Hakan Goker, managing director of M Ventures, is one of the 100 leading corporate venturing professionals in our 2026 Powerlist.
Hakan Goker is the managing director and head of the biotechnology team responsible for healthcare and life sciences investments at M Ventures, the corporate VC fund of German science and technology company Merck.
Goker has been a venture investor for 20 years, starting at Atlas Venture in 2006, continuing at Aescap Venture, before joining M Ventures in 2013 as senior investment director and later becoming the managing director in 2021.
M Ventures’ mandate is to invest in innovative technologies and products that have the potential to significantly impact Merck‘s core business areas and the unit’s capital pool has been topped up to €600m ($800m) over five years.
Headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands, with offices in the US, Israel and Germany, M Ventures invests in transformational ideas globally. Under Goker’s leadership, the unit has leaned into what pharma-backed venture can uniquely do well: underwrite scientific risk that others cannot.
Over the past year, that philosophy has translated into broadening the focus on not only platform technologies, such as new mechanisms for protein aggregation diseases, but also near/early clinical-stage companies and novel technologies that can transform detection, measurement, identification and bioprocessing workflows in the life science tools spaces.
M Ventures continues to utilise Merck’s own scientific curiosity and support of external innovation to help build future optionality for Merck businesses. Investments such as Trimtech, Vizgen, NRG Therapeutics, Abselion and Genopore continue to reflect their efforts to progress technologies that could redefine human wellness through therapeutics and innovation that can enable faster and smarter drug discovery and development.
The past year has also underscored M Ventures’ long-game approach to supporting high impact companies to their next value inflection points (clinical and market validation, revenue build) via continued financing in a volatile private market such as Artios’ oversubscribed series D, Storm’s series C and Vizgen’s series E.
More noticeable, however, since the start of 2025, has been the increased market activity seen on the technology side of M Ventures with notable events such as the sale of Celestial AI to Marvell for $3.25bn and Seeqc’s merger with Allegro.
Goker has been a key figure in M Ventures’ evolution since 2013, having helped build the investment team, the portfolio and strategy direction which have led to an increase in fund allocations from €30m to €600m over the years.
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.
Here’s a snapshot of their recent deals:
