MAHLE New Ventures

MAHLE New Ventures GmbH

We boost future business

MAHLE New Ventures GmbH was founded in 2022. It bundles all startup activities and founding teams at MAHLE under one roof and thus takes into account the growing importance of internal corporate startups and venture capital (VC) investments in external startups. We now support a portfolio of startup initiatives and have created the necessary structural framework to enable our corporate startups to operate more agilely and independently of the usual decision-making processes in new business areas. All this with the clear goal of developing new strategic business areas for MAHLE.

Our founders and startup teams are at the center of our activities. They analyze the existing market situation, identify customer problems and develop new business ideas, which in the best case become new business models. In their work, the teams benefit from lean processes that are kept as simple as possible and a very short decision-making process. This means that direct customer feedback can be quickly incorporated into their business models. In addition, our founders benefit from a shared network and their own steering committee consisting of internal and external market, VC and business experts who provide strategic advice/support to the startups.

Our goals

Continuous transformation through startups
Strategic support for our startups
Development of a startup ecosystem for scaling new business areas.

The task of MAHLE New Ventures GmbH also includes profitable portfolio management. For this reason, topics are repeatedly stopped in various phases, startups are sold, business ideas are pursued further in our BUs or additional investors are brought on board.

How we find our Startups

MAHLE Incubator Programm

The MAHLE Incubator Program is an intrapreneurship program that gives internal founders the opportunity to develop new business models for MAHLE. We look for intrapreneurs and set up our own start-ups to further develop our employees and open up new business areas for MAHLE. We strengthen the company's innovation culture with agile and creative working methods, coaching, pitch training and mentoring. In recent years, our corporate start-ups have emerged from the incubator programs, as well as individual business ideas that have been transferred directly to the Business Units and pursued further.

MAHLE Piloting Programm

Since 2013, MAHLE has been scanning around 3,000 promising external startups and young companies per year within the Piloting Program with the aim of working together. We select the teams primarily according to how well they fit in with MAHLE. There should be a win-win situation for both sides. This means that both sides should benefit from a cooperation. MAHLE wants to participate as an investor not only financially, but above all strategically with know-how and corporate experience.

We are looking for startups and pilot projects in the following areas, for example:

Automotive applications such as e-drive systems & electronics, new material applications, air quality and climate comfort,...
Industrial applications such as Industry 4.0, Logistics 4.0, Digital Technologies (AI & IoT),...
Mobility ecosystem such as aftermarket service solutions, e-bike systems & HMI, charging infrastructure,...
New business areas such as sustainable products & processes, digital business models, B2B/ B2C business with fit to MAHLE

We are supported in the search for new startups by three VC funds: