About Mathieu Guerville

Mathieu Guerville is the Director of Strategy and Corporate Innovation at CCC Intelligent Solutions, where he spearheads innovative strategies to drive the company’s advancement. Renowned for his visionary leadership, Guerville combines his role at CCC with academic contributions as an adjunct professor at IE Business School, which is ranked among the top 20 global MBA programs. His extensive background spans significant roles in venture capital and mergers & acquisitions, managing over $200 million to support business growth. Additionally, Guerville is an active angel investor, bringing his substantial knowledge and strategic insight to support emerging startups.

What strategies do you employ to identify potential startup partners that align with your company’s vision and goals?

Market intelligence is crucial for identifying opportunities, both directly from your customers and by keeping an eye on new entrants in your markets. Startups often start with a very focused scope and a narrow product, tackling pain points from fresh angles. This requires you to think like a product manager and determine the “jobs to be done” (JTBD) and explore various solutions that could integrate well within a large organization. With UL Ventures, my first investment was in Metamoto, a company that developed simulation software for autonomous vehicles’ safety testing. At that time, UL primarily focused on physical product testing for compliance. If we had solely concentrated on our core operations and only looked for startups involved in physical testing (such as those doing sensor or whole-vehicle testing), we would have completely overlooked Metamoto.

What are the key factors you consider when deciding to invest in or acquire a startup?

Just like my approach as an investor, I look for a few key things: product-market fit (think very low churn and very high growth, ideally consistent over several quarters), defensible differentiation (this could be intellectual property, a real first-mover advantage, etc.), top-notch team quality, and solid unit economics. However, there’s a twist when I switch to my corporate role: I need to evaluate the team not just for their skills but also for how well they mesh with our existing team and culture.

How does a large organization balance the entrepreneurial spirit of startups with the structured processes of a large corporation?

Large companies and startups operate in such different worlds that it’s often smart to have a specialized team and a tailored process to handle these partnerships. The structure of this team can vary widely, depending on your goals and what you have at your disposal. For example, when I was at Underwriters Laboratories, I kicked off a corporate venture fund to invest in startups and increase our understanding of emerging markets, though we didn’t aim for deep operational collaboration. Over at CCC, on the other hand, we set up an ecosystem team that’s all about building genuine connections and getting things done with partners of various sizes. In both scenarios, these initiatives acted almost like a bridge between the company’s core and the startups, ensuring everything runs smoothly.

In your experience, what are the biggest challenges when aligning a startup’s technology or products with your company’s existing offerings?

Ego and resistance to change are real issues. Large companies often pride themselves on scalability, security, performance, or complex integrations, while startups tend to boast about their UX/UI, quick implementation, modern architecture, and tech stack. Behind closed doors, both sides might lament that they believe the best way forward is to refactor the other company’s code base completely. In practice, though, cooler heads usually prevail. Over time, teams find ways to align, but it’s rarely quick or all that friendly.

How does a large corporation structure startup partnerships to ensure mutual benefits and sustained innovation?

Navigating partnerships can be tricky. You want your partners to succeed, but often you also want to keep the door open for a potential acquisition. If you’re the startup, relying too much on your corporate partner can box you in, making it tough to sell to anyone else. On the flip side, if you’re the larger company, you don’t want the startup to gain so much from your support that they become too pricey to acquire later. Smart companies tackle these challenges with more robust partnership agreements. Options like Right of First Refusal (ROFR), warrants (similar to call options), performance-based triggers, or fair terms around changes of control can help balance the scales.

What are the key strategic goals that a typical corporation aims to achieve through mergers and acquisitions of startup companies?

More often than not, companies pursue one of three goals when acquiring a startup:

1. Tech Leadership: You might acquire a startup because they genuinely possess the best technology, and you want that platform or the team that built it (this could be an acqui-hire) under your brand. This move is usually because you believe you couldn’t develop the technology well enough or quickly enough to achieve the same result on your own.
2. Beachhead into New Segment: If your market is evolving and a startup dominates the new segment, it might be wise to humble yourself and acquire them rather than trying to reinvent the wheel with what you already have. At UL, we acquired several cybersecurity startups when it became clear that our definition of “Safety” needed to shift from “Testing your TV won’t electrocute you” to “Testing whether your Smart TV could participate in a DDoS attack, or intercept your emails on the same WiFi.”
3. De-risking: Sometimes, the goal is simply to prevent a startup from falling into a competitor’s hands. In such cases, you might pursue an acquisition just to shut the startup down.

I purposefully don’t mention tuck-ins (acquisitions that fit nicely into your existing business, often just to “buy” some market share) because, while a valid M&A strategy, they aren’t truly strategic but rather opportunistic or tactical.

How does a large organization handle intellectual property and innovation output during and after the M&A process with a startup?

Honestly, there isn’t much IP in software that’s highly valuable or defensible, so while having patents is nice (and often startups are too young to have actual granted patents anyway, so it’s all “pending” or “provisional,” usually in just one jurisdiction), it doesn’t significantly impact valuation. More broadly, the IP topic tends to be more about risk than opportunity. We focus on assessing and mitigating these risks through due diligence on potential IP infringements and the proper use of open source software. Having worked at an IP valuation and exchange startup myself (tradespace.io), I know that other industries might take a very different approach, but in most of the software markets I’ve experienced, IP is a Tier 3 concern at best.

What trends are you observing in the startup ecosystem that might influence your M&A strategy going forward?

Companies are staying private longer than ever, and private equity has become an active participant in the tech markets—a shift from the early 2010s when I first got involved in M&A. This change has significantly altered the competitive landscape of potential acquirers.

Author: Daniel Rongo
Founder at Industry Gap and Corporate Innovation Consultant
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