The Norwegian company has internal, well-funded incubators which give employee-led ventures a launchpad.
When corporations talk about internal innovation, it often stops at pilots and PowerPoints. Norwegian maritime risk management company DNV’s journey of spinning out digital bunkering platform Ofiniti shows what it looks like when a company builds processes from the get-go to give internal ventures a chance at commercial traction.
Ofiniti, which in March raised $6.8m in growth funding, began as an idea by an employee in DNV’s maritime business to create a digital platform for administering green shipping fuels.
Critical to its creation were the internal incubators integrated into DNV’s business units. These provide employees with a business idea and a place to validate customer need and build their products.
The incubator model is funded by a long-standing policy at the company to reinvest 5% of its revenue, recently increased to 6%, in research and innovation.
Reinvesting revenue in research and innovation
Few corporations successfully spin out internally built ventures, even though venture building is a growing part of corporations’ innovation activities. Thirty-two percent of corporate venture units attempt venture building, according to GCV’s most recent Keystone survey. Having well-funded incubators inside the corporation gives employees a launchpad for easing the transition to becoming a founder.
“That reinvestment of revenue gives us a good starting point – if you want to take an employee’s time or my time to do something else than what they’re set to do, that requires structural funding,” says Kaare Helle, DNV venture director.
Ofiniti was nurtured in DNV’s internal incubator for three years before it was spun out as an independent company in 2024 and received external investment. The start of the Ukraine war was a defining moment for the venture. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused green shipping fuel prices to shoot up, making Ofiniti’s green-fuels-only model unviable. DNV worked with the team to pivot to also cover traditional maritime fuels.
The broader market coverage that Ofiniti took on meant that the company was no longer a strategic fit for DNV’s core business. This drove the decision, which went all the way up to group CEO and president, to spin it out as an independent company.
The spinout also benefits from new bunkering regulations in Singapore aimed at ensuring environmentally sustainable use of maritime fuels in the Port of Singapore. The city state is the world’s largest bunkering hub by volume. Its new regulations require electronic bunker delivery notes for all fuel deliveries.
To make an internal ventures independent, they need to attract external investment. Helle was tasked with making the company attractive to VCs. As head of DNV’s venture unit, launched six years ago and which also invests in external startups, he evaluates internal ventures on the same footing as external startups. Internal startups, for example, are subject to the same investment committee and governance practices.
To make Ofiniti investable, DNV carved out the spinout into a separate legal entity. It changed its logo and branding to make the new venture more autonomous.
Reducing ownership and eschewing veto rights
It also reduced its ownership stake initially to just above 50% from 100%. DNV then took a minority equity position so that external investors would not feel they would be funding a captive internal company, says Helle.
To ease investors’ concerns, the company also used plain-vanilla market standards in term sheets and avoided veto rights and special corporate controls.
“We needed to be transparent that we didn’t intend to buy back the company. We were ready to prove it by putting into shareholder agreements or terms sheets and the investment agreements that even if we wanted to bring Ofiniti back into the DNV family down the road, it would need to be on market terms,” says Helle.
He cautions that corporates spinning out companies will often be faced with suspicion by venture capital investors.
“If you’re a purely financial investor, nobody suspects you of doing something that is suboptimal financially for the company. But when you are a corporate, that suspicion is there,” says Helle.
DNV also made sure that Ofiniti’s employees who had come from the corporate parent were incentivised with stock options so that they would be motivated to stay at the startup. Three of its employees joined the spinout. It also made external hires.
DNV maintains around a 30% stake in Ofiniti. Having a corporate backer on the cap table helps it have credibility with customers, says Helle. The company also contributes its deep knowledge of the maritime market and its customer network.
With $9m in total investment, Ofiniti is using funds from its recent fundraise to expand internationally as regulatory pressure and the drive for more sustainable fuels increase demand for verifiable digital documentation in the maritime sector.
Kim Moore
Kim Moore is the editor of Global University Venturing and deputy editor of Global Corporate Venturing and produces video for the website.
