Kyle Petersen, corporate development manager at Oshkosh, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2025.
Kyle Petersen began his career at industrial and mobility technology producer Oshkosh in 2015 as an intern and has since progressed through several finance roles to become a corporate development manager, working on corporate VC deals, as well as M&A and portfolio strategy.
Petersen took on his corporate development responsibilities in 2020, when the company’s CVC activities were in their infancy. It has moved on a lot since then.
“We had a charter and an approval process in place and we made one LP investment, but no direct investments yet,” he says. “It was still a very new activity for us and something that people were getting used to. A lot of people in our organisation still did not know what CVC was.”
“Sitting with two VC firms day to day, participating on pitch calls and in their investment committee meetings and understanding how they make their decisions was invaluable experience”
Oshkosh’s evolution involved it expanding into direct startup investments, but for Petersen, his growth was triggered by a second limited partner investment. That led to a venture fellowship where he could sit in with established venture firms to learn their process and investment methods.
“That moved me from Wisconsin to California,” he says. “Sitting with two VC firms day to day, participating on pitch calls and in their investment committee meetings and understanding how they make their decisions was invaluable experience.”
Petersen now handles everything from deal sourcing through to term sheets, co-ordinating with various parts of the company. He sees the present time as the ideal point to be a mobility VC investor, as valuations become more attractive and new technology emerges on the AI side.
“My favourite thing is having the opportunity to impact our product innovation,” he says. “Being finance by background, I never really expected to have that level of connection to what we build. But because of our strategic charter, a lot of it ties into our product roadmap, and it is fun to me to be able to influence that.”
See the full list of Emerging Leaders 2025 here.
