Nicola Tongue, head of CCEP Ventures, the investment arm of Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2026.
Nicola Tongue is head of ventures at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, a multinational Coca-Cola bottling company which invests in startups to reach net zero emissions targets.
Tongue took an unusual route into corporate venturing. She chose to skip university in favour of jumping straight into work running a pub. She then worked as an account manager for Belvoir drinks company, before joining Coca-Cola Europacific Partners in a sales role. That experience of sales helped her to get a job in the company’s corporate venturing unit in 2020.
“I was lucky at the time because they were looking for someone to help with deal sourcing, who had a broad knowledge of the business from a sales perspective,” says Tongue.
“We try to be quick and agile in our decision-making and remove the barriers that people sometimes see from corporate investors”
The unit’s goals have evolved since she joined to focus exclusively on clean technologies that can help the business meet net zero goals. Her team of three invests in pre-seed and seed technologies. They work closely with the firm’s sustainability team to identify startups and deploy those technologies inside the company’s manufacturing facilities through commercial agreements.
“We are starting to see some of the companies that we invested in approaching a point where they are ready to do first deployments,” says Tongue. One of these is a direct air capture technology, which is ready to be deployed at one of its sites.
She sees potential in heat pump technology that can be deployed at industrial scale. “All of a sudden you can have a technology that can provide heat without carbon emissions and that can also reduce cost.”
The other area is materials innovation. The team has invested in academic research to make sugar from carbon dioxide. It is also looking at AI technologies that can make sustainable crops.
“We try to be quick and agile in our decision-making and remove the barriers that people sometimes see from corporate investors,” she says.
The Emerging Leaders are mid-career corporate venture professionals who are making an outstanding contribution to their teams and the industry.
See the full list of Emerging Leaders here.
