Erin Crowther, associate at HG Ventures, is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2026.
Erin Crowther has worked with HG Ventures, the investment arm of The Heritage Group (THG), for less than three years, but has quickly become a critical member of the investment team of six. She is already leading on funding rounds and is leveraging a growing external network to bring new deals into the HG Ventures pipeline.
Crowther originally joined THG through the Orr Fellowship, which places high-achieving graduates into Indiana companies. She rotated through multiple divisions of the family-owned business, but found a natural fit with the ventures team.
“I naturally like a lot of the traditional venture work: term sheets, cap tables, exit modelling. I find it fascinating and I was able to pick up on that quickly,” she says.
Spending time on rotation across most of THG’s business operations gave her an internal network that would become an advantage.
“Do not underestimate relationships, not only internally but externally. If you are genuine and build authentic relationships, that is the right way to go about it.”
“Every day we are in communication with our businesses,” she says. The engineers and chemists in THG’s research and development lab are just down the hall from the venture team. Crowther has an ongoing dialogue with them about new technologies. They also collaborate on technical reviews of potential investments.
One key interest for Crowther is synthetic biology. She says being able to engineer organisms to process waste or recover materials is something that could have many applications across THG’s many businesses, which span everything from construction, environmental services and speciality chemicals.
Her key advice for those aspiring to a career in corporate venturing is: stay up to date on industry and market dynamics, and, more importantly, “do not underestimate relationships, not only internally but externally,” she says. She believes that when it comes to networking, authenticity matters most: “If you are genuine and build authentic relationships, that is the right way to go about it.”
The Rising Stars are early-career corporate venture professionals who are making an outstanding contribution to their teams and the industry.
See the full list of Rising Stars 2026 here.
