Jelto Kromwijk Smits
Jelto Kromwijk Smits is a Partner since 2009. He joined Prime from Philips where he held various senior management positions. His last position before joining Prime was that of Senior Vice President in charge of the Technology Incubator, which he established in 2002 at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The incubator was set up to institutionalize Philips’ efforts in creating high-potential, technology based ventures, with which Philips has been so successful in the past, e.g. ASML, JDS Uniphase, Navteq, which grew to multi-billion dollar companies. During his leadership a large number of companies were started and spun out, of which three are now part of Prime’s portfolio: Silicon Hive, Civolution and amBX.
Until 2001, Jelto was manager of the Philips Corporate Strategy group at its headquarters in Amsterdam, in which capacity he contributed to the strategic turnaround of Philips as well as to a number of high-profile M&A projects. He moved there in 1994 after a technical career of 17 years in Philips Research where he was active in the development of break-through technologies in the domain of magnetic recording materials and devices.
Jelto obtained a PhD in Physics (cum laude) from the University of Groningen, complemented by executive business education at IMD, MCE and Harvard. Jelto serves on the boards of IPDiA and Intrinsic-ID. Previously Jelto led the investments in Silicon Hive and Liquavista, portfolio companies that were exited to Intel and Samsung, respectively.