SK Hynix

Welcome to Impact TV. It's a corporate venture video series in collaboration with the Kaufman Fellows. I'm Jack Crawford, a founding managing partner at CIBC. And alongside my colleague, Pat Bumpus, and my Kaufman Fellow co chair, Alessandro Santo, we're thrilled to welcome to the show Renee Dodes, senior director of venture investments at SK Hynix.

Hi, Renee. How are doing today? I'm doing well. Thank you, Jack, Pat, Alessandro, and the entire Impact TV team for having me.

I've seen how this platform brings together investors and innovators across the venture ecosystem. So it's truly a pleasure to join the conversation. Oh, we're thrilled to include you, especially coming off this big win. GCV recognized you as one of the emerging corporate venture capitalists, so congratulations on the recognition.

Thank you. It was genuinely an honor to be recognized. So I know you collaborate a little bit with He Jin Chung, who I've known for more than, ten years. And and I guess I was looking at your your LinkedIn profile, and I saw that you were involved in, a bit in, Coffin Venture Deals program.

Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you've, collaborated with He Jin and and anything that you did with, Coffin on the venture deals program. So, when it comes to Heejin, he I report to him. So it's more of a, you know, a ten year relationship now, professional relationship. So I have many things to say.

I don't know whether it's suitable for this conversation. With the, deals, program, it's something that I came across, and it was a very succinct and well organized program for people who's already, experienced and ventured but, want a, you know, clear, structured, learning, platform, just to, review concepts and make sure that you are thoroughly, you have a thorough understanding. Both, Alessandro and I, went through the Kaufman, fellows program. We developed an incredible network of of global relationships and and certainly contributed significantly to our personal journeys getting into Venture.

Let's talk about your personal journey in Venture. Sort of it looks like sort of Samsung to Motorola, a little bit of time at LG, and now SK Hynix. Can you just talk about sort of your your personal journey, to the role that you're in now? Sure.

I've, never, intended, to be in venture capital, but, I've always had a strong curiosity around innovation and a desire to contribute to technologies that can create meaningful impact. And, looking back, each chapter of my career gave me a different lens on how innovation actually happens and, more importantly, how it scales. So I started at Samsung Electronics and Semiconductors, which gave me a foundational understanding of the industry. And, the culture there really instilled an obsession with quality, continuous improvement, and long term planning, lessons that still influence how I evaluate companies today.

Then at Motorola, I was able to move closer to products and commercialization. And, that experience taught me the importance of streamlined execution, cross functional teamwork, and communication. So you can have brilliant technology, but if you can't align teams and bring products successfully to market, the innovation doesn't create impact. Later at consulting at Accenture, brought in my strategic perspective across industries, and my role at LG Electronics was really where everything started to converge.

So, we had strategy, partnerships, open innovation, and venture investing in my role, and that exposed me to thousands of startups and reinforce it reinforce my belief that innovation often happens at intersections and, meaning, between industries and between technologies and between large companies and entrepreneurs. Eventually, I moved to SK Hynix to focus on venture investing. And what's interesting about corporate venturing is that it's not just about investing capital, but it's about fueling innovation.

You're you're at an interesting company at an interesting time. Mhmm. As a you know, a lot of the growth appears to be driven by SK Hynix playing a supplier role of HBM to NVIDIA. That appears to be some of the growth.

There's some exciting plans, I guess, about a $13,000,000,000 facility in South Korea focused on AI. There's some really interesting things happening at the company that you're at right now. What can you talk a little bit about sort of the the growth? Is that where where most of the excitement in in in growth is happening?

What what's your view on why it's so interesting to be at SK Hynix at this moment in time? I think it's exciting because right now, we are the market leader of AI memory. And, when, people, people usually think, models and, compute power, when they think what's enabling all of that is, data infrastructure and memory. And, at right now, we are a company, that is generating around $7,000,000,000 in annual revenue and playing that foundational role in enabling the modern AI infrastructure.

From a industry sector standpoint, my recollection and research is mostly knowing SK Hynix is is a leader in memory and storage with some strategic investment focus on semiconductor and data infrastructure and AI. Do I have it right with regard to the role that you're looking to play? Sort of picks and shovels an infrastructure in AI as it as it grows going forward? How would you describe sort of the the role, that that you'll play in in those general industry sectors and what kind of you expect next?

So yes. So when I say, we like to position ourselves as a full AI memory stack, provider, you know, it's going to be a combination of leveraging our DRAM products, NAND flash products, and storage solutions. I see. And and, I wanted to talk a little bit about a couple of articles that I saw that you wrote, talking about sort of AI applied to automotive and, and then AI applied to sort of power in the data center.

Can you comment to sort of, you know, we don't have time today for a full debrief on your expertise in in sort of how AI applies to the automotive, but I would encourage people to go read your LinkedIn post because I thought it was I thought it was extremely interesting. Can you just talk a little bit at a high level of how AI is impacting the automotive industry? So, that article, was to cover, one of our portfolio companies, from our earlier days, when, the automotive industry was emerging, and it was the fastest growing segment of the market for our products.

And we wanted to we invested in that industry because we wanted to better understand the ecosystem, understand the evolving requirements in the automotive industry, And, also, in addition to understanding, that market, at that time, we had the, CMOS image sensor business, where there were portfolio companies that were, highly relevant when it came to intelligent perception. Mhmm. And then, your comments on the reason why I mentioned power in the data center are particularly interesting to to us because we invested in a company that you may have heard of called Kornami.

It's looking at high performance computing with lower power consumption and enhanced security. And and so just your general view on what's happening in the data center. How's that relevant to SK Hynix? And how are you thinking about sort of, you know, power consumption in the data center?

Yes. So because there is a massive increase in, AI workload, there is a lot of, compute resources being allocated, but at the same time, traditional, system architectures have not thought out this power usage increase. And so, the industry, I think, is tackling as a whole, to, reenvision how we can make the system more efficient, not just the individual chips. So, as a memory provider, we are revisiting, you know, our product itself and how we can, better collaborate with the ecosystem players, to bring higher levels of, integration and system level optimization so that, there is more efficiency.

And, when we say efficiency, it means, using less power, whether it's, based on the chip or whether we're using, better material, and also, you know, thinking about, cooling, in the, whole data center at the whole data center scale and at the whole data center scale. What what, what do you make of, if you've been, watching it closely, the Grok transaction with NVIDIA and and then this this recent I IPO, the Grok transaction with NVIDIA was $20,000,000,000 and now recent Cerebras IPO at, I guess, 55,000,000,000.

You've watching that market closely. And sort of what would you expect to happen next with, kind of, you know, emerging companies like Kornami and others? What what do you envision as the next sort of wave of growth in the data center space as it relates to high performance computing and and low power consumption? So I think, some of the areas that could be, emerging, that could be disruptive would be, of course, you know, optical, technologies as well as, wafer level integration.

So, again, this ties into, my, previous comment about, system level, integration. And one of the ways could be, wafer level integration. So, there is less, distance between compute and memory, and, also, the manufacturing manufacturing is happening together at the wafer level. Mhmm.

Awesome. Alright. I'm gonna shift gears and ask you some questions about the CBC platform, that that you've been building. A lot of times, and we were interacting with hundreds of corporate investors each year as part of our strategy, we're investing at the seed in early stage in AI companies, mostly applied to security, finance, digital health.

But oftentimes, as you may know, we, we actively invest alongside of corporate, investors. We actually have a couple of co investments with, with with SK Hynix. And I'm wondering how your platform has evolved because you seem to be the CBC at SK Hynix seems to be operating more like a traditional corporate veteran with regard to your your pace, your speed, your ability to respond. Can you talk a little bit about the research Pat and I were doing was sort of leading us to believe you're going from kind of a relationships driven model to more of a scalable investment platform.

How has it evolved over the last, what is it, seven, eight, nine years that you you've been there? How has it evolved over that time? Yes. So as you mentioned, I think there is a broader evolution of corporate venture capital because the pace of innovation is accelerating, especially in AI and deep tech.

And as you mentioned, many CVCs operated in a more relationship driven way. But today, the sheer volume and the velocity of, opportunities require a much more structured and thesis driven approach. And so at SK Hynix, we are focused on improving our signal to noise ratio, accelerating diligence, and strengthening strategic alignment and engaging founders, with founders more proactively. Does that mean using data to make decisions?

You're doing more analytics? Talk about what what does that mean? Is it is it a shift from, I don't know, attending 30 events each year to sort of really looking at the data that's been able, that that you've been able to to gather and making decisions based on follow on rounds of financing or the quality of the investment syndicate or, you know, maybe maybe the overall market size and its and its and its growth. Is it is it data versus relationships?

Talk a little bit about what you mean when when when you talk about kind of decisions being made in a different way. Right. So, as we've, gained experience over the past decade in investing, we have understood what type of functions are required, for venture investment to work at SK Hynix. And so, clearly defining, functions, also, streamlining process.

And we've understood that, in order to gain some of the strategic values that we seek, we also need to, have more flexibility, when it comes to, the check size, the stage, that we invest in. So, those are some of the changes that we're going through this year. And, traditionally, we were focused on more directly relevant opportunities to memory, but we are broadening our scope when it comes to investment areas. Typical check size is kinda two to ten million and mostly series a, series b.

Help fine tune my my memory of Yeah. Five year to You are up to date on our check size. So 2 to five, was our check size last year. And this year, I think we can comfortably invest up to 10,000,000.

But, as Dean fit, there is, more flexibility beyond that. If your revenues keep growing, your check size might increase to 20,000,000 next year. So I'll keep an eye on that. I'll remember this for next year's, next year's interview.

I so there's some people on our team that seem to know a lot about quantum and AI systems. I don't know much about that area, but it seems like it's an area that's growing in interest by a lot of corporate venture groups. How are you are there high priority areas that you're looking at that you're really excited about in the coming year? Talk a little bit about sort of from an investment theme standpoint.

What are the areas you're most likely to make investments in in the next quarter or two? Yes. So, when it comes to, quantum and advanced AI, compute systems, I remain cautiously optimistic, about, those computing paradigms. As I mentioned earlier, optical computing and certain quantum technologies, both continue to make gradual progress, but I think commercialization timelines and practical deployment challenges are often underestimated.

Where I think some of the most impactful breakthroughs over the next several years may actually happen, may come from applying AI to semiconductors and infrastructure engineering itself. So think of it as using AI to help build the very infrastructure, that powers AI. And when it comes to applying it to our company, as you know, the semiconductor industry is very, complex. So from design and verification to manufacturing, testing, yield optimization, packaging, and so on and so forth.

And so there is a lot of potential, to fundamentally accelerate and optimize, many of these processes. You are with the expertise on your team, with your own personal skills and network of relationships, you're clearly in a great position to add value beyond capital to startups that that you invest in. We've seen corporates play an active role with engineering expertise and co development opportunities. At SK Hynix, I have to imagine your your understanding of manufacturing ecosystems, your understanding of significant customer relationships could also bring some value to startups that you work with.

When you're pitching a startup about the importance of of SK Hynix being included in and maybe an oversubscribed round of financing, how do you articulate your value beyond capital? What is that? How should how should founders think about, the importance of including SK Hynix in a series a or series b round of financing? Sure.

So, as as you may be aware, we are a strategic investor. So we always pitch the, strategic value and the synergy that we can create, being a corporate, investor. And, in deep tech, many of the, hardest challenges happen during the transition from a promising technology to, scalable commercial deployment. So we, offer, our technical insight, ecosystem navigation, partner introductions, and practical guidance, especially around manufacturability and go to market strategy, when we are approaching startups.

As you invest in these rounds and you've got the founder buy in, is it mostly alongside other corporate investors? Is it mostly alongside other VCs? Is it alongside private equity firms? What's the typical syndicate, the types of investors that you're you're most often investing alongside?

So we don't have any restrictions on who we co invest with, but it tends to be venture capital firms that are technical and also strategic investors in the semiconductor industry or in the broad technology ecosystem. And are you when you meet a new company, is it and you go through an assessment, is there a different process if or does it go to a different team if it's a a partnership versus a venture investment versus, oh, wow. This looks pretty interesting, and we actually may wanna acquire this business.

Are those different teams that you're working with different business units and you guys are really handled handling the the direct investment portion? Are you having influence over partnerships and over, acquisition opportunities as well? So I would say, at our company, we are usually, the first group that the startup encounters, and we have a introductory session and have the initial evaluation and make introductions as deemed fit to the right organization, be it partnerships.

And I think consideration for acquisition happens at a later stage because it's a more serious transaction than a partnership or an investment. So it's something that would perhaps then be taken as a next step. And and in line with that, Renee, how are you sort of measuring your own performance at the end of the year? How do you know you had a great year?

Is it that the portfolio that you invested in grew in value or you provided some strategic addition to SK Hynix, or is there some other metric from a KPI standpoint? How do you think about, you know, sort of your own performance this year? So you know how they say that investing and venture investing is an art form. I think measuring our performance is also an art form.

A lot of it is qualitative, although there are quantitative KPIs that can be taken into account such as, you know, deal, number of deals, number of investments, the value increase of the portfolio company. And but, you know, be be given that we are a strategic investor, much of it is qualitative. So number of partnerships, joint collaborations, POCs, joint research papers, and so on and so forth. So, it's a it's a holistic, evaluation that we, do on ourselves.

It's an art, not a science. Yeah. I hear you loud and clear. Okay.

Last couple of questions before we run out of time. Just wanted to understand if we're looking out over the next few years, are you excited about defense tech? Are you excited are you excited about robotics, humanoids, or any of those areas? Are there other areas that seems to be a lot of corporate interest in those areas?

What you and I have mostly talked about today is obviously the data center and AI infrastructure. Is there anything else when we think about SK Hynix that we should be thinking about by industry sector that you're really excited about? Mhmm. So I represent SK Hynix, and we're focused on the semiconductors and AI data center space.

At the SK group level, we are open to all sorts of technologies and industries. And I think for me personally, I am curious to see how AI will impact our society and how it will also help me improve as an individual in the coming years. And at the same time, I'm also concerned about, you know, how the society will evolve as, there is concentration of, AI based power. Very helpful.

Well, on behalf of the team at CIBC and the Kaufman fellows, thanks to Renee Doe for spending a little bit of time with us. Really appreciate you today. And thank you very much for having me.