New chairperson announced at Irish Venture Capital Association
Denise Sidhu, partner, and director of Cork headquartered Kernel Capital, has been elected chairperson of the Irish Venture Capital Association (IVCA). She replaces Leo Hamill, former managing partner of Investec Ventures in Ireland, who has completed his term of office. Denise Sidhu is the third woman to chair the IVCA in the last four years.
The Irish Venture Capital Association is the representative organisation for venture capital and private equity firms in Ireland. Last year venture capital investment into Irish tech start-ups and SMEs totalled over €1.3 billion.
Commenting on her election, Sidhu said that her focus would be to work with government and all relevant stakeholders to put financial structures in place to ensure indigenous technology and life science firms will be able to source funding locally and maximise their potential.
“Ireland’s most innovative technology firms are being cherry picked by global investors,” said Sidhu. “We need to be able to scale from local resources, rather than letting international investors harvest our best companies and develop jobs and headquarters overseas rather than here in Ireland.
“Failure to provide locally sourced scaling funding means that that Irish jobs and headquarters move abroad just at a time when companies are reaching their maximum growth potential. Funding local companies and scaling them here will help to broaden the tax base.”
Sidhu, who joined Kernel Capital in 2001, has played a key role in over 20 trade sales of the firm’s venture capital portfolio companies. She is a board member with portfolio investees B-Secur, Cirdan Imaging, Kianda Technologies and Nova Leah.
Before joining Kernel, Sidhu who is from Blackrock, Cork, was head of finance in Ulster Bank Commercial Services Limited and prior to that financial controller of the Bank of Nova Scotia, Channel Islands.
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