Claas Heise
Executive Director, NRW Bank
Since 2008, Claas Heise is responsible for NRW.Venture, the venture capital activities of NRW.BANK in Düsseldorf, Germany. NRW.Venture includes the management of several venture funds focused on the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia that together now have made close to 70 investments. He is also responsible for over 15 investments in European venture capital funds and manages fund-of-fund activities sponsoring now 13 regionally focused seed capital funds.
From 2006 to 2008, Claas Heise has been a partner at Innovature Capital Partners, an advisory and venture capital / secondary services firm based in the Silicon Valley, California. From 2002 to 2006, he has been the Managing Director for T-Venture of America, the U.S. arm of the Corporate Venture Capital unit of Deutsche Telekom / T-Mobile, based in Foster City, CA, USA.
He joined Deutsche Telekom in 1995 and held a variety of management positions. He helped to found the enterprise software start-up TRAIAN and joined TRAIAN in October 2000, where he led the partnership business development efforts.
Claas Heise received his PhD in physics and worked for seven years in science, including a postdoc fellowship at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., USA. He won a Feodor Lynen fellowship of Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and a NASA grant.
Claas Heise is also a graduate of NVCA’s Venture Capital Institute.