Alloy Partners: Corporate Venture Building

In December 2025, Elliott Parker, founder and CEO of Alloy Partners, was preparing to pitch OneHealth Studio - a proposed $20 million multi-partner venture studio focused on the convergence of animal health, human health, and agriculture - to prospective corporate investors. Over five years, Parker had helped launch 34 startups and eight venture studios with corporate, university, and government partners, demonstrating that large organizations could build advantaged startups outside their core businesses. The case explains how venture studios differ from accelerators, incubators, and traditional venture capital; the stage-gated venture-building process (build, incubate, spin-out); studio economics; and Alloy’s playbook for co-creating companies with institutional partners. It traces Alloy’s progression through three engagements: Athian, an agricultural carbon-insetting marketplace co-created with Elanco Animal Health; a venture studio built with Huntington Bank to systematically generate new ventures for a super-regional bank; and OneHealth Studio, a $20 million vehicle - anchored by Elanco and $10 million in SSBCI matching funds from the Indiana Economic Development Corporation - designed to build up to sixteen incubations over four and a half years. To reach a first close, Parker needed to convince CEOs and CFOs, trained to underwrite to NPV and IRR thresholds, to commit balance-sheet capital to a multi-year, multi-partner platform whose returns combined uncertain financial exits with strategic learning. Students must consider how Parker should frame the choice among building, buying, and co-creating innovation, and what it would take to persuade risk-averse corporate leaders to fund a portfolio of ventures rather than a single bet.