Corporate venture becomes a survival tool amid the materials science revolution

At first glance, the worlds of cement and shampoo do not appear to have much in common. But Holcim, a 114-year-old construction materials group, and Henkel, the adhesives, sealants, coatings and consumer goods producer, embody two ends of the same problem: how to adapt large, traditional industrial groups to the revolution happening in materials science.

From using AI to formulate new materials to exploring alternatives to cement as a building material, technology in this sector is evolving fast.

Both Markus Gatterwe, VC investment lead at Holcim MAQER Ventures, and Max Kammerinke, investment manager at Henkel Ventures, are working to help their parent organisations adapt to and survive any disruption. Both will be speaking on the industry’s challenges at the GCV Symposium on June 23, and gave the Global Corporate Venturing team a preview of what they are seeing as the big current challenges in the market.

Markus Gatterwe and Max Kammerinke will be speaking at the GCV Symposium session:

Materials science at the core of the next industrial revolution.

Cement’s carbon reckoning

For Gatterwe — and the cement industry as a whole — a key focus area is bringing down carbon emissions. This is challenging, as cement production is structurally high-emission. It involves heating limestone and other raw materials in a kiln to around 1450°C. Along the way, limestone releases CO₂, and the remaining materials react to form clinker — the carbon-intensive basis of Portland cement.

Decarbonisation of this process is not about tinkering around the edges, it requires a fundamental change. Within the broader push to decarbonise cement, clinker reduction has become one of the most visible fronts — and one where Gatterwe and the Holcim team are exploring several complementary approaches:

• Supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) – taking a percentage, say 20% of the clinker out of cement and replacing it with lower-carbon materials while aiming to maintain comparable cement or concrete performance.
• Novel cements – changing the traditional cement formulation and manufacturing process more fundamentally.

Both approaches remain early relative to the scale of the cement industry’s decarbonisation challenge. SCM-based startups are more numerous, partly because they can build on existing materials, standards and production systems. Novel cement companies are fewer and often more transformative, rethinking cement chemistry or manufacturing itself. Both approaches bring significant potential, but also face a tough path through scale-up, certification, and market adoption.

The core problem is not only chemistry and processes of material production but scale and unit economics, says Gatterwe. A single integrated Holcim plant produces more than a million tonnes of cement a year. Many material startups top out at a pilot plant capacity range of a few hundred tonnes of material and a first‑of‑a‑kind commercial plant in the tens of thousands tonnes range. Bridging that
order‑of‑magnitude gap — while trying to improve margin economics in a notoriously low‑margin sector — is where many promising technologies encounter their toughest reality check.

“In our industry,” Gatterwe says, “if you just minimally reduce the margin, the market still fails to accept it.”

The venture team’s job is no longer about fearing disruption from outside; it is about finding a way to comply with tightening regulation “in a way you’re still somewhat viable economically.”

Another area of focus, carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS), is challenging in a different way. Holcim now has eight large-scale EU-supported CCUS projects, with a goal of producing over eight million tonnes of near-zero cement annually by 2030  — the largest number of funded projects in the industry to date.

The rate of capturing CO₂ has been extremely high in these pilot projects. The problem is knowing what to do with the captured carbon. Today, the infrastructure, markets and end uses for captured CO₂ are still nascent.

AI-driven R&D

For Henkel, whose portfolio spans everything from industrial adhesives to consumer detergents and personal care, the challenge is around modernising the R&D labs in the age of AI. Kammerinke describes a quiet revolution underway in how material science might be done. A wave of startups is building what he calls “leading material science AI companies” — tools that can propose new formulations, orchestrate high‑throughput experiments, and, in theory, dramatically compress development cycles.

The promise, he says, is that we expect AI to play an increasingly significant role in R&D, already enhancing how we develop and optimise formulations today. But the journey from potential to practice is non‑trivial. Early projects show that a key challenge is data quality

“We did projects initially where we realized, okay, we have a lot of data, but the data is not the right quality for AI yet. This has reinforced the importance of building strong data and project foundations from the outset,” says Kammerinke.  

That experience has pushed the ventures team to become highly selective about use cases — focusing first on domains where they see strong potential to generate tangible impact and scale solutions effectively.

Unlike single‑molecule optimisation problems, many of Henkel’s applications involve 15 to 20‑ingredient formulations performing out in the real world — for example, in washing machines with varying water qualities. Translating complex real-world conditions into robust AI models is a rapidly evolving field.

Strategically, Henkel does not want to be spread thin across a dozen AI platforms. “Especially as a strategic,” Kammerinke notes, if you try to work with and invest in three companies in the same space, “at some point you have a conflict.”

Business units do not want to run multiple overlapping platforms; they want a small number of partners with whom they can go deep.

So the team runs deep dives to build long lists, then short lists, then backing a single player where “we think this is the winning company, because of the go‑to‑market, the team, and everything.”

In AI‑for‑R&D, they have chosen one such company and are now mapping a staged roadmap with it: starting with lower‑hanging, simpler projects, then progressing to more complex, higher‑value areas as confidence and internal capabilities grow

Change management in the lab

A thread that connects Holcim’s decarbonisation challenge and Henkel’s AI ambitions is organisational change.

While younger scientists are often eager to apply the latest tools and approaches they have used during their studies, it is important to align these innovations with the security and governance requirements of a 47,000‑person corporate, says Kammerinke. The deep expertise of the company’s experienced chemists needs to be combined with new digital and AI‑based tools to strengthen innovation.

The CVC and innovation teams are therefore playing a translational role: curating external startups to match very specific internal needs and then using successful pilots to show that new tools are “enabling you, not replacing you”.

At Holcim, the equivalent work is knitting together startups, internal specialists and an evolving regulatory regime to prove that new low‑carbon materials and processes are not just technically valid but commercially survivable.

In both cases, the venture function has now gone beyond an optional, future-scouting accessory, it is becoming a mechanism to tackle existential issues such as tightening environmental regulation and AI disruption.