Dennis Clark, investment director at Zeon Ventures, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2025.
Dennis Clark is a seasoned corporate venture investor and a founding member of multiple CVCs. Now, as part of the founding team at Zeon Ventures, he leads venture investments for Zeon Corporation, a Japanese chemical and speciality materials company.
Clark was inspired to join Zeon Corporation after seeing the type of impact that corporate venturing can have. “I saw the impact that was happening in transportation that needed to happen in more fundamental industries such as materials and chemicals,” says Clark. “That got me interested in helping found the team for Zeon – how can we create a next generation company and help Zeon transition and do things in a more sustainable fashion and leverage innovations that are happening in the startup community?”
Zeon Ventures invests between $1m and $3m in startups driving innovation in areas including advanced materials, energy transition and life sciences. Its strategic focus is to proactively connect portfolio companies with Zeon Corporation. More than half the firm’s investments involve collaboration between the startup and the parent company.
“Our approach as a CVC goes beyond passive investing,” says Clark. “We bring meaningful corporate resources to help accelerate our startup partners.”
“Our approach as a CVC goes beyond passive investing. We bring meaningful corporate resources to help accelerate our startup partners.”
Over the past year, Zeon Ventures expanded its investment focus to include frontier areas such as space, nuclear fusion and next-generation protein sequencing. These long-term investments aim to balance the overall portfolio and provide the parent company with insights into both near-term and longer-term business opportunities.
“Markets and technologies evolve at speeds that can be difficult to predict. What looks like a frontier investment today can rapidly attract capital and an influx of talent and become a viable business for the parent company sooner than anticipated,” says Clark.
See the full list of Emerging Leaders 2025 here.
