Koch Disruptive Technologies

Our corporate venture capital program invests and commercially partners with emerging technology and materials science companies. The program is designed to support entrepreneurs working on innovative, disruptive technologies, which will support our business strategies, providing value to our customers and strategic partners. We can partner with entrepreneurs in many ways, including minority equity investments, joint development agreements, non-recurring engineering projects, reseller relationships, and other forms of strategic technical and commercial partnerships. Our goal is to combine the best of both worlds: disruptive technology and entrepreneurial thinking with operational excellence at a global scale. Our Focus SectorsConnected Items: Enables a broad set of use cases from inventory management to consumer engagement Sustainability and Waste Management: Sources more sustainable materials, supports innovative recycling solutions, and enhances product life cycles Personalized Customer Experience: Helps brands provide personalization, customization, and more engaging product offerings for customers Advanced Materials: Expands our portfolio of label, film, coating, and other functional materials while developing our industry capabilities and relationships Data: Enables data acquisition, management, analytics, and monetization across complex global value chains Industry 4.0: Improves automation and efficiency of industrial manufacturing and global supply chains, including next generation IoT platforms

We partner early with unstoppable entrepreneurs leveraging breakthrough science and technology to pursue progress at scale. Everything we do revolves around a single problem: What are the best ways to reconcile economic growth with human and planetary health? We invest in teams and solutions that address multi-decade problems that humanity has no choice but to solve. Our focusing questionsHow can we decouple improving living standards from resource depletion? How can we ensure food, energy and materials supply security when confronted by deglobalization, multipolarity and the distractions of the attention economy? How can we improve life on Earth and unlock future economic growth potential by leveraging next-generation computing and exploring outer space? How can the clean industrialization of biological processes reduce humanity’s impact on our planet? How we invest in unstoppable founders We look to problems and unmet needs first and then to which technologies and solutions have the potential to address those problems effectively. We don’t push any one type of technology or limit ourselves to one field. We look for founders and companies at the pre-seed and seed stages leveraging the three basic disciplines (physics, chemistry, biology) to engineer economically viable solutions. We look for teams that are uniquely suited to address the opportunity and its inherent challenges and for solutions that are radically better, technically viable, and defensible. Some of the areas we are keen to continue exploring include clean commodities, space technology, industrial decarbonization, electro- and green chemistry, next-generation computing, new materials & production methods. How we partner for the long-term Starlight is a Pre-Seed and Seed investor and ideally the first institutional check into your company. Having been in your shoes as founders and scientists ourselves, we will serve as an ally in the journey ahead. Here’s what you can expect from working with us: We will lead or co-lead your first institutional round. We reserve capital for follow-on investment in later rounds, and we have to ability to partner with our LPs to augment our participation in future opportunities. We will be personally invested in your success, as a large portion of our fund comes from our own team. We will put a particular focus on ensuring that your roadmap is focused on the key risks and milestones unique to addressing the most pressing problems. We will work with you to establish rock-solid governance and operational practices that hold up to the scrutiny of the world’s best institutional investors. We will help you line up and credibly engage the right future investors for your business and trajectory. Let’s partner and make change happen.

TUM Venture Labs are new entrepreneurial innovation hubs re-enforcing in a unique way tech-based business creation at the interfaces of engineering, natural, life and data sciences and medicine. The joint initiative of TUM and UnternehmerTUM supports entrepreneurial talents in tech-based business translation from science, offering an entire ecosystem with the necessary development environments. Our offers range from technical and social infrastructure to entrepreneurship training and support through our top-class industry and investor networks. Discover and strengthen your entrepreneurial qualities and develop a business idea into a successful enterprise at TUM Venture Labs! Our offerings for talents and founders Whether you are a student, a scientist or a well-established team, the TUM Venture Labs offer tailored support within your technological domain. Various formats along our four pillars are available to you -- from initial inspiration to founding your company. Training formats to deepen specialized knowledge in an application-oriented way, to develop start-up ideas or to grow personally. Domain-specific startup support on your journey from initial idea or technology to starting your venture. Our network of top-class entrepreneurs, mentors, industry partners, scientific/domain experts and investors. Access to spaces and infrastructure in the form of workstations, labs or technical infrastructure (e.g. MakerSpace), individually tailored in each Venture Lab. Discover and strengthen your entrepreneurial skills and develop your business idea into a successful company at the TUM Venture Labs! 11 Venture Labs with entrepreneurial know-how in your tech-domain In order to bring high-tech start-up projects to success, teams need deep knowledge of technology, management know-how as well as specific industry and market understanding. The TUM Venture Labs can support you in enriching your tech know-how with management expertise and deep understanding of your industry and market. To this end, the TUM Venture Labs focus on 11 technology domains and thus create a support offering that specifically addresses the needs of founders and founding teams in the respective technology fields. Discover the Venture Lab that's right for you! Aerospace ChemSPACE Built Environment Robotics/AI Food/Agro/Biotech Software/AI Healthcare Quantum Additive Manufacturing Sustainability & Circular Economy Legal Tech Colab Additional venture lab "mobility" is currently being planned.

“Spero” is Latin for hope. We help founders build a hopeful future. We’re a team of former startup founders, operators, and investors from landmark companies including eBay and Tesla. We invest in determined founders building mission-driven technology companies in three focus areas: wellbeing; sustainability; learning, work, and play. We prefer to lead or co-lead a $3-$10M round (late seed or Series A). Our typical check is $2-$4M, and we reserve capital for follow-on. We are conviction-based investors who play the long game. How We Work With YouWe have the conviction to lead and price your round. We participate in follow-on funding and help with subsequent fundraising. Our concentrated portfolio approach allows us to engage deeply with our founders. We’re supportive throughout the life of a company. Every one of our founders has full access to the entire Spero Ventures team. We know some ideas take time to catch on, so we offer patient capital. We are calm and steady partners in uncertain times. We help companies scale to serve billions of customers. We’ve done this as operators and founders, and as advisors and board members. We connect our companies to a network of founders, advisors, coaches, domain experts, and executive talent. We build community by bringing founders and leaders together through our CEO Summits, Product Leader Summits, founder breakfasts, workshops and thought-provoking events. We offer expert-led workshops that help founders with brand/storytelling, sales/go-to-market, consumer growth, and fundraising. Our focus Wellbeing Agency over physical and mental health People deserve to be in control of their own physical and mental health. For that, they need new kinds of information and access to care. What devices, apps, tools and services will help people live longer, healthier, more vibrant lives? How can genomics help us better understand our world and ourselves, and contribute to new solutions? Companies that answer these questions will make life worth living. Sustainability Protecting and preserving our planet Life is worth living on a healthy planet. But many of the largest systems we rely on - water, food, energy, transportation, product production and waste - were designed in a way that’s unsustainable and detrimental to our personal and planetary health. The economic, social, and health impacts of climate change and industrial pollution are growing too large to ignore: unprecedented droughts, fires and floods have disrupted millions of lives and result in billions of dollars of loss each year. How can we develop safer, more efficient systems? What can we do to improve power grids, recycling, environmental monitoring and disaster analytics? We invest in sustainability with conviction. Learning, Work, and Play Freedom in work and life Savoring relationships, art, joy, and laughter makes life worth living. Today, the way we do these things is changing. We can now learn, work, and play in hybrid ways that suit individual needs. This means self-directed learners need access to education and job preparation. Likewise, self-directed workforces need freedom, flexibility, and the ability to manage their goals. How can we provide better access to rewarding, satisfying work? What tools and support systems do people need to thrive? We invest in powerful visions for the future of learning, work, and play.

We back regenerative technology companies that are restoring the planet from the atom up. Why regenerative? Because investment should be an act of optimism. We can’t incrementally fix what is fundamentally broken. Sustainability is not enough. The next generation of iconic companies will work with nature rather than against it. Driven by a convergence of technology, demand and talent, the only limit is our collective imagination. Together, we will create a better way of living for all without destroying the planet we depend on. 25% of greenhouse gas emissions caused by the food and agriculture industry. We can transform this carbon culprit to a carbon sink. $>3T per year of materials and products will be redesigned from synthetic to bio-based to meet our net-zero targets. 45% of carbon emissions need to be cut this decade and 100% by 2050. The entire economy must be radically reinvented. Our Investment Areas Food & Agriculture Nature-inspired technologies enable a healthier food system that meets the needs of all while healing the planet. Regenerative food systems can mitigate 25% of global emissions as well as being a carbon sink for other industries. The co-benefits of increased biodiversity, reduced water consumption and improved food quality, make this a truly win-win-win area of focus. Alternative Food Production, Soil Health, Supply Chain, Robotics and Automation, Microbiome Materials & Products From synthetic chemicals and fossil-fuels to living and bio-based. Ubiquitous materials such as textiles, building materials and packaging that make up our physical world are being reimagined thanks to step-changes in technology. Materials of the future will work for the planet rather than against it and be more beautiful, cheaper and infinitely scalable. Regenerative Fibres, Textiles, Dyes, Feedstock, Plastics, Building Materials, Enabling Infrastructure Decarbonisation Reinventing every sector of the economy is an urgent imperative and generational opportunity. We acknowledge that not every sector will reach net-zero in our lifetime. While reducing emissions towards zero as fast as possible we will simultaneously accelerate our progress by harnessing nature-based solutions to remove carbon faster, cheaper and more permanently. Mother Earth has been doing this for 4 billion years! Nature-based carbon removal, Biodiversity, Enabling technologies, Marketplaces, Carbon-to-value, Next-Gen Infrastructure

Pale blue dot is a €87M seed-stage venture capital firm, investing in climate tech startups that reduce and reverse the climate crisis and help us prepare for a new world. Pale blue dot is based in Malmö, Sweden, and invests in early stage companies in Europe and the US. We invest in founders building climate tech companies to build the world we want to live in. It’s simply good business to protect our home - the dot - and it’s not too late. We still have time to use technology to outpace climate change, but we have less than a decade to reduce carbon emissions, reverse the climate crisis and prepare for a new world on the same beautiful blue dot. DetailsStage: Seed and Pre-seed Ticket size: €500k-€1.5M Fund size: €87M Focus: Climate Tech Geo: Europe and US Strategy: Lead or co-lead seed rounds Why? We founded Pale Blue Dot in 2020 as three former entrepreneurs. We wanted to build a better venture capital fund that understood entrepreneurs and channelled capital into founders solving the biggest problems facing humanity: climate change. We have all previously built software startups in Europe and the US and have invested in hundreds of startups and built programmes to support entrepreneurs and their growth. Focus We invest in the best early-stage founders building scalable solutions to the climate crisis. Climate change is the biggest challenge facing humankind right now, and it's also the most significant opportunity for new thinking and where we think the best entrepreneurs are building. So, what is climate tech? Every single industry needs to adapt to climate change. Climate tech is not a vertical itself, it's a lens through which we see all companies. Many industries are built for an old world, and startups are coming in fast to develop better versions or entirely new solutions. Climate positive companies can be found everywhere; food, agriculture, mobility, fashion, supply chain and logistics, fintech, proptech, energy, biotech, and more. We think every industry will be disrupted. We invest in companies with climate impact at the core of their business model. We back companies that decarbonise industries, remove carbon from the atmosphere, or prepare for a new world. We strongly believe the future billion-dollar companies will be built with positive climate impact right at the core, and it is no longer negotiable. We also invest in great leaders. Those who are building defensible ideas in huge addressable markets, and who ask themselves every day if their company contribute to a liveable planet. We strongly believe that profit and impact go hand in hand. We believe that great companies and great people can come from anywhere. We love meeting climate tech founders and corporate activists from all backgrounds. We believe that diverse founders are a moral imperative and give you a competitive advantage. We back leaders who want to build diverse and inclusive companies.