Inside Evonik’s long game: Building a CVC arm to outlast the cycle

Over more than a decade, Evonik’s corporate venture unit has evolved from a technology window on the distant future into a global value chain integrator under Bernhard Mohr’s leadership. From a small, startup-style start, over more than 12 years Mohr built an investment unit with sufficient trust that it could survive leadership changes and restructuring its mandate without losing its soul.

When Mohr joined Evonik in 2012 to build its corporate venture capital arm, he saw it as an opportunity to build something significant — but hardly dared imagine he would be running same unit more than a decade later.

Two years earlier he had made the transition to corporate investing, at BASF’s venture arm after realising that his combination of science background and business experience worked well for a career in venture. (Mohr is a chemist by training with three postdocs and experience running a research lab as well as several BASF business unit).

“I realised what I have done in my previous life is very, very useful for venture capital,” says Mohr, and what had meant to be a two-year rotation with the BASF venture team turned into a vocation.

When BASF peer Evonik recruited him to build new venture unit at the company Mohr seized the opportunity. What followed was not a perfectly engineered model rolled out from day one, but what Mohr describes as “a bit of a startup launch” inside a legacy chemicals group: starting “at 80%”, then spending the first two years “optimising a bit on the run”.

Over time, the unit would push for a separate legal entity, move investment decision from the board to an autonomous investment committee, shift its focus from horizon-three technology scouting to nearer-term business impact, and build a global footprint including an unusually active stance in China.

Along the way, it had to educate the parent organisation about losses, prove it could return capital, and convince both business units and founders that it was a reliable long‑term partner.

This is less a story of one big strategic bet than of continuous adjustment: of a CVC learning to survive by quietly professionalising its governance, sharpening its mandate, and embedding itself in value chains.

1. Designing for independence

Evonik’s CVC did not begin life with the structures many now see as standard. It started as a small internal operation of three people, intended to grow to “five to six people”, focused on Europe and North America. Crucially, it was not initially a separate legal entity.

Mohr calls this “the first battle I had to fight”, and the only major point on which the board was “a bit hesitant”. The corporate logic made sense — new subsidiaries create complexity. But for a corporate venture arm to operate at the speed the startup world needs, some degree of separation was desirable.

Mohr decided to take the debate out of the building. He flew the CTO to Silicon Valley on a three‑day trip organised with Silicon Valley Bank. There, the question the CTO kept hearing from investors and peers was disarmingly simple: do you have a separate legal entity?

“At some point in time, the CTO… said, ‘there’s one thing these guys keep asking me, do you have a separate legal entity?’” Mohr recalls. When they returned to Germany, the structure was changed.