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Keysight Technologies
Satish Dhanasekaran leads $28B test-and-measurement incumbent Keysight Technologies, whose venture arm turns instrument dominance into early-stage equity.
Keysight Technologies
Keysight empowers innovators to explore, design, and bring world-changing technologies to life. As the industry’s premier global innovation partner, Keysight’s software-centric solutions serve engineers across the design and development environment, enabling them to deliver tomorrow’s breakthroughs at speed and with reduced risk. Keysight leverages its strength as the world’s leading test and measurement provider and today enables innovators to push the boundaries of engineering by quickly solving design, emulation, and test challenges to help create the best product experiences. Whether you're looking to improve your design and development process, optimize and secure your network, or harness AI and digital twins to get a head start on technologies like 6G, AV and EV, IoT, or quantum computing — Keysight accelerates innovation across the workflow with intelligent insights built on the most accurate measurements. Our fusion of technology knowledge, measurement science expertise, and tailored solutions helps you forge ahead with confidence in our connected and dynamic world. Keysight Technologies (NYSE: KEYS) is an S&P 500 technology company, headquartered in Santa Rosa, California, with offices and manufacturing worldwide. Keysight owns 2,000+ patents and our ~15,000 employees work with nearly 32,000 customers worldwide to start technology revolutions. Keysight customers span the communications, industrial automation, aerospace and defense, automotive, energy, semiconductor, and general electronics markets. Join us! To accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world, innovators start here, with Keysight.
General information
Firm type
Asset Manager
Year founded
2014
AUM
Undisclosed
Location
Region
North America
Country
United States
City
Santa Rosa
Corporate office
Santa Rosa, CA, United States
Additional offices
Palo Alto · New York · Dubai · Singapore · Zurich · Madrid · Charlotte · Milwaukee · Stuttgart · Chicago · Tysons · San Francisco
Principals
Satish Dhanasekaran
President and Chief Executive Officer
Sector focus
Frequently asked questions
Is Keysight a family office or an operating company's venture arm?
Keysight is a publicly traded corporation ($28B market cap) with a strategic corporate venture arm, Keysight Ventures. It does not operate as a single-family or multi-family office. The venture group invests off the parent's balance sheet to map emerging technologies that align with Keysight's test-and-measurement franchise.
Who runs investment decisions at Keysight Ventures?
Investment decisions are led by Keysight's corporate-development team under CEO Satish Dhanasekaran, with material transactions disclosed as part of Keysight's SEC filings. The group draws on engineering-domain experts from the parent's R&D units to conduct technical due diligence, a process that leverages Keysight's own instrument datasets.
What investment stages does Keysight Ventures typically target?
The group targets Series A through late-stage venture and growth-equity rounds, with occasional strategic acquisitions of platform technologies. Check size varies from early minority stakes to full buyouts of complementary testing-asset companies, as demonstrated by the $1.5B Spirent ethernet-testing acquisition closed in November 2024.
How does Keysight source its venture deal flow?
Deal flow originates through Keysight's engineering teams, who use the parent's own instruments to benchmark startup hardware performance. This relationship creates an origination funnel where companies seeking calibration or validation from Keysight labs often become portfolio prospects, giving the venture team line-of-sight into technical quality that is rare among pure financial VCs.
Which sectors does Keysight explicitly avoid?
Keysight Ventures does not invest in consumer internet, traditional enterprise SaaS, or therapeutics. The group's constrained mandate reflects the parent's focus on electronic measurement, and it avoids startups whose business models require instrument sets outside Keysight's core competency — for example, wet-lab biology or consumer-packaged goods.
What is Keysight's relationship to Hewlett-Packard?
Keysight is the direct successor to HP's test-and-measurement division, which was spun off as Agilent Technologies in 1999 and then split further in 2014 when Keysight took the electronic-measurement business public. There is no ongoing ownership link between HP Inc. and Keysight, though the engineering culture and patent estate trace back to Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's original Palo Alto garage.
Does Keysight participate in fund commitments or only direct deals?
Keysight Ventures executes direct deals and strategic acquisitions rather than committing capital to third-party venture funds. The parent's corporate-development group occasionally co-invests alongside deep-tech specialist funds when a portfolio company requires additional capital, but the primary vehicle is direct equity off the corporate balance sheet.
Profile maintained by Altss using OSINT (open-source intelligence), regulatory filings, licensed data partners, and verified direct submissions. Read the methodology. Last updated: . Continuous refresh with full update cycles at least every 30 days.
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