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Gisa Springer

PartnerLondon

Co-leads McKinsey's work in Green Business Building (GBB) in Europe, bringing deep expertise in strategy, corporate ventures, growth equity, and start-up ecosystems, with a focus on helping both traditional companies and start-ups build and scale

Gisa serves clients in the United States and Europe across different sectors. She co-leads Leap by McKinsey for B2B clients and our work in Green Business Building (GBB), where she focuses on helping companies build and scale new, often digital, businesses. 

Gisa brings deep expertise in corporate finance, M&A, corporate ventures, growth capabilities, and agile transformation to her client work, which lies at the intersection of the corporate and start-up worlds. She serves traditional companies by focusing on starting and building digital ventures, including helping them connect and partner with technology-focused start-ups, and she serves start-up companies directly on scaling matters.

Examples of her recent client work include the following:

  • setting up and coleading an in-house business-building factory for a leading global oil and gas conglomerate, including helping scale the first two ventures to the seed and series A funding stages
  • defining and helping set up the go-to-market function for a European software company as part of a 5-year internationalization strategy
  • evaluating strategic options (such as divestiture, spin-off, and joint ventures) for a corporate venture of a global specialty-healthcare company and supporting the transaction
  • supporting the setup and implementation of a market-access operating and key-account-management model for the top 50 customers of a leading security-software company
  • leading the postmerger integration across commercial and procurement functions for two private-equity-held technology businesses, including implementing best-practice governance and process management

Gisa is on the mentoring board for the London School of Economics and is active in the Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of London.

Gisa speaks English, German, French, and Italian.

Published work

From niche to mainstream: Advancing partnerships in green investing,” McKinsey & Company, March 2024

Small steps, big vision: Scaling a purpose-driven business at CoachHub,” McKinsey & Company, September 2023

Scale or fail: How incumbents can industrialize new-business building,” McKinsey & Company, March 2021

Traditional company, new businesses: The pairing that can ensure an incumbent’s survival,” McKinsey & Company, June 2019

Past experience

Summit Partners
Private equity and growth capital

Goldman Sachs
Structured finance

Education

Harvard Business School
MBA

The London School of Economics and Political Science
MSc

Yale University
BA