Artur Faria, CEO at Oxygea Ventures, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2025.
Artur Faria set up Oxygea Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of Brazilian plastics manufacturer Braskem, after the covid-19 pandemic pushed the company’s management into soul-searching about disruption.
Decarbonisation was becoming a multi-billion-dollar opportunity, but many of the necessary technologies were not invented yet. “It was undeniable that a major part of this innovation occurred in the startup ecosystem, but we did not have the correct tools to do that,” says Faria.
Before Braskem shuttered the unit as part of a wider restructuring earlier this year, Oxygea was one of the leading corporate venture units in Latin America. Faria set up the unit based on all the best practice he could glean from the leaders of major corporate venture programmes at companies such as Qualcomm, BASF, Siemens and Intel. Oxygea had a GP/LP structure, the staff had access to a carried interest incentive scheme and the company also did venture building.
“We are like a jazz band – everyone has their own solo.”
Faria assembled a diverse 15-person team with backgrounds in consultancy, product development, private equity, venture capital and startups. “We are like a jazz band – everyone has their own solo,” he says. That means there is plenty of delegation for the team to operate when it comes to their specific expertise.
Faria himself is a part-time entrepreneur, running a solar energy startup alongside his Oxygea role, and has been keen to instil a startup mentality at the team.
There are nine startups in the portfolio, including three from the venture building operation. Faria’s interest is in energy-related startups, especially those that will help optimise and decentralise the electricity grid. He is also interested in new materials that could be used to create better batteries. For example, he says, biomass-based batteries could replace those that rely on rare earth metals like lithium.
“If everybody has electric vehicles, we do not have enough of the rare minerals for batteries, so we need to be smart about it,” he says.
See the full list of Emerging Leaders 2025 here.
