Marcus Behrendt

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“Sustainable supply chain is one of the things we’re really interested in right now,” Marcus Behrendt, managing partner at BMW i Ventures, told TechCrunch. “BMW Corp has announced that it wants to significantly reduce its carbon footprint, and therefore it’s looking at all ways of producing this, not just emission from the vehicles, but also the emissions that are produced when manufacturing and developing the cars.” BMW i Ventures invests in autonomous truck technology company Kodiak Robotics [...] “We don’t need corporate buy-in to make an investment,” said Behrendt. “We do consult our engineers for due diligence and we also connect them with other startups. We’re trying to combine the best of both worlds. So we are acting like a financial VC, we’re taking board seats, we’re leading rounds, we can make quick decisions. And on the other hand we’re providing all the connections within our organization to the company.” [...] The startups that BMW i Ventures invests in get the benefit of networking with BMW engineers and employees and learning from a legacy company how the automotive ecosystem works. Behrendt says for a company like Solid Power, where the technology is another four or five years out, there’s a strong collaboration between BMW’s business unit and the company to help them grow. “This is a win-win situation,” said Behrendt. “We are introducing them and will bring them into the company, they will be talking to the right engineers. There’s no guarantee that they w