KKR has appointed Diego Piacentini as a senior adviser, effective immediately.
In his role, Piacentini will support KKR’s technology, media and telecom (TMT) investment activities globally.
Piacentini started his career holding a number of roles at Apple EMEA throughout his more than a decade at the company before joining Amazon in Seattle. He spent 16 years at Amazon as senior vice president of the international consumer business with responsibility for all international retail operations. Reporting directly to founder Jeff Bezos, he oversaw the launch and growth of Amazon’s e-commerce operations in global markets including Europe, Japan, China and India.
Most recently, Piacentini served in the Italian government as commissioner for digital transformation, reporting directly to the Prime Minister. In this role, he founded and scaled the government’s digital transformation team, delivering various initiatives to support the digitization of public services in Italy.
Piacentini is currently a member of the executive committee and a board director of Bocconi University in Italy, from which he graduated with a degree in economics. He also is a mentor of Endeavor Global, a global entrepreneurship mentoring program, and is a board member of Endeavor Italy which he co-founded in 2016.
“Diego has an outstanding track record of leadership in business and government, and we’re thrilled that we will be able to benefit from his expertise, particularly as it relates to the technology sector where we are deeply invested and continue to expand our activities across the U.S., Europe and Asia,” stated Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall, co-presidents and co-COOs of KKR. “Diego’s experience, including scaling one of the largest international technology platforms globally, will be extremely valuable to our investment teams and our portfolio companies.”
KKR, a leading global investment firm with approximately $200 billion in assets under management, has invested more than $26 billion of equity in TMT-related private equity and growth equity investments since 1983. KKR has announced multiple investments across the TMT sector in 2019 alone, including MYOB in Australia, OneStream and KnowBe4 in the United States, Exact Software in the Netherlands, and heidelpay Group and Axel Springer in Germany.
