Top 50 Rising Stars 2021 continued (in alphabetical order by CVC unit): Gregory Hoffman, manager, DuPont Electronics & Imaging Ventures
DuPont Ventures, the corporate venture capital (CVC) unit formed by chemicals producer DuPont de Nemours in 2003, was embedded into each of the corporate’s businesses in early 2020.
“This led to the formation of the DuPont Electronics & Imaging (E&I) Ventures group, led by Greg Hoffman,” said Linda Ralleca, former managing director at DuPont Silicon Valley Technology Center. “He has driven the importance of venturing work to our business and established the strategy with our executives.”
DuPont hired Hoffman in mid-2018 as a Silicon Valley ecosystem lead, where he helped design, build and launch its Silicon Valley Innovation Center incubated by Ralleca. The unit developed and executed an innovation outreach strategy to grow DuPont’s business in Silicon Valley that eventually led to the corporate’s ventures concept.
Hoffman joined DuPont Ventures in August 2019 as external innovation programme manager under former managing director Frank Klemens. He helped build a deal flow management system to automate opportunity sharing, evaluation and reporting and assisted Klemens on investment and agreement execution.
He cultivated a network of over 100 stakeholders across lines of business to jointly develop investment theses around 11 innovation growth platforms and built relationships with outside parties – VCs, CVCs, accelerators and academic partners – to source deal flow, expand co-investment opportunities, and learn from various models of startup collaboration.
In March 2020, Hoffman launched E&I Ventures for DuPont and the unit inherited its predecessor’s areas of concentration: advanced materials in the high-performance computing, high frequency connectivity, the internet of things and digital transformation.
In his new role, Hoffman manages all aspects of E&I Ventures’ investment process including deal sourcing, candidate evaluation, due diligence, negotiation and committee presentations, leading to one investment to date.
He has developed a comprehensive internal deal flow toolkit including a Startup Evaluation Rubric, Opportunity Assessment Template and other tools to streamline pipeline throughout and facilitate stage-gate reviews of over 175 opportunities.
