Students hear from Co-Founder of Innventure one day before he rang the closing bell at Nasdaq
Mike Otworth, who lives part of the year in Maryville, explained the company's unique business model.
Just one day before he rang the closing bell on October 3 at the Nasdaq Marketsite, Mike Otworth, Co-Founder and Executive Chair of Innventure Inc., shared with students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville the history of the Orlando, FL-based entity.
The ringing of the bell late last week followed the execution on September 30 of a previously announced business combination with Learn CW Investment Corporation with Innventure being the surviving entity.
“Our focus is on sustainability,” Otworth told the students. Thus far, three companies have been launched, and a fourth will be announced soon. The existing three are:
- PureCycle which is pioneering a revolutionary approach to plastics recycling, focusing on polypropylene (PP), one of the most widely used plastics globally. The company’s proprietary technology purifies and recycles waste PP into ultra-pure recycled PP, indistinguishable from virgin material.
- AutoFlexx which has a liquid packaging technology designed to address key challenges in the packaging industry while providing substantial environmental and economic benefits. The company’s solution offers a unique combination of flexibility and rigidity, resulting in a package that never loses its shape and will not break.
- Accelsius which is at the forefront of addressing the rapidly growing need for efficient data center cooling solutions, particularly in the face of increasing artificial intelligence adoption and rising CPU/GPU wattages. The company’s innovative NeuCool™ system is a two-phase, direct-to-chip liquid cooling technology that offers exceptional thermal performance and reliability.
Otworth, who lives part of the year in Maryville, co-founded Innventure in 2015 with a very unique business model. The firm finds hidden gems that could reshape industries but have not found their path to market, then licenses or acquires the intellectual property with the goal of transforming these innovations into disruptive companies.
More specifically, he explained that Innventure’s focus is on transformative, sustainable technology solutions acquired or licensed from multinational corporations. As owner-operators, the firm takes what it believes to be breakthrough technologies from early evaluation to scaled commercialization utilizing an approach designed to help mitigate risk as it builds disruptive companies Innventure believes have the potential to achieve a target enterprise value of at least $1 billion.
How does it define “disruptive”? They are innovations that have the ability to significantly change the way businesses, industries, markets, and/or consumers operate.
The title of his presentation was “From Vision to Venture: Unpacking Entrepreneurial Success Through Innventure’s Unique Business Model.” During the roughly 60-minute presentation and very active Q&A session, Otworth early on stressed that he is a fan of ESG (Environmental, social, and governance), but stressed there are at least two perspectives.
“It’s important that you hear both sides . . . and find the truth on your own,” he told the students.
The Innventure business model is designed to create companies to transform the future. How does the firm do that?
“We develop relationships with multinationals, get them to trust us, and then invest in companies with disruptive potential through a process called Downselect,” Otworth said. “If we acquire a technology from a multinational, they become a customer of the company (we founded).”
He added that ESG “has shifted from a risk management tool to an opportunity-driven approach.”
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