From 0 to 50: Inside Conviction-Driven Investing

As we kick off 2026, the entire TDK Ventures team is proud to have closed our 50th investment since our founding in 2019. Proud, naturally, but even more so, deeply honored and humbled. The past six years have been an incredible journey, and with such a milestone, we can’t help but reflect on how we […]

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As we kick off 2026, the entire TDK Ventures team is proud to have closed our 50th investment since our founding in 2019. Proud, naturally, but even more so, deeply honored and humbled. The past six years have been an incredible journey, and with such a milestone, we can’t help but reflect on how we got to this point.

Looking back across the 50 companies, the milestone feels significant: each investment embodies a conviction about the future, not merely capital deployed. From introductory calls to Deep Explorations through to due diligence and closing, every step reflects a deliberate commitment to deeptech innovation in service of a more resilient future. And many of these technologies require patient—often many years—to mature.

In the spirit of reflection, this article shares some of our thoughts and insights after over six years and 50 deep convictions in investing across energy and climate solutions, mobility, robotics and industrial innovation, advanced materials, and AI deeptech. We hope to share not just how conviction has helped us choose investments, but also how it has shaped our post-investment actions and differentiated us as investors—something we call “TDK Goodness.”

Why Convictions Matter Now

Conviction is where purpose, meaning, dedication, research and passion intersect—where a perspective shifts from what you could do or have to do, to what you should and want to do. It is an urgency built on a foundation of deep understanding and care.

So now, the thirty-thousand-foot question: Why does conviction matter in investing anymore? Today’s world—investing and otherwise—is dominated by numbers. We continually monitor and calculate metrics to assess technical relevance and performance. Surely, passionate conviction for an idea is far less important than quantitative evidence that it is a safe bet and has market fit?

At TDK Ventures, our philosophy is simpl—we need both. Numbers, metrics, and an assured quantitative foundation are critical to success, of course. But so is a grounded, human understanding of the importance of a technology—not only if it can solve a problem but how it solves the problem, and why that problem deserves to be solved.

Numbers can often lead the way to excellent potential innovations, but they can also become blurred in favor of the fastest or most hyped option—undervaluing the longer but more sustainable bet. For that, we need conviction. Conviction for the problem and conviction for the solution—not merely the fastest return, but the right solution.

Conviction provides not just dedication among those pursuing solutions, but also patience for the right solution—patience over hype, over cycles, and over the fastest path to ROI. And more often than not, where conviction exists, deep domain knowledge tends to follow.

In venture, timeframes matter. Where traditional VC structures are often bound by fund cycles, we are structured to sustain conviction beyond market cycles—an advantage that is increasingly critical in deeptech.

So when we make an investment at TDK Ventures, we collect the same numbers you might expect to quantify risk, market value, and technical feasibility—but we also insist on conviction. Impact scalers (entrepreneurs) must have conviction in their innovation and its ability to drive positive change, and our investment team must share that conviction to support the idea through to market impact.

How Convictions are Formed

Once we place significant emphasis and capital on convictions, we ensure they are supported by a disciplined investment process.

Before any investment in a space, we execute rigorous Deep Explorations grounded in technical expertise, first principles thinking, long-term relevance, and the evaluation of real-world applicability. This anchors the team on firm ground where conviction is more likely to arise naturally.

Some examples include:

  • Guided by Deep Explorations and founder conversations — including with Jonathan Ross — TDK Ventures President Nicolas Sauvage developed an early thesis around Groq and led TDK Ventures’ investment in July 2020. He believed that inference would not only become the bottleneck in AI, but the market itself—an uncapped opportunity that required a new hardware architecture optimized for speed, efficiency, and determinism, a thesis he later detailed in An Insider Investor View on Groq.”

 

  •  In next-generation energy, Investment Director Tina Tosukhowongformed a deep conviction that steady-state fusion is essential for safe and reliable power generation. Seeing stellarators as a proven approach with the clearest path to a fusion power plant on the grid by the early 2030s, she led the investment in Type One Energy—demonstrating the power of patient capital grounded in rigorous physics and long-term thinking.

What Differentiates CVCs — and TDK Ventures

Understandably, patience is not a luxury all investment entities can afford. Five- or even ten-year return horizons can be difficult, or sometimes intractable, for many venture organizations, no matter how compelling the idea.

That’s one aspect where Corporate VCs (CVCs) have a unique advantage. Beyond financial returns, CVCs play a pivotal role in enabling corporate strategic objectives—from fostering novel technologies and de-risking innovation to informing future product and market roadmaps. With these strategic anchors, CVCs can often afford the longer development timelines necessary to tackle complex or global challenges.

This patience is not passive; it allows for conviction to compound over time and for strategic value to surface in ways that quarterly or fund-cycle horizons cannot capture.

Our corporate foundation and backing, combined with our deep internal convictions, enable TDK Ventures to support us through longer time horizons or temporary headwinds. We are empowered to invest not just on numbers, but with conviction and patience — and with that luxury, we exclusively invest in technologies that contribute meaningfully to sustainability and social values.

As Nicolas Sauvage puts it:

“We believe with a sense of purpose, in the patience to exploit a distant return horizon, and in the collaborative spirit to combine our individual competencies, that we can scale impactful solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. We also believe with a sense of urgency, in the value to be impatient, to refuse that we cannot change the world around us today, especially as our planet demands urgent actions.” — “Entrepreneurs are the Ultimate Impact Scalers.”

“TDK Goodness” and the Founder Perspective

With conviction comes responsibility. When we invest, we don’t simply wire capital and step back. We aim to meaningfully reduce execution risk for founders.

In practice, “TDK Goodness” is not a single offering but a coordinated system of support. It begins with Deep Explorations—our thesis-driven research process that grounds each investment in first-principles analysis of technology, markets, and commercialization pathways. From there, our Engagement Team activates TDK’s global ecosystem, enabling product validation, pilots, supply-chain insight, and introductions to TDK’s customers, partners, and regional markets. In parallel, our Scaling Team helps founders close operating gaps in areas such as go-to-market strategy, hiring, capital planning, and functional expertise.

Rather than funding development and hoping scale follows, these elements of TDK Goodness are deployed alongside founders as they build—accelerating time to market, reducing risk, improving decision quality, and earning trust through action.

Importantly, we only count TDK Goodness when it is confirmed as valuable by the founders themselves. Founder validation—not investor assumption—is how impact is measured internally.

Rather than funding development and hoping scale follows, these elements of TDK Goodness are deployed alongside founders as they build—accelerating time to market, improving decision quality, and earning trust through action. Importantly, this support is tailored. We adapt what we bring to the table based on a company’s stage, needs, and ambition, knowing that no two founder journeys look the same.

We are grateful to the founders who have validated this approach firsthand:

  •     “TDK Ventures is setting a new CVC standard. We knew that TDK Ventures was going to bring tremendous TDK Goodness value to the relationship and that’s been true throughout.” – Adam Tachner, former CLO & VP of Corporate Development, Groq

 

  •     “More than an investor, TDK Ventures is a true partner to Verdagy. We’ve worked closely with the TDK Ventures team on go-to-market, capital raises, hiring, customers, and strategy discussions. They’re always present to help, provide feedback, check in and support us.” – Rahul Bammi, CEO, Verdagy

Knowledge Sharing as Transparency

Conviction also carries accountability. Since 2021, we have documented our investment decisions through “Why We Invested” articles at the time of investment. We also have open-sourced tools such as the Engagement Checkerboard (to visualize strategic value) and the Investment Scorecard  (to support both investors and entrepreneurs). Sharing our frameworks publicly reflects a belief that conviction should be matched with transparency—and that the ecosystem benefits when knowledge compounds beyond our walls.

The Next 50 Convictions

50 is a special milestone, but the work is far from over. Energy demand is rising, infrastructure is under strain, and compute is scaling while power and latency constraints tighten. Deeptech is more important than ever for building a sustainable and resilient future.

Reflecting on the journey, we are more convinced than ever of the importance of conviction in our investment process, and we look forward to working with a growing number of entrepreneurs who are as ready to change the world as we are. We are equally humbled and more thankful than ever to be structured in a way that allows patient, long-term investments – and ready to withstand headwinds to ensure sustainability and social value remain at the forefront of deeptech innovation.

The next 50 convictions will demand the same patience—and likely more—as deeptech becomes central to energy, compute, and industrial transformation.

Ultimately, each of these 50 investments—from AI innovators like Groq, EdgeCortix, and Silicon Box, to energy pioneers such as Peak Energy, Amperesand, and Exponent Energy, to robotics and mobility leaders like Agility Robotics, ANYbotics, and Ultraviolette—represents a belief about how the future should work. While the technologies vary widely in domain, scale, and maturity, they are united by a shared thread of conviction: that progress is worth pursuing, that complexity is worth embracing, and that deeptech can meaningfully improve lives, industries, and the planet. That is the spirit in which we reflect on our first 50 convictions, and the spirit with which we look toward the next 50 and beyond.

“Why We Invested” Articles

Behind each of these 50 convictions is a founder story, a technological insight, and a belief about how the future should work. Since 2021, we have captured these convictions at the time of investment through our “Why We Invested” articles, published on Medium and on our website—to honor the entrepreneurs who are scaling impact and the ideas that led us to invest for impact.

While we began this practice in 2021, the spirit has been consistent: to honor entrepreneurs and to make our conviction explicit and accountable at the time we invest.

Below is the collection of TDK Ventures’ “Why We Invested” articles written during our first 50 investments, spanning July 2019 to December 2025.

2025

 

2024

 

2023

 

2022

 

2021

 

2020

 

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