Highlights
- NOVA is the corporate venture arm of Saint-Gobain, focusing on strategic early-stage investments aligned with a 360-year-old materials company.
- Sven’s unique background as a chemist and startup operator informs his venture approach, blending technical expertise with business acumen.
- NOVA invests beyond core materials into digital, sustainability, and robotics, illustrating a broad innovation scope.
- Due diligence emphasizes strategic fit, IP strength, team diversity, and founder adaptability.
- Material startups face higher capital barriers; NOVA supports them through partnerships, contract manufacturing, and venture debt strategies.
- Post-investment support includes joint development agreements, board involvement, customer introductions, and manufacturing scale-up.
- Despite current venture market challenges, Sven is optimistic about the long-term outlook and encourages investors to embrace downturns as opportunity.
Summary
This episode of The Innovators and Investors Podcast features an insightful conversation between host Kristian Marquez and Sven Harmsen, Director of External Ventures at NOVA by Saint-Gobain. Sven provides a comprehensive overview of NOVA—the corporate venture capital arm of Saint-Gobain, a 360-year-old French multinational materials company with roots in glass manufacturing. NOVA focuses on early-stage investments, primarily seed to Series A, supporting startups that align strategically with Saint-Gobain’s core businesses or explore innovative technologies beyond it, such as digital solutions, sustainability, and robotics.
Sven shares his professional journey from a chemist working in pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals to becoming an investor, emphasizing how his experience in startups and business development shaped his venture capital career. He discusses NOVA’s due diligence process, which prioritizes strategic fit with the parent company, intellectual property, team composition, and business potential. Sven highlights the value of diverse founding teams, openness to advice, and the importance of learning from failures.
The conversation also explores innovation trends in materials science, noting the growing focus on sustainability, energy efficiency, and circular economy principles. Sven explains how material startups often face higher capital requirements compared to digital ventures and how they mitigate this through partnerships, contract manufacturing, and venture debt. He elaborates on how NOVA supports portfolio companies post-investment through joint development agreements, board involvement, facilitating partnerships, scaling manufacturing, and assisting with fundraising.
Looking ahead, Sven reflects on the challenges in the current venture capital landscape—particularly the scarcity of non-dilutive grants and tougher fundraising conditions—but remains optimistic that downturns weed out weaker companies and create opportunities for investors. He also discusses the nuanced considerations in nearshoring manufacturing, emphasizing that location decisions depend heavily on product types and market needs.
Finally, Sven offers personal advice to aspiring investors, highlighting the importance of financial and legal knowledge, and encourages flexibility and openness when engaging with startups. The episode closes with contact information for Sven and an invitation to connect.
Key Insights
- Strategic Fit as the Primary Investment Filter: NOVA’s investment thesis hinges on how well a startup’s technology or market aligns with Saint-Gobain’s core businesses or strategic growth areas. This focus differentiates corporate venture capital from purely financial VC firms, ensuring investments generate mutual benefits like product expansion or strategic partnerships. This approach reinforces the value of corporate venture arms as innovation scouts and accelerators within established industries.
- Blending Deep Technical Expertise with Venture Capital: Sven’s path from chemist to investor exemplifies the advantage of having operators-turned-investors who understand the science, product development challenges, and commercialization hurdles startups face. This background enables more nuanced due diligence and meaningful support beyond capital, fostering stronger founder relationships and better decision-making.
- Broadening the Innovation Horizon Beyond Materials: Although Saint-Gobain is fundamentally a materials company, NOVA actively pursues investments in digital technologies, sustainability, and robotics, reflecting a strategic intent to future-proof the parent company and capture emerging market trends. This diversification indicates how traditional industrial corporations can leverage venture capital to explore adjacent and disruptive fields.
- Importance of Diverse and Experienced Founding Teams: Successful startups often feature teams with complementary skills—including technical, financial, and strategic backgrounds—and founders who are passionate yet open to feedback. Sven’s observation that learning from failures can be more valuable than past successes challenges conventional wisdom, highlighting the iterative nature of startup growth and the critical role of adaptability.
- Capital Intensity Challenges in Hard Tech and Materials Startups: Unlike software or SaaS companies, materials startups typically require significant upfront capital for research, prototyping, and manufacturing scale-up. Sven underscores practical strategies such as using contract manufacturers, venture debt, and corporate partnerships to alleviate capital constraints. This insight can help founders better navigate the capital landscape and optimize resource allocation.
- Active Post-Investment Engagement Drives Startup Success: NOVA’s approach includes establishing joint development agreements to foster collaboration, securing board representation to stay closely involved, and leveraging Saint-Gobain’s global network for customer and investor introductions. This level of engagement ensures that startups benefit from both the agility of a startup environment and the resources of a global corporation—creating a powerful symbiosis.
- Venture Capital Outlook Amid Market Uncertainty: Sven acknowledges the current fundraising difficulties and the decline in non-dilutive grant availability but views these as cyclical phenomena that ultimately strengthen the ecosystem by focusing capital on the most promising ventures. His perspective encourages investors to remain patient and opportunistic, recognizing that downturns can catalyze innovation and yield higher returns in the long run.
- Nuanced Approach to Nearshoring and Manufacturing Strategy: Decisions around manufacturing location are complex and product-dependent. Saint-Gobain’s global footprint and expertise allow NOVA to guide startups on scalable manufacturing strategies, balancing factors such as shipping costs, product volume, and customer proximity. This insight is particularly relevant in the context of global supply chain shifts and geopolitical uncertainties.
- Critical Role of Legal and Financial Acumen for Investors: Sven reflects on the importance of deep understanding in legal and financial realms, which are often underestimated by new investors. Mastery in these areas enhances due diligence quality and risk management, ultimately influencing investment outcomes and portfolio health.
- Flexibility and Openness as Key Traits for Investors: Sven’s concluding advice encourages investors to be flexible, open-minded, and attentive listeners. This mindset fosters continuous learning, adaptability to changing market dynamics, and better alignment with innovative founders—qualities essential to long-term success in venture investing.
This episode provides a rich, well-rounded perspective on corporate venture capital in the materials and innovation space, blending practical investment strategies with forward-looking insights into technological trends and ecosystem dynamics.
Stay up-to-date with Sven Harmsen and his work with NOVA by Saint-Gobain.
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