Rehau sees promise in a clienting-first model

Plans to start working together with startups took off faster than expected for Rehau, the German industrial products company. In early 2025 the company had just set up its venturing unit, Rehau New Ventures, and was planning to just get the team set up and possibly start three pilot projects with startups.

By the end of the year, six pilots were already operational.

Part of the reason for the fast start was because Rehau decided to start with venture clienting, i.e., working together with startups as an early customer without investing.  

“It’s a corporate venturing approach where you always start with the venture clienting,” says Ronja Stoffregen, director of corporate venturing at Rehau New Ventures, of the model she is trying to build.

Many corporate venture units are adding venture clienting operations to what they do — some 49% of units have this capacity according to GCV’s annual benchmarking survey. But Stoffregen goes further. She sees venture clienting not just as an additional tool – much less a side tool – of the strategic corporate venturing toolbox, but as the foundational first step.  

The unit also does venture building and venture investing, but are moving away from the traditional corporate VC that invests first and hopes the strategic value follows. Instead, they want to lead with the collaboration and follow up with the potential equity investment. Whereas other corporates separate these functions out, Rehau has them under a single roof.

The venture clienting function would identify the internal pain point and scout startups specifically to solve it, as part of a model designed to be standardised – looking for a repeatable process, not just one-off pilots.  

“Ultimately, the way I see myself is just being in an expensive telephone sales service,” says Ronja Stoffregen, director of corporate venturing at Rehau New Ventures.

The essence of the job is that of a matchmaker, diving deep to find and understand the needs of the business, then understanding the technology around them and making the match.

At the end of that process, if the startup is attractive enough, has a close enough strategic fit and if it makes sense for the cap table, Rehau New Ventures can then invest equity.

The best due diligence

“The pilot in the venture clienting phase is, for me, the perfect operational due diligence for an equity investment,” says Stoffregen.

“You know the functionality of the product, you know the people, you get insights into their finances. A better operational due diligence you cannot have on the market.”

From a de-risking perspective, the logic is solid. Alignment is shown through real work, visibility is far beyond what can be gleaned from a pitch deck, one can learn how a startup can integrate into a large and complex corporate context with non-standardised data or IT infrastructure, and there is a front-row seat to how the team works under pressure. The validation pathway is strong.

With an invest-first approach, she says, it’s harder to validate, to know the actual operations, and to see how the integration would work with real-world data.

“Oftentimes, you can have a nice platform that can do beautiful things with beautiful data, but in reality it doesn’t work how it should because ultimately the data is really not beautiful. It’s quite ugly data, to be frank.”

The returns are elsewhere

The flipside of having a collaboration-first approach is that venture clienting is a cost centre, not a revenue generator, but that is by design. It may cost more money than it generates, with the intention of reducing costs and improving efficiencies elsewhere in the business.

“There are going to be some questions about how you finance yourself in the future, but you can quickly relate it to in-house consultancies or procurement,” says Stoffregen, likening it to other organs that spend money but that result in gains across the enterprise.

The venture unit is set up as its own legal entity so that it can move fast, to assess and execute without the same layers of approval as a regular procurement team within a corporate.  

Once results start mounting up, so does the budget. Stoffregen recalls during her time at DB Schenker, doing 160 pilots, of which 55 were ultimately implemented, leading to more budget for new hires as the team was able to show how much money was saved as a result of those projects.  

Making sure those pilots have the potential for real impact within the organisation, though, is crucial for the survival of the programme.

“If you are doing pilots because they’re cool or fancy, I think it’s really fair to ask, what’s the impact? Is this a must-have pilot? Because, especially in down cycles like we are in right now, ultimately innovation is always one of the first functions to be cancelled.”

Proof is in the numbers

The difference between a good venture clienting unit and a bad one, she says, is ultimately in the number of solutions that get implemented.

For Rehau, that would encompass anything that makes their operations cheaper and more efficient – automation, digitisation, IT modernisation and decentralisation, process optimisation and more.

Stoffregen says she is sometimes surprised when speaking to others in the industry who are months into their programmes and still talking about branding or which tools to use or conferences to attend before getting to the implementation. In her view, even the metrics used for calculating programme success should be figured out while actually doing the work.

“Focus on implementing your first startup, and then measure the KPIs on how to get it done,” she says.

Accordingly, her own suite of tools as she got started at Rehau has been relatively spartan – six months into the job so far, she has foregone the need to spend much on enterprise software packages or subscriptions to scouting platforms to manage the operation, opting instead for Microsoft and widely available AI tools like ChatGPT, or just tapping her network to get referrals to startups.

A flash in the pan?

“One of the questions I oftentimes get is whether venture clienting is just the next wave that’s going to have a couple of good years and then we all do something else again,” she says. But she hopes that as more companies execute venture clienting effectively, it is acknowledged as a valuable procurement mechanism – not just for technology but for mindset. This is especially true since startups are pulling more and more technical talent than ever before, meaning corporates increasingly need to work with them to access the cutting edge.

“Ten or 20 years ago, people would always try to get a job at a big company and be happy to have their whole career there,” she says.

“Now, we’re not interested in having this one corporate job forever and ever, just to build one feature for an irrelevant product. The really skilled software developers, they’re not working for corporates, and I think companies need to understand this.”

Read more

Test before invest: Corporates turn to venture clienting as budgets tighten

More companies are choosing to become customers of startups rather than invest in those companies as a way to bring short-term innovation into their businesses.