In today’s episode of our CVC series, Andreas Munk Holm and our CVC in-house expert, Jeppe Høier, talk with Ida Christine Brun, Venture Investments and Partnership Director at Maersk Growth. With over 13 years at Maersk under her belt, Ida brings experience from commercial business development and supply chain management to her current role in corporate venturing. She explains how Maersk Growth invests in early-stage startups focused on decarbonizing and digitizing supply chains, using a well-rounded approach that blends equity investments with strategic partnerships.
During the conversation, Ida shares how her team leverages Maersk’s deep logistics expertise to test and validate innovative solutions in real-world settings. She discusses the value of engaging with both internal teams and external VC partners to drive impactful change, emphasizing the importance of addressing current business challenges and paving the way for future growth. By integrating strategic insights with practical pilot projects, Maersk Growth is working to bridge the gap between groundbreaking technology and sustainable, long-term industry transformation.
Watch it here or add it to your episodes on Apple or Spotify 🎧 chapters for easy navigation available on the Spotify/Apple episode.
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✍️ Show notes
Who is Ida Christine Brun?
Ida Christine Brun, Venture Investments & Partnerships Director at Maersk Growth, has 13 years of experience in the Logistics and Supply Chain Industry.
Since joining A.P. Moller Maersk in 2011, she has held roles in Commercial, Business Development, Supply Chain Management (SCM) performance, and larger strategic transformation projects such as M&A integrations, before she came back full circle and found herself in Commercial Sales again.
About three years ago, she sought out the opportunity to join the company's venture arm, initially focusing on Portfolio Management and bringing to life strategic partnerships with the companies Maersk was going to or had already invested in.
Within the Maersk CVC and venture arm she now leads a team responsible for sourcing equity investments and strategic partnerships with startups and scaleups to digitise and decarbonise supply chains, as well as portfolio management, and holding two Board positions in Dexory and Onomondo.
So, in broad terms she has spent majority of her career within Maersk - really getting a strong understanding of the products, services, and customer needs and now have the opportunity to bring new innovative solutions to the challenges that Maersk and their customers face.
Who is Maersk Growth?
Corporate venture arm & global partner for external innovation at Maersk on a mission to digitise, democratise, & decarbonise supply chains.
We support Maersk's innovation agenda through two key routes: Corporate Venture Capital and equity investments in Climate Tech and the Energy Transition and Venture Clienting and Strategic partnerships with promising startups to bring forward solutions across supply chain tech more broadly.
As a Corporate Venture Capital unit, we invest in early-stage startups to fuel innovation, specifically towards Maersk’s Net Zero 2040 strategy.
The unit is now on our third fund, which invests exclusively in climate tech. We have made investments in areas such as green fuels, energy efficiency, battery technology, electrification, and carbon capture technologies.
We mainly invest at the series A to B stages, and hold a strong portfolio of more than 40 companies, including Supply Chain tech companies such as Loadsmart, Dexory, Ofload, Pactum, and Climate Tech companies such as Captura, Altris, and Prometheus.
In terms of ticket size we typically invest up to 5M USD as a specialist co-investor alongside financial investors and other strategic investors.
Through these investments, we gain insights into and leverage emerging technologies and trends, encourage further investment from the financial community, and enhance Maersk’s contribution to sustainable, long-term innovation.
Evolutionary Journey to drive strategic value and impact
Shift from a pure CVC to the dual approach of CVC and Venture Clienting
Since our inception in 2017, we have been on a journey of continuous evolution and adaptation to ensure we drive strategic value to both Maersk and the startups we invest in or partner with!
Building on 7+ years of Corporate Venture Capital experience, the Spring of 2023 was a defining moment for us as a team. This led us to a renewed mandate, where we focused our investment efforts on Energy Transition while continuing our support of the Supply Chain Tech ecosystem via Venture Clienting.
Doubling down on our efforts around strategic collaborations with startups allowed us to get closer to Maersk’s transformation needs and enabled us to partner with startups beyond those we had invested in.
Though the team had been working with Venture Clienting since 2021, the enhanced mandate allowed us to professionalize this.
As part of the Maersk Strategy Unit, Maersk Growth can now look forward to helping shape the strategic roadmaps of the departments we work with, underlining the commitment and belief in the value that open innovation brings!
From a team perspective, we are now 15 people, covering Investments, Venture Clienting, External Ecosystem Engagement, and Strategic Insights.
3rd fund’s focus on Energy Transition and Climate Tech
Why did we, as logistics integrators, decide to focus all investment efforts on decarbonizing shipping?
With most of our investments to date and our first two funds predominantly focusing on Supply Chain Tech, we strategically decided to focus our equity investments in the areas where we believed the most funding was lacking and needed.
This led us to exclusively cover decarbonisation to uncover the path towards net-zero supply chains, and we believe Maersk Growth has a pivotal role to play here, given the vast number of new and promising solutions emerging in maritime shipping and logistics more broadly.
As a company, Maersk aims to reach net zero emissions by 2040 across our entire supply chai.n
Whilst many know Maersk for our large vessels, our commitment goes beyond reducing direct emissions from our ocean fleet, to all modes of transport and products we offer our customers,
Therefore, innovation & investment opportunities ****exist in a wide range of areas, within everything from
Assets for transportation and storage themselves (green methanol vessels, electric trucks, low-emission warehouses ...),
Technologies that can improve efficiency, the lifetime of assets, and the way we operate them
Alternative fuels and energy sources to power the supply chain.
In other words, we have massive challenges and opportunities ahead of us!
To date, our key focus has been on decarbonizing ocean transportation, as this is where we still have the greatest emissions to reduce.
This field was also where we could really add something extra to startups, benefiting our founders with value beyond capital.
Maersk Growth’s and CVCs' unique value proposition to the companies they partner with and invest in
Every CVC unit will tell you they bring that additional value beyond capital. However, we truly believe that as a global logistics player, we bring
We provided diligent and continued support post-investments.
The ability to test and validate solutions with industry experts with deep domain knowledge within everything from Energy Transition execution to Fleet Management Technology.
If we have a successful POC, we can see our startups benefiting from that industry verification and stamp of approval.
Seeing that your solutions have been tested and validated in real-life operations and assets.
When we do our due diligence for investments and partnerships, we always take the time to really understand what the startups are looking for in terms of support and why they are keen to work with Maersk, especially!
Very often its due to the growth and development opportunities that we as a strategic investor and partner could bring, and of course potentially as a future customer further down the line.
Whereas Energy Transition startups largely seek financial and strategic support and technical validation, the leading Supply Chain Tech startups are eager to secure early-stage revenues, feedback, expertise development, and access to new markets.
Venture Clienting and Strategic Partnerships
Elaborate on Venture Clienting and Strategic partnerships as an added lever.
Partnerships or venture-clienting, our most recent lever and offering, is our non-equity collaborations with supply chain tech startups through POCs and pilots to test and validate innovations from the startup ecosystem and bring readily available solutions to our operations quickly.
This is about accelerating Maersk’s transformation and also us looking towards closing the strategic innovation & capability gap.s
The added lever of Strategic partnerships has enabled us to work with a broader spectrum of startups across Growth stages AND, importantly, on challenges that require solutions here and now!
At the same time, based on the feedback received, we see a strengthened internal buy-in and reputation. By becoming more strategic in our pursuits and more business-led, we see an increased internal perception of us being more in tune with the opportunities and challenges the company and industry actually face.
Our role is to inspire, inform, and provoke internal thinking—it is a prerequisite that we can still challenge our colleagues! If we ever reach the point where we no longer challenge current thinking and operating methods, conversations will look very different.
Team set up – and an equal focus on external and internal engagement
External / Internal team split
In terms of how we have now organized ourselves, we have decided to split the team into two: half of the team will be external-facing, and the other half will be our internal ambassadors.
Jeppe might recall this as part of our previous Portfolio Management team's role, but now this is their sole role.
Essentially, a key reason for our existence is to bring external innovation and solutions from startups to our internal colleagues and organization.
In many ways, we act as a bridge between the two different worlds—our internal world of a 10,000-employee integrated logistics company and that of the exciting, motivated, agile startups we work with.
To succeed, it has been vital for us to understand and embrace the differences between them. Hence, having a team solely focusing on understanding and working with the corporate has become a key advantage for us.
Essentially, the Internal team is our expert on how to navigate Maersk, and the Ecosystem engagement team has established a great network and ability to translate business requirements to other investors and the startups that we partner with.
Strategic and intentional engagement with the startup and VC Ecosystem
Ecosystem engagement to inform and challenge our own thinking, and to validate relevant solutions, both the ones we are looking at.
Lastly, the new strategic partnership model has enabled us to collaborate more effectively with other investors and CVCs.
We are seeing great sparring and collaboration opportunities with a number of VCs that have investment theses and convictions around similar themes as us.
We see several of them embracing our Venture Clienting efforts to push forward PoC and pilot opportunities for their portfolio and as part of their due diligence to understand whether the companies they are assessing are actually addressing real needs and challenges.
For relevant opportunity areas, we can work to validate the feasibility of portfolio companies' solutions and investment opportunities.
So, a final call to action: If you have an interesting startup, especially one that focuses on decarbonising logistics and supply chains, then you know who to reach out to!
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