For corporate venture capital, finding promising startups is rarely the hardest part. The more difficult question is what happens once the cheque has been written: can a technology move from a pilot into the machinery of a large industrial company?
For Kendra Rauschenberger, general partner at Siemens Energy Ventures, the corporate VC arm of German energy technology company Siemens Energy, that is where the unit’s attention is increasingly being concentrated.
Siemens Energy Ventures was set up in 2020 to sit between Siemens Energy and the startup ecosystem, bringing together organisations that operate at very different speeds.
“Startups move incredibly fast. They’re decisive because they have to be,” says Rauschenberger. “Siemens Energy, by contrast, operates in an environment where safety, reliability and complexity are fully embedded.”
The answer, Rauschenberger argues, is not to force startups into the processes of a large industrial company. It is for the corporate venture team to learn how to translate between the two.
Adapting to startup speed
The ventures team has created simplified decision paths to help Siemens Energy move faster on startup partnerships and has looked for ways to make the corporation a more effective partner.
“It’s not about asking startups to adapt to us — it’s about us being willing to adapt where it makes sense,” says Rauschenberger.
The lesson is significant for industrial CVCs. The value of a venture unit is not simply its ability to identify technologies ahead of the market, but its capacity to make those technologies usable within an organisation where procurement, engineering, safety and commercial requirements can slow adoption.