Welcome back to the EUVC Corporate Podcast. This week, Jeppe sits down with Axel Deniz, CEO of Bosch Business Innovations and Head of Venture Building at Bosch.
Axel is building Bosch’s venture-building engine with a clear mandate: get Bosch technology out into the world, through founder-led spinouts, joint ventures, and seed rounds that can stand on their own with external investors. With ~80,000 active patents, 20 new patents per day, and 80,000 researchers globally, Bosch has the assets. Axel’s job is turning them into investible companies.
🎧 Here’s what’s covered:
02:30 Bosch’s unfair advantage: 80k patents, 20 patents/day, 80k researchers
04:10 Horizon 2/3: building for 2030–2035 where incumbents can’t reach
05:30 Hybrid execution: not all in-house, not all studio but a blended model
06:25 Problem definition: Bosch theses + founders bringing problems from outside
08:25 Stage gates: “get to no fast” + external validation early
09:05 Gate #1: attracting “triple-A founders” before anything else
10:35 Founder-led 80/20 vs joint ventures when tech risk is still high
13:10 Venture market fit: choosing where to build is a venture builder superpower
16:20 Founder acquisition: why mediocre pre-seed talent is the biggest risk
23:05 Working with scale-ups: co-create instead of buying or minority investing
24:15 University engine: 5–6 deep partnerships (Carnegie Mellon example)
27:15 Biggest surprises: founder scarcity and portfolio restructuring complexity
29:05 Axel’s advice to founders: don’t start deep tech from scratch
30:30 Axel’s advice to VCs: don’t underestimate corporates’ learning curve
32:00 Axel’s background: founder → Silicon Valley → PWC CVC → Bosch
35:15 Career advice: no cookie-cutter route and trust your gut sometimes
37:10 How founders can engage: programs + direct outreach on LinkedIn
🎧 Listen on Apple or Spotify, or queue it for later with chapters ready to go.
✍️ Show Notes
Bosch Has the Raw Materials, Venture Building Makes Them Liquid
Axel frames Bosch’s starting position in numbers that most startups can’t even imagine:
~80,000 active patents
~80,000 researchers globally
~20 new patents written per day
But the key point: venture building in its current form is new at Bosch. Axel started in January 2025, after prior internal entrepreneurship approaches didn’t produce the outcomes leadership wanted. The new mission is explicit: spinouts that can raise external capital and stand as investible companies.
Strategy Is Board-Aligned — Execution Is Founder-Led
Axel defines 4–5 venture theses aimed at Horizon 2 and 3 — the 2030–2035 opportunity set that large incumbents struggle to access.
Those theses are aligned with Bosch’s top management, but once a venture is formed, Axel’s goal is “maximum autonomy” for the founders — using a hybrid build model and partners where needed.
“Get to No Fast” + External Validation as a Discipline
Two principles drive the operating system:
Fall in love less quickly
Validate outside Bosch early
The first stage gate isn’t technical.
It’s:
Do we have triple-A founders willing to dedicate their life to this problem?
Then comes customer traction and the hardest forcing function of all:
Within ~12 months, the venture should raise a seed round independently in the market, ideally with an external lead.
Founder-Led 80/20 — Unless Tech Risk Demands a JV
When Bosch can contribute technology that’s already sufficiently de-risked, Axel goes for a VC-friendly structure:
80% founders / 20% Bosch
But when technology risk is still substantial (common in hardware and deep tech) Bosch will pursue joint ventures with corporates or universities to give the venture the time (and structure) it needs.
Venture Market Fit: Choose the Market, Don’t Just Accept It
Axel makes a sharp point: VCs compete for dealflow in whatever geography it shows up. Venture builders can choose.
Bosch has seven global hubs from Latin America to Japan, Middle East to Africa and can make deliberate decisions about where a venture should be built, based on ecosystem readiness, talent, customers, and investor density.
He calls out Pittsburgh (Carnegie Mellon) as an underrated deep tech ecosystem in robotics and AI.
Partners as Potluck
Axel’s partnership philosophy is one of the clearest metaphors in the episode:
Bosch brings:
IP
patents
technical assets
prototypes
labs
Everything else should be filled by partners who do it better:
founders
VCs
scaleups
corporates
universities
He highlights co-creation with scaleups, especially in areas where Bosch is “1–2 years behind” (like carbon capture), where acquisition or minority VC investing doesn’t solve roadmap influence.
The Closing Advice: Don’t Start Deep Tech From Scratch
Axel’s single strongest message to founders:
If you’re building deep tech or hardware, don’t start from scratch.
Defensible technology takes too long to reinvent. Instead, founders should be brave enough to reach out to corporates with underutilized assets — whether it’s Bosch or others — and compress the journey by one to two years.
To VCs, he adds: corporates have learning curves, but the best opportunities increasingly sit where corporate assets meet founder execution.
💡 One-Liner Takeaway
Europe’s deep tech advantage won’t come from more pitch decks. It’ll come from founders turning corporate IP into venture-scale companies, fast enough for markets and capital to believe.
