Anchor your investment strategy in the company’s value chain. 
Stepping Into a Moving Machine: Laurel Buckner Talks BHP Ventures
This week, Corporate Venturing Insider features a conversation between Nicolas Sauvage and Laurel Buckner, Vice President of New Business Ventures at BHP. Trained as a tax attorney with an LL.M., Buckner’s career spans M&A, operating roles, private equity, and ultimately corporate venture capital. Today, she leads BHP Ventures, the venture arm of BHP—the world’s largest mining company—working closely with the company’s broader strategy and innovation functions.
In this series, we often speak with investors who have built venture funds from the ground up. We have also covered leaders who stepped into existing platforms—such as Btomorrow Ventures and InMotion Ventures—but in those cases, new leadership brought significant strategic shifts, realigning with corporate priorities and redefining investment focus.
Far less common is the opposite challenge: stepping into a mature, high-performing venture arm and evolving it without breaking what already works.
That was the situation Laurel Buckner faced when she joined BHP Ventures.
“I really felt like I stepped into a car that was already traveling very fast,” Buckner said on Corporate Venturing Insider. “They had incredible processes in place… and a great portfolio that was truly the envy of many venture funds.”
Rather than resetting the strategy, Buckner’s early focus was something more fundamental: understanding.
The First 30 Days: Listening Before Leading
For many incoming CVC leaders, the instinct can be to make immediate changes. Buckner took the opposite approach.
“In the first 30 days, it was getting my arms around the folks that were already on the team,” she explained. “And also understanding who the people within BHP were that would be important for me to meet.”
At a company the size of BHP—90,000 employees globally—this meant traveling extensively and building relationships across geographies and functions. The onboarding process itself reflected the maturity of the venture arm, with structured internal briefings and global coordination.
That emphasis on internal alignment is critical when inheriting an existing fund. Unlike standalone VCs, corporate venture teams operate within a broader organizational context that cannot be ignored—or quickly reshaped.
Strategy: Continuity Over Reinvention
While Buckner and BHP leadership discussed strategy extensively before she joined, the conclusion was not to overhaul the approach.
“We talked a lot about strategy… and the current portfolio,” she said. “The strategy itself, we were continuing and have continued.”
Instead of redefining the mandate, Buckner focused on ensuring the strategy remained responsive to evolving technology trends. “The most important in today’s world… is really listening and being able to pivot into the growth areas,” she noted.
This balance—maintaining strategic continuity while staying adaptable—is a defining challenge for second-generation CVC leadership. It mirrors experiences seen at other corporate funds, where alignment with the parent company often matters more than introducing a dramatically new thesis.
At BHP, that alignment is reinforced structurally. Buckner reports into the Chief Development Officer, alongside strategy, M&A, and business development.
“Thinking about what our strategy is with respect to investments and then how we make those decisions based on the strategy of the company overall is an important piece of where BHP Ventures fits,” she said.
A Fully Integrated Model
One of the defining characteristics of BHP Ventures is how deeply embedded it is within the broader organization.
“Ventures certainly does not work in a silo,” Buckner emphasized. Instead, the lean team operates in close coordination with functions like BHP Invent (the company’s innovation arm), exploration, and technology teams.
This multidisciplinary model allows BHP Ventures to both inform and be informed by the business. Insights flow in both directions: from operational needs to investment priorities, and from startup engagement back into corporate strategy.
The structure of the small team reflects this dual mission.
“About half of our team are working solely on investments and about half are focused on portfolio management, listening to the business,” Buckner said.
That split is increasingly seen as a best practice in corporate venturing, ensuring that value creation doesn’t stop at the point of investment.
Investing Along the Value Chain
BHP Ventures’ investment strategy is anchored in the company’s core value chain, spanning four key areas: exploration, processing, operational efficiency, and broader technology trends.
“We think about how we look at our value chain and how we can bring a particular expertise to that value chain,” Buckner explained.
This approach allows the team to remain focused while still leaving room for unexpected opportunities. “We don’t want to create a filter such that we may not see something that could be applicable to mining,” she added.
That openness is increasingly important as technologies like AI begin to reshape industrial sectors.
Macro Tailwinds: AI and Critical Minerals
Buckner joined BHP Ventures at a moment when global attention is shifting toward critical minerals and industrial supply chains.
“The spotlight on critical minerals has brought mining into the public discourse,” she said, pointing to both COVID-era supply chain disruptions and the growing energy demands of AI.
For BHP Ventures, this creates both strategic urgency and opportunity. The firm is actively exploring areas like physical AI—investing in companies such as FieldAI, which develops “the AI brains for robots.”
“How those applications specifically in the industrial space are evolving is so exciting,” Buckner said.
Discipline and Partnership in Modern CVC
As corporate venture capital matures, Buckner also emphasized the importance of financial discipline—particularly when leading or co-leading rounds.
“Anyone that can write a term sheet with that balance should be the ones that are leading the round,” she said. But that responsibility comes with rigor: “You have to be thinking about what the capital needs will be of the business moving forward.”
This reflects a broader shift in the ecosystem, where the line between financial and strategic investors continues to blur.
“I love seeing that partnership,” Buckner added, referring to increasing collaboration between CVCs and traditional VCs.
Looking Ahead
As corporate venture capital matures, Buckner’s approach reflects a broader shift in the industry—from building new funds to refining existing ones. At BHP Ventures, that means staying grounded in the company’s value chain while remaining open to emerging technologies shaping the future of the industry.
Buckner points to areas like physical AI as the next frontier, where software and hardware converge in real-world environments. For corporate venture teams, the challenge is not just identifying these trends, but also integrating them back into the business. In that sense, success is no longer defined by reinvention, but by the ability to evolve—without losing momentum.
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