NAZCA CAPITAL, a private equity fund firm focused on investing in unlisted companies, has appointed Carme Artigas as Operating Partner. Artigas will chair the firm’s new Technology Committee and join its Industrial Advisory Board. With this appointment, NAZCA strengthens its capabilities in digital transformation, artificial intelligence and dual-use technologies, areas that are critical both to companies’ competitiveness and to Europe’s strategic autonomy.
Artigas will take an active role and work alongside the investment team on the origination, analysis and monitoring of projects involving deep tech companies with disruptive business models and at early stages of development. This is an area in which the firm has been expanding its focus and where the combination of technological expertise and investment discipline is critical.
As part of this initiative, NAZCA will establish a Technology Committee chaired by Carme Artigas. Its responsibilities will include rigorously assessing the technological strength of each opportunity and helping companies accelerate their transformation and technological development. Artigas will also be responsible for bringing in top-level experts in cutting-edge technologies to the committee.
Her experience in technology investment dates back to the beginning of her career. Between 1999 and 2003, she was CEO of Ericsson Innova, Ericsson’s first private equity fund in Europe, where she held management and governance responsibilities across nine unlisted technology companies. She later co-founded and served as CEO of Synergic Partners, a pioneering big data company in Europe that was acquired by Telefónica Group in 2015, where she remained in charge until its full integration into the group. She holds a degree in Chemical Engineering from the Institut Químic de Sarrià and has completed executive education in venture capital at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
In January 2020, she was appointed the first Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, a position she held until December 2023, where she developed the Startups Law, created the Next Tech Fund and led the negotiation and approval of the European Artificial Intelligence Act. She was also Co-Chair of the United Nations AI Advisory Body and, since October 2023, has been a Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School, a position in which she became the first Spanish woman to hold this role.
Many of the technologies Artigas has worked on are now at the center of the debate on European strategic autonomy. These are dual-use capabilities that are critical both to industrial competitiveness and to Europe’s security and resilience. Her appointment will bring value across NAZCA’s investment strategies, both in assessing new opportunities and in supporting the technological development of portfolio companies, and particularly to the firm’s activities in aerospace, security and defence, where the technological frontier is advancing at a pace that requires specialised technical expertise.
Carlos Carbó, Executive Chairman of NAZCA, has commented: “Developing our own expertise in investing in technology and dual-use capabilities is a clear ambition for NAZCA, and Carme’s background – as an entrepreneur, investor and institutional leader – will allow us to approach this with greater technical depth. Her appointment and the Technology Committee she will chair are how we are putting this ambition into practice.”
For his part, Carme Artigas, has stated: “A significant part of Europe’s strategic autonomy depends on critical technologies, and the challenge is not generating knowledge, but turning it into companies capable of competing on a global scale. This requires technical expertise alongside financial expertise. I am very excited to join the Nazca team, which has a strong track record of success and an outstanding team of professionals, and I look forward to contributing my experience to help shape this new phase.”