Eliot Jones, principal at Trimble Ventures, is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2025.
Eliot Jones is a popular member of the Trimble Ventures team and is praised for playing a key role in shaping its venture processes and ensuring the CVC aligns with the broader corporate strategy.
Jones joined Trimble, a provider of software and hardware to the construction and transportation sectors, as a product application engineer in 2014. He became acquainted with the company’s M&A strategy after it bought e-Builder, a construction management application, and he joined the team integrating that business in 2019. While there, he worked on defining an investment thesis for a proposed venture fund.
“I worked with the team to draft a framework, a process for how we define our investment strategy, informed by macro trends, technology and Trimble’s core strategies and footprint,” says Jones.
Jones joined the ventures team in 2022 and his role spans both investments and portfolio management. A large part of his job is creating partnerships between startups and business units.
“It is highly complex when you are a small team trying to influence and steer a very broad organisation.”
He says the secret to portfolio development is building credibility for corporate venturing among the members of business units. It is important to create partnerships between startups and the corporate parent that become a revenue driver for the business units, he says.
“It is building that credibility and exposing more people in the organisation to startups so that you are not just a gatekeeper from meeting with these startups – you are bringing the business units along where it makes sense.”
Jones advises new entrants to corporate venturing to be open-minded and be ready to be a generalist than a specialist to cope with the broader functions of CVC. “It is a strategy role, it is business development. Investing is, of course, a part of it as well. It is highly complex when you are a small team trying to influence and steer a very broad organisation.”
See the full list of Rising Stars 2025 here.
