Panel: Investing in IoT
Moderator Kristin Stants, Vice President, KPMG Corporate Finance, Investment Bankers is joined by Kiva Allgood, President IoT, New Business Creation Group, GE Ventures; Bob Regan, Director (New Business) Corporate Development, Nokia; Sunder Somasundaram, Director of IoT Platforms, AT&T and Marty Linne, Managing Director Strategic Transactions Group, Intel to talk about investing in the IoT space.
Kristin Stants kicks off the panel explaining the evolution of the merger and acquisitions market in the IoT field over the recent years. “The number of deals and the value of the transactions have increased between 2014 and 2016. The number of mergers and acquisitions have increased by approximately 160% while the value of total transactions during that time period increased by 750%,” the executive said. Stants also said that KPMG continues to see robust valuation and activity in the market. “It is certainly a good time to be a banker in the IoT space.”
Commenting on the areas of interests in terms of M&A, Kiva Allgood, President IoT, New Business Creation Group at GE Ventures, said that the company’s areas of focus are “things that align with our business units that helps us to grow scale in specific domains. We have been investing very heavily in advanced manufacturing,” the executive said. “We are currently investing in areas tied with our core business,” she added.
Bob Regan said that Nokia is looking at M&A opportunities in some specific IoT verticals including connected cars, smart cities, public safety and energy, among others. “In terms of the functionality of our IoT platform we are looking at partnership opportunities with third parties for data collection, event processing, device management, application enablement, security and analytics.”
Sunder Somasundaram said that AT&T currently has nearly 30 million devices connected to its networks. The executive said that the company is looking to innovative offering to add to the IoT platform as well as strategic partnerships in the IoT field as the one we recently announced with GE. Smart cities is also a huge area for us.” The executive added that AT&T is looking at different use cases which would attract the interest of the firm’s customers.
Kristin Stants is a Vice-President at KPMG Corporate Finance in the Communication Systems and Technologies Group and has advised on a number of transactions in the Internet of Things over the last several years. Kristin has over ten years’ experience including financial advisory services both on buy-side and sell-side merger and acquisition transactions, as well as debt and equity financings. Prior to joining KPMG Kristin was with Green, Manning & Bunch, a Denver based mid-market investment bank. Prior to GMB, Kristin worked with Bank Of Montreal and KPMG Corporate Finance in their mergers and acquisitions groups in Toronto. She has a Bachelor of Commerce degree from McGill University and is a Chartered Business Valuator (CBV), Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and Chartered Accountant (CPA, CA).
Kiva Allgood is Managing Director for GE Ventures, New Business Creation. Within GE Ventures, New Business Creation is focused on bringing together GE businesses with external parties, entrepreneurs and experienced management teams to accelerate the creation of new companies within strategic areas of growth. Allgood brings over twenty years of digital transformation and high technology expertise.
Prior to joining GE Ventures, Kiva Allgood was President, Smart Cities and Industrial IoT, for Qualcomm Intelligent Solutions, Inc. As the global business lead for Qualcomm’s Smart Cities and IIOT business, Allgood helped strategic partners and cities deliver on their connectivity and sustainability goals. Before joining Qualcomm, Allgood ran a startup focused on delivering high quality headphones and hearing devices to special needs children and adults. Allgood has also held executive positions at Motorola and GE. Most recently she was the General Manager for NA Retail and MVNO Sales at Motorola’s Handset Division in Chicago, Illinois.
Allgood holds board seats on CleanTech San Diego and Teen Volunteers in Action. The executive holds a Bachelor of Science from Northwestern University and an MBA from Kellogg.
Bob Regan is Director of New Business Development (NBD) within Nokia’s Corporate Strategy and Development group and is based in Plano, TX. Nokia’s NBD team serves as the central go-to unit within the company for the strategic assessment of new business development initiatives including M&A and partnerships with the startup community.
The unit builds the company’s funnel for new business development projects in tight collaboration with Nokia’s business groups. NBD is also Nokia’s central interface to the venture capital and startup community worldwide.
For 13 years prior to the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent by Nokia, Bob managed Alcatel-Lucent’s Corporate Development activities including M&A, equity investments and strategic partnerships primarily in North America. His breadth of experience includes deal sourcing, due diligence, negotiation, execution, and integration. He was a board observer for several firms where he made investments.
Bob holds Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT and an MBA from London Business School.
Sunder Somasundaram heads up Digital Strategy and Developer ecosystems for IoT Solutions at AT&T. Sunder wears many hats including product management, digital marketing , corporate strategy and has created and shipped numerous IoT/SaaS products. Now, Sunder is focused on applying his passion on delivering AT&T’s IoT vision of creating “Innovative IoT Solutions that can change the world” . In his free time, Sunder is busy tinkering with chat bots that can help with customer service and automation.
Sunder has a Graduate degree in Computer Science and a bachelor’s degree in Statistics from Bangalore University.
