economics and a BA in public policy from Duke University.
Ye has been a long-time expert in the world of corporate venturing, having served as advisor to groups like Barrick Gold, DeNA, Southwest Airlines, and UPS Ventures, prior to joining Mach49. He enjoys supporting both startups and venture capital funds through his work as an active angel investor and LP, and he is passionate about promoting economic development through venture, which previously led to a multi-year stint as an advisor to New Zealand Trade & Enterprise. He holds degrees in bioengineering and corporate finance from the University of Pennsylvania.
About Mach49
Mach49 partners with global businesses to build their growth engines through venture building, venture investing, venture transformation, strategic partnering, and targeted M&A. We are 100% focused on execution, helping our clients disrupt existing markets and create new ones to drive meaningful growth.
The company is a unique cadre of successful serial entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and C-suite executives who have collectively generated over $60B in market value over their operating careers in companies they've invested in, managed, created, or built. Mach49 was founded by Linda Yates, author of The Unicorn Within: How Companies Can Create Game-Changing Ventures at Startup Speed (HBR Press, October 2022)—named "10 Best Business Books of 2022" by Forbes, and recently selected by Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Pink as one of "7 Startup Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read." Mach49 is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in Redwood City, Boston, London, and Amsterdam. www.mach49.com
