Tennenhouse joins New Venture Partners

New Venture Partners, a Murray Hill, New Jersey-based firm specializing in corporate technology spinouts, announced last week that it has opened its first Silicon Valley office as it expands on the West Coast.

The firm has hired David Tennenhouse as the sole investment partner in the firm’s San Mateo, Calif.-based office. Tennenhouse, a onetime executive at Amazon.com, will be responsible for developing relationships with Silicon Valley tech companies and leading new spinout investments.

The firm, which currently has more than $650 million under management, got its start commercializing technologies developed at New Jersey’s famed Bell Labs. Today, the firm also has affiliated offices in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

To date, New Venture Partners has completed more than 50 spinouts from R&D labs and other divisions of large tech companies, including Lucent/Bell Labs, British Telecom, Philips Electronics, Intel and Telstra. Portfolio companies have included Azure Solutions (which was acquired by Subex Systems), Celiant (acquired by Andrew Corp.), Flarion Technologies (acquired by Qualcomm) and Vallent (acquired by IBM).

Before joining New Venture Partners, Tennenhouse also served as interim CEO of A9.com, the developer and operator of Amazon’s product search engine, and as vice president of Amazon’s platform strategy. Previously, he spent six years at Intel as vice president and director of research. Tennenhouse has also served as chief scientist and director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s information technology office and as a faculty member in MIT’s electrical engineering and computer science department.