Lucas Harper serves as Chief Investment Officer, Investment Committee of Innventure and brings over 20 years of experience in managing investment teams, building companies / business units and the seeding and build-out of multiple investment platforms and investment products for both large institutional investment and start-up organizations. Prior to joining Innventure, Lucas held a Principal role at Santa Monica Capital Group as well as serving as President & CEO of Ocean Avenue Investment Partners. He earned his B.A. in Economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara, is a Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) and currently holds a Series 7 and Series 63 license.
Lucas, tell us a bit about your background. What led you to this role and what excites you most about the work you’re doing at Innventure?
I have been operating in the institutional investment business for about 25 years. I started my career in the asset management business – originally as an analyst, then into raising capital, to building product and running investment platforms and funds, and to operating ventures across various verticals. I joined Innventure in 2019, and I was drawn to Innventure’s unique model of building companies in strategic collaboration with multinational corporations (“MNCs”). By founding, funding, owning and operating companies that are focused on technology solutions that have been invented or adopted by MNCs, where the MNC works to help catalyze early adoption by becoming one of the first clients and/or a channel to the marketplace otherwise, it creates an ecosystem that’s designed to mitigate many of the early startup risks most companies face, while providing an opportunity to build a high value company in an accelerated manner. And with a focus on breakthrough technology solutions that are created to solve a significant unmet market need, we have the opportunity to work on both creating significant value for investors while addressing major market needs through technologies that very often create value through significant and sustainable improvements to current technologies and solutions. I consider it a privilege to work on these types of companies, and we have built an amazing team to help us execute this model.
For those who may be unfamiliar, what is Innventure and what sets it apart from traditional venture capital firms or incubators?
Innventure has two major differentiators compared to other models: our operational mindset and the potential economic value we create for shareholders.
The first difference is that we are the founders, funders, owners, and operators of these companies. We adopt an operator’s mentality when analyzing each technology solution, as we will ultimately become the founder, majority holder, and operator of the company. Traditional venture / private equity firms and incubators play a very important role in creating value in the marketplace, and we seek to work with them where appropriate. But those are typically models that are making investments into third-party companies and operators (like us). They are usually betting on a technology or sector, as well as a team. At Innventure, we do not make such bets. We are 100% focused on the strategic relationship with the MNC. In this manner, we seek to understand what technology solutions they have invented or adopted and why — and that’s our starting point.
To understand why the technology solution was invented in the first place, what major unmet market need it solves, and we can then evaluate the overall opportunity and long-term sustainable advantage of launching the company with the MNC as our strategic partner. We skip over several years of R&D and the significant capital spend that is required to create the technology solution. We take a technology that has been funded at least to the proof of concept, and the risk that we undertake is the commercialization of that technology towards the MNC and its relationships that have already demonstrated adoption interest in the end solution. We refer to this model as the Closed Loop Model. And we use our own team to launch and build the company.
The second major differentiator for us is the potential economic value to investors. We aim to achieve early-stage, founder-level economics while executing through a process that’s designed to provide a much later-stage risk profile. In our model, our shareholders gain access to our founders’ shares in each of the companies that we launch, as we are both the founders and operators of these companies. By the time we launch a company, we have a clear understanding of who developed the technology and the significant unmet market need it is intended to solve and that it has been funded to at least proof of concept and come with a well-developed patent estate, with a blue-chip MNC counterparty that wants to help catalyze adoption. This launch point is much more akin to a later-stage B Round.
Ultimately, we seek a better risk-adjusted basis with which to put our capital to work to build companies. We think this provides an attractive solution to both institutional and retail investors alike. For institutions that are looking for a better way to access early-stage venture economics on highly compelling companies, we will offer a family of companies that we have created over time with this model that’s designed to mitigate risk and increase the likelihood of success — and do so without the traditional fee structure through a liquid format (as a publicly traded company). And for retail investors, we offer the same access to these breakthrough technology solutions that are traditionally available only to larger institutional investors through longer lockup vehicles (again, with the benefit of daily liquidity).
How does Innventure balance corporate partnerships with startup agility? Can you share a story or example of a technology that successfully scaled through one of these partnerships?
Large MNCs have a long history of creating highly valuable technology solutions. The top 100 spenders in R&D spend over $720B each year on continued research and development (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics and R&D World). According to the 2024 Global Innovation Index, corporate R&D expenditure reached approximately $1.2 trillion annually, with the top R&D spenders driving significant innovation across sectors.
By using that as the starting point for evaluation through our process, we are able to skip over a lot of the early-stage time and capital spend that’s required to bring these technology solutions to at least a proof of concept.
By understanding the major unmet market need the technology solution seeks to solve, the new dollars and cents created by the company, and what players will want to adopt (and what they will pay for the solution), it provides us with what we feel is the ideal scenario to build companies. And that’s where we can focus on what we’re best suited to do.
Our founders, operators, and team members are focused on commercializing technology solutions for the bulk of their careers. This unique blend of skills and mindset positions us to efficiently scale opportunities that align with our strategic partners/collaborators needs. In this manner, we get the quality of technology solutions that have been invented by deeply experienced and well-funded research teams, where we can then take on the task of being intently focused on accelerating the process of building and scaling the company, with end adoption being a known quantity. There’s no such thing as 100% success, we believe this approach maximizes our chances of success as we identify technology solutions and build the companies needed to deliver the end product to the marketplace.
Of course, Innventure has launched four companies since its inception:
- Refinity in 2024 (collaboration with Dow). This has been initially centered around a technology solution to commercialize the cost-effective conversion of mixed plastic wastes to chemical precursors, required in all petrochemical production, to replace fossil feedstock used for the precursors. In layman’s terms, we are excited about this company because it will provide us the ability to access abundant and cheaper supply sources in a process that is designed to provide a much higher level of output to highly valuable end-use cases. It’s intended to be a much higher margin use case of recycling that can take in more sources of mixed plastic waste than competitive solutions, with more and higher value end-use cases for the end product.
- Accelsius in 2022 (technology sourced from Nokia Bell Labs). It’s a breakthrough, direct-to-chip, two-phase cooling technology solution for servers (and other computing devices) in data centers and edge computing locations. In addition to providing a dearly needed cooling solution (as chips continue to need more power and create more heat), it also reduces data center power usage, increasing energy efficiency and reducing the need for water in the cooling process – all of which are a fundamental need driven by the generative AI boom in the marketplace.
- AeroFlexx in 2018 (technology sourced from P&G). This technology solution is a first-of-its-kind, flexible packaging solution designed to act like a rigid bottle and solve the challenges of shipping liquids in the e-commerce channel while equally performing in traditional brick-and-mortar retail channels. This patented technology is the world’s first flexible liquid packaging solution that can be curbside recycled anywhere a rigid bottle can be similarly recycled. The package eliminates up to 85% of virgin plastic usage versus a rigid bottle, while creating new dollars for its customers through a significantly lower total cost of ownership across the supply chain, manufacturing, and shipping.
PureCycle Technologies in late 2015 (technology sourced from P&G). PureCycle purifies and recycles post-industrial and post-consumer polypropylene waste back to a like-virgin grade polymer, usable across a broad range of applications and markets. We founded this company in 2015, and ultimately took PureCycle public in March of 2021 (NASDAQ: PCT) at a $1.2B post value. We have fully exited and no longer have an economic interest in PCT.
Innventure positions itself as a bridge between breakthrough corporate innovation and billion-dollar businesses. Can you walk us through how you connect the dots—from acquiring a technology to embedding the right entrepreneurial team, capital, and operational support to scale it into a successful standalone company?
As the starting point for all decision-making, Innventure has developed a systematic approach, known as the Closed Loop Model, designed to mitigate risk and increase the likelihood of commercial success and potential impact of disruptive opportunities in the market. There are four core tenets we look to achieve via the Closed Loop Model:
- Access Advantage. We are accessing technology solutions that are uniquely available only through our MNC relationships, channel partners, or our innovation network.
- Institutional Data Set. We leverage the deep MNC market knowledge related to the unmet market need, technology solution, industry value creation, market size, and channels of distribution.
- Developed Technology Solutions. Each technology solution has been funded beyond proof of concept, has a strong intellectual property strategy, and an early tailored technical support as we build and scale the company.
- Early Customer Adoption. The MNC is motivated to catalyze early adoption by becoming an early customer and/or facilitating the initial customer base to drive financial and strategic value
Once our DownSelect research team has evaluated a technology solution that fully adheres to the Closed Loop Model and has created the go-to-market launch plan, we will found a new company on our platform. We typically will source the initial management team from within our company or network of highly experienced entrepreneurs. We leverage the entirety of the Innventure platform, from our DownSelect research team, our Capital Markets and Finance teams, through our operational teams, so to allow the entrepreneurs (the initial management team) to be focused on the building and scaling of the company – which will eventually grow into its own standalone enterprise. Throughout the lifecycle of the company, we will seek to support its management needs at the board level and ongoing capital needs from our balance sheet and third-party relationships. We all think of ourselves as operators, and we take that approach to solving problems and working as a team to build and grow the company.
Innventure’s model creates value across a wide spectrum from entrepreneurs and founders who want to build, to retail investors seeking early-stage access, to the multinational partners you help scale innovation for. How do you think about communicating that value to each group? And are you starting to see more interest from institutional investors who recognize the strength of this model?
We use the phraseology of “ecosystem” a lot at Innventure. The process we execute, which has been designed over decades of entrepreneurship, creates an ecosystem that all of our constituents get excited about. Whether it’s an entrepreneur or investor that’s looking for high-growth concepts with a process that’s designed to increase the likelihood of success, or an MNC collaborator that’s looking for the most effective way to commercialize highly valuable IP, it’s about communicating the process and discipline Innventure applies to creating companies. We see continued growth in interest from both investors and MNCs alike
For our multinational partners, we offer a complementary external commercialization pathway for their high-potential technology solutions. We’re working to create adjacent value to their core business by helping them efficiently extract value from innovations that might otherwise remain on the shelf.
For the market, we are launching companies in an ecosystem we have created that’s designed to be a better risk-adjusted process for funding, launching, and scaling high-growth companies. Providing this access through daily liquidity offers benefits to both institutional and retail investors who want high-quality solutions in early-stage companies.
There’s some exciting news around Accelsius, which is tackling one of today’s most urgent challenges in thermal management in data centers and high-performance computing. Can you share what’s new with Accelsius and why its precision cooling platform is generating so much interest right now?
Accelsius is gaining serious traction across the data center and high-performance computing markets as demand for sustainable, high-density cooling continues to surge and the race to buy and build AI factories grows. Over the past several months, we’ve announced major milestones that underscore both our global expansion and the growing trust in our two-phase, direct-to-chip liquid cooling platform. In Europe, we’ve partnered with Telehouse, one of the continent’s most established colocation providers, and Computacenter, a leading independent provider of IT infrastructure and services. These collaborations mark Accelsius’ official entry into the European market, where our technology is being showcased through new co-innovation labs—hands-on spaces that allow enterprise clients and partners to evaluate, test, and benchmark NeuCool™ technology under real-world conditions.
At the same time, we’re evolving rapidly to meet the changing needs of server and chip design. We’ve expanded our product line with the industry’s first 2-phase, multi-rack, coolant distribution unit (CDU) that supports large-scale deployments and maximizes compute density, enabling 250kW+ per rack, especially important as new generations of AI servers push thermal boundaries higher than ever. Our Thermal Simulation Rack, which allows data centers to simulate next-gen CPU and GPU loads without requiring massive hardware investments, has also seen growing adoption among hyperscalers and hardware partners. These developments highlight how Accelsius is not only keeping pace with the rapid evolution of AI infrastructure but also shaping the next generation of thermal management solutions for the world’s most demanding data center environments.
What industries do you believe are ripe for disruption over the next five years?
While some of us may have our own views as to what industries are ripe for disruption, that guessing game is not one that we play. Instead, our starting point is to sit down with our MNC partners to understand what technology solutions they have created and why, and use that collaborative approach as the starting point to unlock the value of what they have created. Our end goal is to be their commercialization partner under our Closed Loop Model – to work with our partners to source the technology solutions they have created to transform future markets.
Ultimately, our industry-agnostic approach allows us to pursue the most promising opportunities across the industrial technology landscape rather than limiting ourselves to predetermined sectors. This flexibility is particularly valuable in today’s rapidly changing technological environment.
Is there anything else that you feel is important to share with readers?
I’d also emphasize that what truly sets Innventure apart is our team of “high-performing athletes” – multidisciplinary professionals with deep expertise across technical, operational, and capital markets disciplines. Our company-building philosophy, outlined under the Closed Loop Model, can be distilled to “early stage economics, later stage risk,” which encapsulates everything we seek to do as we launch companies.
The traditional path for breakthrough technologies is fraught with commercialization challenges. By providing a systematic approach to bridge this innovation gap, we are unlocking transformative technologies of significant value that address critical global challenges.
Innventure seeks to provide a mechanism for investors to get in early at highly disruptive companies in thriving sectors (Data Center Cooling, Liquid Packaging & Plastics Recycling), where institutional and retail investors can access opportunities with early-stage economics but with late-stage risk, and have the ability to get in and out on a daily basis. We’re aiming to be the new blueprint for turning R&D into ROI. And we thank you for your support!
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