Top 50 Rising Stars 2021 continued (in alphabetical order by CVC unit): Ginger Rothrock, senior director, HG Ventures
Ginger Rothrock is a senior director at HG Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of US-headquartered industrial holding company The Heritage Group. She has been with the unit since December 2018 and invests in seed to growth-stage developers of advanced materials and systems for sustainability, energy, speciality chemicals and transportation infrastructure.
Rothrock said: “I believe that science and engineering entrepreneurs can have the maximum impact on humanity. I am a scientist-entrepreneur turned investor. As an investor with deeptech operating experience, I seek to bridge technical credibility with business intelligence to accelerate commercialisation. I have gravitated towards an interdisciplinary, collaborative leadership and mentorship style and embraced my instinct for experimentalism.”
Apart from investing for HG Ventures, Rothrock also oversees internal incubation initiatives for The Heritage Group and serves as a liaison for Heritage Group Accelerator powered by Techstars, where she connects entrepreneurs with the resources and know-how of the group.
She told Global Corporate Venturing that nationalisation of supply chains was an important theme in 2020 while HG Ventures will focus on the use of software and data to drive industrial processes and decision-making in the new year.
Rothrock sits on the boards of synthetic molecule developer Biosynthetic Technologies, fat substitute producer Epogee, sustainable chemical product developer P2 Science, additive manufacturing technology developer Equispheres and Duality Robotics, the operator of game data and intelligence analytics platform Falcon.
Prior to HG Ventures, Rothrock was vice-president of technology and commercialisation at research services provider RTI International. She managed commercialisation of a $1bn research and development portfolio for the firm and provided mentoring and training to scientific entrepreneurs.
Rothrock herself had had an entrepreneurial background, having incubated and founded startups such as Liquidia Technologies, a biopharmaceutical company that had been backed by industrial equipment and appliance maker Siemens and contract researcher PPD before it went public on the Nasdaq Capital Market in August 2018.
