Sivan Zamir, VP, enterprise innovation and venture at Xylem, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2026.
Five years ago, when Xylem began shaping its corporate venture strategy, Sivan Zamir chose a non-conventional approach: flip the usual playbook. In most corporate venture models, the fund comes first and the operating model follows. “We intentionally flipped that,” says Zamir. “We wanted to build the partnering muscle, the governance and the commercial pathways before deploying capital.”
Xylem focused first on creating a disciplined engine for partnering – designed to turn promising technologies into scalable solutions that address real water challenges. Zamir led the work to put common metrics, processes and decision frameworks in place, with clearly defined checkpoints to assess technical readiness, customer demand and commercial viability. This process was built with one goal: help Xylem work with the global entrepreneurial community to move beyond pilots and toward real business impact.
“We have partnerships coming through the pipeline, and we are starting to commercialise them. Venture capital becomes a vehicle to reinforce those relationships”
The first major expression of that approach was a structured partnerships programme: an accelerator that brings in a cohort of startups each year to work directly with Xylem teams. The focus is not on experimentation for its own sake, but on finding out whether a technology can translate into a scalable commercial relationship.
Once that pipeline was established, Xylem added venture capital to the mix as a complementary tool. Equity investment is used selectively to deepen partnerships that are already showing traction, align incentives and accelerate scale. “We have partnerships coming through the pipeline, and we are starting to commercialise them,” says Zamir. “Venture capital becomes a vehicle to reinforce those relationships.”
Integration is central to the model. Zamir and her team work closely with Xylem’s R&D organisation to ensure venture and partnering activity extends internal innovation rather than competing with it. “This is not about doing something instead of R&D,” she says. “It is about all stakeholders driving innovation together.”
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.
