Since April 2008, Claas is responsible for Technology and Innovations Investments at NRW.BANK in Düsseldorf, once again in Germany. In this role, he heads up the venture capital activities of NRW.BANK, including a venture fund for direct investments focused on the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, as well as fund-of-fund activities sponsoring a number of regionally focused seed capital funds. Since 2006, Claas has been a partner at Innovature Capital Partners, an advisory and venture capital / private equity services firm he co-founded with Sven Weber. From 2002 until September 2006, he has been the Managing Director for T-Venture of America, the U.S. arm of T-Venture, the Corporate Venture Capital unit of Deutsche Telekom Group, including T-Mobile. Claas’ investments include mimoOn, Xsite, Nominum, Kineto Wireless, Grouper Networks (Acquired by Sony Pictures), Ruckus Wireless, among others. Claas has extensive experience in the mobile space as well as with digital home and digital media companies. Claas joined Deutsche Telekom in 1995 in Germany and held a variety of management positions. He helped found the Enterprise Software start-up TRAIAN in late ’99 and joined TRAIAN in October 2000, where he led the partnership business development efforts. He joined T-Venture in Bonn, Germany in 2001, after serving as an outside advisor to T-Venture already since 1997. Claas moved to the US for T-Venture in 2002. He originally started out as a physicist and worked for seven years in science, including a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. He won a Feodor Lynen fellowship of Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and a NASA grant. Claas is a member of the German-American Business Association of California, a previous member of the VC-Angel Roundtable, and previous member of the steering committee of the Service Provider Investment Forum (SPIF). He has been on the advisory board of Cal-IT, Golden Capital Network, and iHollywoodForum. Claas is a graduate of NVCA’s Venture Capital Institute.

 Business & Management