These are the 50 early-career professionals who are rising fast in the corporate venturing industry.

GCV Rising Stars 2025

Navigating the complexities of CVC with boldness and charm

Matthew Raeside has one of the more interesting paths into corporate venturing among this year’s Rising Stars. He was an officer with the UK’s Royal Navy, before joining Swiss bank UBS’s principal investments team. But, he says, there are many similarities in the intensity of the work in investing and on a battleship, with a great deal of resourcefulness needed in both lines of work.

A nautical theme is also the way Daniel Correa, principal at JLL Spark, sees the role. Corporate investors, he says, negotiate between corporate ‘navy’ and startup ‘pirates’. “There are 60 startups that I view as innovation pirates in our portfolio and they are out there changing critical aspects of this industry, and through Spark they are collaborating with the navy,” he says.

Bravery was a theme that came up often in interviews with this year’s Rising Stars – as was a willingness to be flexible. “Boldness and adaptability are what matters,” says Jordy Klaassen, investment manager at Eneco Ventures.

Every investor has their own way of bringing this combination to the table. Sara Olson, senior director at Leaps by Bayer, for example, is not afraid to “pound the table” on behalf of brilliant startups. Her day-to-day modus operandi, however, is a mixture of “radical authenticity and open-minded kindness”, which helps bring people along even in tough negotiations.

If there is one bit of advice that nearly every Rising Star we spoke to mentioned, it was the importance of networking. It is not enough to be a good investor, says Tanvi Lal, investor at Intuit Ventures. “A lot of the job is partnerships-driven and your success as a CVC investor is driven by how well you can build connectivity between startups and the business,” she says.

Shobhit Gupta, senior associate at GM Ventures, says he owes his success to following advice he was given by a senior figure early in his career: spend at least one day a week networking. That network needs to be both inside and outside the company, says Thomas Molleker, senior associate at BMW i Ventures. “It is important to have a network inside the corporate on the one side, but also to have a strong network with the startup community and your potential co-investors. It is not one or the other, but a mixture of those worlds,” he says.

Rising Stars 2025 (alphabetically in order of surname) 

Rising Stars cover

Download the 2025 GCV Rising Stars list here

See GCV’s list of Emerging Leaders for 2025

These are mid-careers stars in corporate venturing