Aaron Peterman, managing director at Boeing Ventures, is one of the 100 leading corporate venturing professionals in our 2026 Powerlist.
Boeing has had difficult few years of well-publicised challenges: safety crises, global pandemic, regulatory scrutiny, supplier disruptions, labour strikes, production delays, workforce reductions, leadership turnover, corporate restructuring — any one of those typically marks the end for a corporate VC group.
Aaron Peterman has spent the past three years quietly reshaping Boeing’s CVC organisation, Boeing Ventures, creating a flywheel where strategic investments in exceptional teams and innovative technology drive value into the company’s most important programmes.
Boeing’s innovation challenge is not ideation, it is integration. Aerospace manufacturers face supply chain fragility, certification requirements and capital intensity that cannot be solved with demos or prototypes. Peterman argued in a recent CNAS essay that the most effective path to operational impact is intentional collaboration, pairing startup agility and innovation with engineering discipline and rigor — and that OEMs must invest in the “connective tissue” beyond just writing a check. Boeing Ventures under his leadership is built around that thesis.
What differentiates Boeing Ventures from industry peers is the strategy. Since establishing its partnership with AE Industrial Partners, every investment must pass two tests: a real PE/VC investment committee, where decisions are based purely on financial merits of the transaction and a strategic value thesis for how the prospective portfolio company can enable Boeing BUs in a mutually beneficial way.
Sourcing and structuring deals that address both is essentially the CVC equivalent of walking a tightrope with no safety net; but this approach drives a focus on deal quality and tighter alignment between fund outcomes and parent-company priorities.
This is reflected in the operating model. Boeing Ventures has a small team of engineers who are embedded with business leaders and technical experts to manage portfolio development efforts; pilot projects are deliberately scoped around lower-assurance applications at the outset and capabilities are proven before scaled deployment.
Recent investments illustrate this approach: Salient Motion in actuation systems, Galvanick in industrial cybersecurity, Zeromatter in physics-based simulation, Nominal in flight test software — each led by exceptional founders and connected to a specific Boeing opportunity or capability gap.
The platform itself is nearly a decade old, and the discipline behind it was earned the hard way, over the course of three distinct eras: early ambition in 2017 when Boeing formed HorizonX as its CVC arm, the crisis of 2021 and partnership that led to what is now AE Ventures and, more recently, a measured return to scale. Today, Boeing Ventures holds LP positions in six funds with a collective fair value over $400 million, including a portfolio of 100+ investments in early-stage companies and 20+ exits to date.
Peterman, who previously led finance and strategy efforts across Boeing HorizonX, NeXt and the company’s defence BU before pursuing opportunities in VC, returned to Boeing in 2022 to lead ventures investments.
Looking ahead, he expects decisive technologies in aerospace to be the unglamorous ones: digital tools that help accelerate certification timelines, optimisation software that enables supply chain efficiency, process automation and intelligent systems that unlock production capacity and manufacturing productivity, cybersecurity and resilient networks for contested environments.
The GCV Powerlist represents the 100 individuals spearheading the future of the corporate venturing industry.
These individuals excel in terms of their venturing approach and structure, number and quality of portfolio companies and in their contributions to the corporate venturing profession.
