Lauro Antono Tonacatl Ojeda, corporate ventures director, EMEA and APAC lead at Cargill Ventures, is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2026.
As head of EMEA and Asia-Pacific investments for Cargill Ventures, Lauro Tonacatl Ojeda works with business leads in the region to build a bridge between startup investments and parent company Cargill, a US multinational food corporation.
Tonacatl joined the company’s ventures team in Belgium in 2022, after focusing on mergers and acquisitions for the business. He came from Mexican baked-goods manufacturer Grupo Bimbo, where he was part of the team that created the company’s ventures arm.
Given the challenging venture capital market conditions for food and agricultural startups, Tonacatl says it is even more important to establish how the corporate partner can bring value to its startup investments.
“With partnerships and collaborations between startups and suppliers, you can get the feedback faster if a technology or product is actually going to be accepted by customers. That is going to be important.”
The Cargill Ventures team, which invests from the corporate balance sheet, seeks to either enter commercial partnerships or do some form of collaboration with the startups it invests in. Tonacatl supports expanding the partnership model to forming collaborations between startups and its suppliers in the food and animal feed businesses. This helps the team to understand if a technology is going to gain traction among its client base before it makes an investment.
“You can get the feedback faster if that technology or that product is actually going to be accepted by customers. That is going to be important,” says Tonacatl.
He sees potential in technologies that improve human health, such as healthier ingredients, reduced fats and prebiotics. He also sees investment opportunities in agricultural-based sustainability, such as biomaterials and technologies that facilitate more efficient food production.
Cargill Ventures has teams in the US and Belgium. The team invests from series A onwards, but tends to focus on later-stage investments, where it sees more likelihood that technologies will scale.
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.
