The Corporate Partnering Advantage With TDK Ventures’ Portfolio Program Director Geetha Dholakia

Fred Schonenberg
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the VentureFuel Visionaries Podcast. I am your host, Fred Schonenberg. I am so excited today to have Geetha Dholakia. Geetha is a scientist, an innovation strategist, and a corporate venture leader at the forefront of deep tech and collaboration. 

She is the Portfolio Program Director at TDK Ventures, where she works with breakthrough startups across AI, energy, robotics, semiconductors, and advanced materials, really helping to bridge the gap between emerging technologies and global industry adoption. 

Before entering venture capital, she spent years at NASA Ames Research Center as a research scientist and technology commercialization leader, which brings a very unique technical perspective to the world of innovation and startup growth. Her impact on the corporate venture ecosystem has recently earned her recognition as one of the 2026 Top 50 Emerging Leaders by Global Corporate Venturing, which honors the next generation of leaders shaping the future of innovation and enterprise partnerships.

So today, we're going to dive into what it really takes for startups and corporations to successfully work together, a theme that is common on our show. Excited to get Geetha's unique perspective on that. And then what trends are shaping deep tech investment, how emerging technologies move from those breakthrough ideas to actual adoption and real world impact. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Geetha to the show. It's so nice to have you. Thank you for being here.

Geetha Dholakia
Thank you so much, Fred. Really appreciate this opportunity for me to have this discussion.

Fred Schonenberg
Well, I would love for, I know it did a little bit of an intro, but for listeners who may be meeting you for the first time or learning about TDK Ventures for the first time, can you talk a little bit about your background and then the mission of the organization?

Geetha Dholakia
Thank you so much, Fred, for the introduction. As you had mentioned, I'm the Portfolio Program Director at TDK Ventures. My role and that of my team involves identifying and opportunities for the startups that we invest in to partner with our global TDK teams. TDK is a Japanese conglomerate, and they focus a lot on electronic components, energy. These are the two main verticals, and TDK is deeply technical as are our startup founders, and my role bridges them to enable partnerships between the two. 

Fred Schonenberg
It's an exciting and challenging space, because obviously you have the business units expectations, you have founder expectations, you have the venture expectations, and in the middle of that is an exciting place to be. One of the things I wanted to start with is looking back at your early career in scientific research and tech commercialization. How did that journey influence how you approach innovation today and as you think about this unique space that you're sitting in? 

Geetha Dholakia
Yeah, I would say being at CVC for me is a little bit of an outlier. It is not what I originally trained for. I have a PhD in experimental physics, and my research, both in my PhD as well as when I was a research scientist at NASA was really in answering physics-based questions on how properties of materials behave at the nanoscale and how that could translate to, say, electrical behavior at the macroscopic level, right, things that one would normally see in an everyday work.

I've also had the privilege of building instruments as part of my PhD, which then led to some interesting projects at NASA on Mars rovers, on studying how small satellites under 10 kilograms can be built. All of these gave me a breadth of technical knowledge, but then I went into the world of technology consulting and there I realized firsthand how important it is to speak to the end customers and understand that pain point. So, it's not just technology, but how you translate that to solving real-world problems that would make an impact. And this kind of breadth and depth is what essentially brought me to TDK Ventures. 

And as I mentioned, the role here involves bridging this technology and market gap by bringing our innovators who are working at the very cutting edge of technology, which may be five to seven to maybe even 10 years out in terms of an actual product, because we are talking deep tech innovation, with our global TDK business teams that usually are more focused on the more near term and what can be brought to the ecosystem through this partnership.

Fred Schonenberg
It's quite a challenge. It's one we navigate a lot as well, is that you have the cutting edge technologies that are really looking to make a wide scale impact five to seven, 10 years out, as you mentioned, but the business units don't have that same timeframe. How do you reconcile that? I'll call it friction or maybe different timetables in order to benefit both. 

Geetha Dholakia
It's a challenge that any large corporation faces actually even internally, right? The corporates are focused on their quarterly goals, whether it's sales goals or any other goals, the metrics are more near term. Most corporates would have, if they don't have a corporate venturing team, they will have other aspects of innovation organizations within the corporation, which could be their own R&D or global R&D. It could be venture innovation within the organization and we have a lot of those things, but what you get in terms of CVC enabled investments like TDK Ventures is really bringing that VC discipline to our investments. 

It's not just, okay, this is an interesting project that a university is doing and so let us collaborate with that and see where this research can lead us to some papers and then maybe think of some real world applications that it can help with our products. But it's that VC discipline that we bring in the investment process where we have a thesis, we due diligence the startups deeply, we see if there is a market fit, we see if there is an opportunity for the startups to really scale and become and have an exit, say like an IPO or a very reasonable M&A. 

And when you already vetted these startups and then you're introducing them to the appropriate TDK teams, you’re overcoming that first barrier of probably not a well-proven technology. Maybe it's not a proven technology, but it is at least a technology that has been vetted by our deep technology investment teams. And then it becomes easier to start having those conversations with the technical folks in the corporate and brainstorm potential opportunities for say evaluations, pilots, and then hopefully first-to-market solutions that can lead.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, it's such an interesting space. And I think you're right, like having the venture discipline upfront means that the opportunities you're looking at are not university academic ideas, right? There's obviously a lot of value in that too, but that may not have that commercial lens. So at least the business unit then sees, hey, there is a path here to something very meaningful. And so how can you work with that to give you that first mover advantage?

I think one thing I wanted to jump into is Global Corporate Venturing. We've worked very closely with that organization. It's really exciting that you were named one of the top 50 emerging leaders. Curious about what you think, given your role, what does that say about the evolving role of corporate venture in driving innovation in large organizations? What did that sort of honor mean to you?

Geetha Dholakia
It's certainly an honor. I'm very grateful to my colleagues, to GCV, the founders that I work with, as well as the mentors that I have who have been part of this journey. But I also see this, like you said, as a recognition for something important, which is not only that CVCs can enable the innovation ecosystem, especially in deep tech and hard tech, but one other important fact, which is that they are beginning to understand that it's not just the investments, but it is the partnerships and the community that enables ecosystem and partnerships to grow that is equally important. 

And I think that's very important in my role. I not just enable partnerships, but I kind of help startups to understand how to work effectively with a very large organization. That could be anything from putting together an introductory meeting to multiple meetings to identify a potential project and then scale it, right? 

So as you said, there is a lot of not just timeline mismatch, but also cultural differences between a startup and a corporate, and especially if it is a global corporate, which is different from, say, the regional geography that the startup may be involved in operating in. And so having a team like this really helps smooth out the interactions, bringing in efficiency. And this is essentially what GCV has begun to recognize and I think that's truly commendable.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, I think it's fantastic. And we've seen this in different pockets. A couple of people that have been guests on the show in the past, there's always this tension with corporate venture capital. Is it strategic? Is it financial? And where do you, you know, the best, right, have some of each. I think that's an interesting conversation, but the truth is it needs to be strategic and financial. 

And the strategic piece is not just in who you invest in, but how you take those investments and bring them back into the core and add value. And I think there aren't a lot of organizations that recognize the need for a team like yours. And I love that they're starting to celebrate that from the GCV, the Global Corporate Venturing Group's vantage point, because it makes those investments strategically relevant. And it also then protects the CVC a little bit more too, because now when someone looks at it, they go, oh, I see what the value is of this in the near term, as well as from the financial long-term.

Geetha Dholakia
Yeah, I think one thing that I would say startup founders, when they approach CVC for investment dollars, need to understand what modality the CVC operates. And like you said, there are some CVCs that purely focus on the financial aspect and not so much on the strategic aspect. But a large percentage of CVC do operate with a strategic, as well as a financial goal in mind. We are set up as a separate fund, which is different from the balance sheet investments that many CVCs do.

Whatever the model may be, what is important for the startup founders to understand is what value the corporate parent can bring to their operations. And if it makes sense, then approach that CVC for investment dollars, right? Because you're not just getting the money, but you're also getting this whole big corporation that can potentially help you to solve your technology problems, sometimes help you definitely to scale, to understand how to approach the market, how to partner with the partners of the corporation. So you have this partnership channel as well.

So there's a lot of value that anyone can benefit from. Startups gain strategic customers, learn to scale. Innovation also helps the corporate parent in becoming more nimble and agile. So when done well, there is equal win on both sides

Fred Schonenberg
I agree completely. One of the things I wanted to talk about a little bit is deep tech. Obviously that as a space continues to evolve, across all different aspects of it, whether it's manufacturing, energy, robotics, material science. I'm curious how AI is reshaping deep tech and what excites you the most about the convergence of AI and deep technologies.

Geetha Dholakia
Yeah, I think I step it back one shot and say that the VC ecosystem recognizing that deep tech is important is actually a big change that we are seeing. Especially in the Silicon Valley in the last 15 years or even longer. I think the focus has been so much on software investments because it's quick, it's easy to scale, it's easy to gain customers. You don't have to spend a whole lot upfront to gain that extra thousand customers.

Returns are quick. So there's been a huge amount of focus on software enablement, but we are in a very interesting space now where either due to AI or because it has become necessary, we are back into looking at deep tech, hard tech. And I think that's very, very encouraging to me.

Regarding AI, we truly are entering a very fascinating period where it's enabling technology across pretty much every domain from deep tech to biology, medicine, even mathematics. I was just reading recently how AI has helped answer some of those longstanding problems that were unsolved for many, many decades. So it's definitely impacting every domain, including fundamental science, I would say.

In the deep tech ecosystem, I think we are moving away from LLMs, ChatGPT kind of an ecosystem to more of the AI enablement of the physical world in manufacturing, predictive maintenance, say factory optimization, autonomous operations, especially in robotics. That is all of the foundational models and the multimodal AI, sense of fusion, all of these enabling robots to become more adaptable and capable of performing, I would say, increasingly complex tasks. And this can truly add value to manufacturing.

Even something as simple as sorting through waste recycling, right? It's a problem that robots have kind of had challenges, but now with a sense of fusion, this can become a viable business when you incorporate, say, image recognition with the AI models. So it's a complex task. It's a very simple task for a human. It's a complex task for a robot. But we are getting there where we're able to see these things actually aid in commercial operations. 

In the area of sustainability, it's also helping a lot, say, we are moving away, probably in the coming future from one grid, providing an AC voltage to all homes and all factories to more discrete AC come DC kind of operation. So it can help with grid management, improve things and battery technologies in terms of performance, et cetera, accelerate renewable integration, different types of renewables and how that can be integrated into the grid and how that can be managed. So bring in a lot of operational efficiencies. 

You had a question about material science, and I would say that in the area of material science, AI can be actually bringing out fundamental changes because it can truly accelerate optimization and discovery of new materials. And this is so fundamental that it can impact a lot of deep tech areas, batteries, semiconductors, advanced electronics, sustainable materials. So I am very, I'm an optimist for AI, enabling the workforce, enabling technologies, enabling our lives to become more meaningful.

Fred Schonenberg
I think one of the things that's interesting about your technical background is I'm sure there's a lot of value in your ability to separate the signal from the noise, right? Sort of what's real versus hype. I'm curious if there's anything that you've picked up over time that helps signal to you that this technology or market opportunity has true commercial impact. I know that that varies from project to project, but I'm curious if there's any learnings you've had as you've done this work that maybe could help others that are suffering from what I would call the shiny tool quick win versus something that looks good, but it's hard to see out three to five years.

Geetha Dholakia
That's an interesting question and I'm trying to see how I can answer it. What typically see in a venture, VC, CVC ecosystem is, it's actually changing more recently with the focus on deep tech, but typically you have people either from the finance background or those that have MBAs so they have a good understanding of market requirements and whether something can scale and become profitable. 

But with deep tech, you also need that extra layer of understanding technology very deeply. And where I have been fortunate is that my training is in physics, which is kind of a foundational area of science where you try to probe and go to the deepest of questions and try to answer those deepest of questions. So there is science and then there is technology and there's this entire stack. But this really brings you to those foundational questions that you're asking and seeing whether it is true or it is not. Is it doable? Is it just a technology challenge? Or is there something fundamentally that science will not enable this to scale, right? So that discerning ability has truly helped me.

I'm not part of the investment team, but it definitely helps me in understanding technology that the startups bring to us way better and also helps us in reading. In fact, our investment team also has a lot of deeply technical people, many of whom have PhDs as well. So this is how we have built TDK Ventures as an organization, both in terms of investment team as well as my team, which enables partnerships.

So I would say it definitely enables us to sift through that hype when the market, say, is running ahead of itself, ahead of reality and customer demand and bring in that investment discipline, most certainly. In terms of being able to understand whether... So we are early stage investors, right? So for us, more than the later stage where there is customer demand, we need to see whether this technology can scale to reach that stage. And I think we do our jobs better if we are technically trained and not just come from a market-focused perspective. It's just my feeling.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, I think it's very valid. Thinking about the partnership piece of it, one of the things that strikes me as a challenge is that a lot of startups, when they approach the business unit, may be successful in getting that pilot, that first test, especially if there's been an investment in that startup. So everyone, okay, we should try this. But oftentimes, I've called it pilot purgatory. At this moment, we'll do the pilot and then it goes back into the desk drawer because it's not a priority for the business unit because of what they need to deliver. 

Do you have any guidance for how a startup, if they're listening, should approach a large organization with the idea of getting past the pilot to that scale up to where it has a meaningful impact for the large company, but also the startup versus getting stuck in the pilot stage?

Geetha Dholakia
I would say that if a corporate decides to invest in startups, whether it's through a fund CVC mechanism or even whether it is through their balance sheet investment, it is very important that they also have a small team that focuses on enabling this collaboration. Somebody either comes from a deep technical background, if it's a deep tech investment or somebody that knows the corporate well. 

Large organizations are inherently complex, multiple stakeholders, multiple priorities, budgets, timelines, revenue, and startup founders sometimes underestimate how much of internal alignment is needed to get approvals for things like pilots and deployments, right? And this is where having a dedicated team can really help the startup navigate this ecosystem. 

One of the challenges I see is we now have 53 startup companies and I've probably worked with all of them. There are a few things that CVCs, corporates, and startups need to understand, which is that if a CVC, let's say there are two kinds of CVCs. There are some that will invest in startups only if there is an alignment. So before the investment, they have teams that have scouted the corporate teams and have found a sponsor or somebody who can be the point of contact and they now know how to progress once you have made an investment.

Then there are corporate CVC teams like us where synergy is important, but it is something that we broadly look at before investment. But we don't identify a pilot set and that comes after the investment because in our model, we are not looking for an M&A or something that is an extension of the corporate operations. We are looking for technologies that are truly horizon three are out there and also early stage. A combination of these two means it has to be a dialogue in being able to even identify those pilots.

It takes time. And this is where the partnership teams can help because once you have identified and you know that a pilot is progressing, you need to start thinking ahead as to who would be the right people within the management that you need to approach to enable say funds for the next scale up stage, which could be much, much larger than say an evaluation or an NRE stage, right? And ensure that that's already budgeted, that that is being budgeted in the next cycle. Get any approvals or even support from the top management that will look onerous to maybe the teams that are working on the ground with these startups.

So there's a lot of alignment that needs to be done, both top down and bottom up. At least if the startup partnerships teams are able to overcome these challenges, then of course the rest of it is based on whether this technology is truly a fit for the pilot. Is this technology truly solving a market need? And those things come later. And they say that investment returns in the VC world is a power law. And maybe they will, if you invest in 50 companies, maybe there'll be one that returns your fund. But I would say that same thing applies to synergy projects as well. So it's not a given that every pilot will scale and be successful. But you can do a lot of things to help it be successful.

Fred Schonenberg
So let me ask you this and then I'm going to end with a rapid fire sort of few questions for you. But what you just said struck something that we've heard a lot, which is the power law on the investment side, the kind of measure that expects upfront, hey, it's going to be one of 10 that's going to return the fund. And by the way, we're going to have seven die before we figure out which is the one. And you preach patience on the partnership side, as you get closer to the core business, they tend to have less patience and tend to not be used to failing.

If you were advising another corporation on partnerships with startups and emerging technologies, how would you advise them to think about that piece that it's OK to go two for 10, three for 10 on these? And is there a way to get any learnings out of those failures perhaps?

Geetha Dholakia
I think it's important to constantly educate various ways to educate. It can be just dialogue with the corporate teams. It can be articles that you can write where corporate teams would read it. But that kind of dialogue in whichever form, I think is very important. Large organizations are designed to optimize for cost, reliability, efficiency, and they have low tolerance for risk. 

I can give an example of TDK, right? We make millions of parts per month, which we sell. And if any of these parts fail when it is deployed in, say, a Tesla car or an automobile, the repercussions in terms of recalls, that whole chain is so costly that they are designed in such a way that you minimize risk. Whereas startups are built on taking risk. So there's a fundamental mismatch right there. And so for the kind of teams that would work well with the startups, it is important to identify the teams that are willing to take the risk. Within TDK Ventures, we call them venture agents in the corporates that are kind of open to new things, open to try out new things. That is the first step.

And at least if you overcome that first step, then all the things that I said, right? So taking care of budgets and helping ease the difficulty of discussions, cultural differences, those things can be done, but we need to identify the right people that can enable this. So if I would say as an advice to corporations, I would say the leadership in the corporation, which could be the CTO, CSO, whoever, right? 

For them to say that when you're working with a startup, it is okay to take a risk. There are multiple levels before a joint pilot can become a deployed project or deployed in the field. So there are multiple levels you go through before you actually reach that stage. In the early stage, be open to risk, be open to failure. I think that would be the biggest takeaway that can help this.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, I love that. And what were they called at TDK? The agents that you…

Geetha Dholakia
Venture agents.

Fred Schonenberg
Inter-agents?

Geetha Dholakia
Venture agents.

Fred Schonenberg
Venture agents, I love that. Very cool. Okay, let me get you out of here on this. We do at the end of the show, a rapid fire where I'll throw a couple of quick questions at you. Just give me your gut instinct, quick answer on them. What do you think is the most overhyped technology right now?

Geetha Dholakia
Definitely in this area of deep tech, it is AI. It is overhyped. Valuations are terribly overhyped. But from that excitement, I'm sure there will be very positive outcomes that come out of it. But it is definitely hyped and valuations are quite crazy at this point.

Fred Schonenberg
Oh, yes. On the flip side, is there an underappreciated technology out there right now?

Geetha Dholakia
If you had asked me this question like two years ago, I would have said deep tech. Like I said, there was so much of a focus on funding software startups. But at this point, I think there has been a correction. And so I wouldn't say any particular area is underappreciated. 

I think there is a lot of enthusiasm in the startup ecosystem to see how they can take AI and enable it to benefit whatever stream that they are working on. It could be biotech, it could be medicine. So I think I wouldn't say there is any area that is underappreciated at this point.

Fred Schonenberg
What do you think will define the next decade of innovation? Is there anything that you see coming, whether it's a trend, whether it's a way of thinking, whether it's a specific technology or area, either that you think is coming to fruition here or that you would like to come to fruition?

Geetha Dholakia
So if there's any one technology that I would like to come to fruition, it would be actually energy self-sufficiency. Because that has the greatest ripple effect on the world economy, politics, and geopolitics. And if you are thinking of moving away from any one single source as the primary form of energy, we also need to think in terms of what can enable a particular nation or geography to focus on which particular form of energy. Because if not, we may be ending up with the same kind of issue. If we focus only on lithium-ion batteries, the bottleneck is where do you source the materials from? So I think if we move away from there to more discrete forms that can sustain a geographic nation or a region, I think that will help solve a lot of problems.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, boy, that would solve a lot of problems in a lot of different areas and a lot of different parts of our worlds. That sounds beautiful. Well, Geetha, thank you so much for sharing your insights. Congratulations on the recognition. And I have to say, this idea of the partnership between large enterprises and startups is where I spend all my time thinking. And so I know what hard work you're doing and what a challenge that is. So thank you for making time to share with us today.

Geetha Dholakia
Thank you so much, Fred. It was a pleasure to talk to you today.