Mike Smeed, managing director at InMotion Ventures, is one of the 100 leading corporate venturing professionals in our 2026 Powerlist.
When Mike Smeed took over InMotion Ventures in 2022, Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) corporate venture unit was already respected but not yet essential. Four years on, he has quietly turned it into one of Europe’s most active, visible and strategically impactful corporate venturing teams.
His mandate was clear: make corporate venturing matter to the parent company’s “Reimagine” strategy, which is JLR’s bet on electrification, software and sustainability.
The result has been a structural reset. InMotion’s investment thesis has narrowed from broad mobility to three pillars, climate, industrial and enterprise technologies, each tied directly to JLR’s future value chain.
Over the past year, Smeed’s team has backed 11 businesses nearly doubling the portfolio to 25. New investments included Matta, SirenOpt and Parable, with the fund making follow-on commitments to scale-ups, such as Cyclic Materials.
Outside of investment activity, Smeed’s primary focus has been on strengthening the quality of interactions between the portfolio and JLR. He has successfully achieved a 90% engagement rate between the active portfolio and the parent company. That number rises to 100% when filtering by companies the fund has invested in post-2022.
Impressively, the number of portfolio companies with full commercial agreements has risen to 30% this year. For example, EV.energy’s smart-charging software is being piloted with JLR’s i-Pace fleet, and New York-based Uncaged Innovations is collaborating with all four brands (Jaguar, Range Rover, Defender and Discovery) to develop luxury interiors that look and feel like leather without compromising price or performance.
Having successfully reinvented the fund, JLR has asked Smeed to build out a full-stack open innovation platform, meaning Smeed this year will also take on the responsibility for relaunching JLR’s venture clienting programme.
The programme is also being extended internationally, through initiatives such as JLR’s Open Innovation hub in Bengaluru, India.
If there is a tension in Smeed’s model, it is that the closer a CVC gets to its parent, the harder it becomes to maintain venture independence. But for now, InMotion appears to be threading that needle by remaining early-stage, financially disciplined and increasingly influential inside JLR.
Smeed himself is candid that the journey is unfinished. Three years in, he says he is only just getting started. That may be the clearest signal yet: InMotion is no longer a corporate experiment. It is infrastructure.
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:
