Alex Smout, investment director at Maersk Growth, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2025.
Alex Smout, investment director at Maersk Growth, the CVC arm of Danish shipping giant A.P. Møller – Maersk, says that corporate venturers need to be comfortable taking risks.
“You still need to be very opportunistic. It’s not like a structured career path where you can get a mini promotion every year. It’s all about bringing value to the founders that you’re working with, and that comes ultimately through experience.”
Smout started his CVC career at Digital Science, the strategic fund of the academic publisher Nature. “It was a very hands-on role,” he explains. “Which I was really lucky for, because we were a very strategic investor.”
“It is all about bringing value to the founders that you are working with and that comes through experience”
After that, he joined Jaguar Land Rover’s fund, InMotion Ventures, before coming to Maersk Growth last year to lead its third fund, which is focused on energy transition. He has worked closely with Maersk’s business units to shape the fund’s thesis and align his outlook with theirs.
“I needed to learn about a space, especially supply chain tech, which I’m not an expert in, but also be able to adapt to the existing policies and procedures and rationale behind the fund,” he says.
Maersk Growth invests off the corporate balance sheet, with a typical cheque size of $5m. It targets startups in the series A to B stages making tech that can help decarbonise Maersk’s operations, such as carbon capture, alternative fuels, electrification and battery technology.
For Smout, one of the most exciting emerging technology areas is nuclear. He explains that he now thinks small modular reactors (SMRs) – which could potentially be used to power ships – and even nuclear fusion are closer to being developed than he previously thought.
“I think with the conversations we’ve had with a few founders in the SMR space, you can see how much they’ve achieved,” he says. “There’s a lot of capital restriction to them, but actually a lot of them are looking to 2030 or even earlier for forward deployments for some really quite significant infrastructure.”
See the full list of Emerging Leaders 2025 here.
