Martijn Scholtes, head of corporate venturing for Rabobank, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2025.
Martijn Scholtes has spent more than 20 years at Dutch food and agriculture-focused bank Rabobank and helped set up corporate venturing subsidiary Rabo Frontier Ventures in 2017, as its chief financial officer. Five years later, he was running it as the now renamed Rabo Investments Corporate Venturing.
“As head of the team, I am more focused on managing the health of the portfolio and the team members,” he says. “How can we serve the bank better? That is an ongoing quest you have as a team, to maximise the impact of the unit with the limited resources we have.”
The corporate venturing team operates as the bank’s strategic investment arm, alongside the food and agtech-focused Rabo Ventures. In addition to supporting the bank’s existing partnerships with equity funding, the unit can step outside of Rabobank’s comfort zone to explore new technologies such as AI in a ‘safe space’ before bringing it into the company.
Stepping out of his comfort zone is something that Scholtes is familiar with, in both a work and a leisure context.
“How to be agile as a corporate venturing team and serving the bank best is about being flexible and developing a keen understanding of where the business is going”
“Innovating in a bank is something everyone understands is necessary,” Scholtes says. “But how to do it effectively is very interesting.
“It is a quest to find the right opportunities. Priorities continuously change over time in the bank, so how to be agile as a corporate venturing team and serving the bank best is about being flexible and developing a keen understanding of where the business is going.”
Scholtes partially does that as a member of Rabobank’s innovation board, where he can oversee new innovation projects. Understanding the broader strategy also helps him better connect the startups back into the bank, he says.
“It is a bit of organisational sensitivity, understanding where the business is going, what it likes and does not like, what does and does not work,” he says. “And, on a personal level, to find the right sponsors within the bank.
See the full list of Emerging Leaders 2025 here.
