Cummins Emerald Technology Ventures : Copy Caterpillars

Caterpillars are supposed to crawl. This one still got to Emerald ten fucking years before Cummins. In 2016, Caterpillar Ventures invested in an Emerald fund to gain greater visibility into emerging technologies. In 2026, after years of Destination Zero, roughly $3 billion of cumulative Accelera EBITDA losses and a substantial retreat from parts of its hydrogen strategy, Cummins has joined Emerald Technology Ventures for startup access, technology scouting, tailored dealflow and another set of eyes on the future. Sensible? Absolutely. Innovative? Perhaps. Original? The Caterpillar has already disappeared over the fucking horizon.

Cummins announced on 28 August 2026 that it had joined Emerald Technology Ventures as a Limited Partner, describing the relationship as another way to strengthen access to emerging technologies and startup partnerships across power, mobility, energy systems, digital tools and industrial decarbonisation.

The announcement comes wrapped in the usual corporate garnish: innovation, customers, energy transition, growth and industrial decarbonisation. Strip all of that away, though, and the proposition is considerably easier to understand. Cummins is buying itself a better radar.

Emerald spends its time looking at thousands of startups and emerging technologies. Its corporate investors can gain access to that dealflow, receive technology and market intelligence, meet relevant startups and use Emerald programmes to test whether promising ideas can become commercial collaborations. Cummins does not need Emerald to build a fucking engine. It needs Emerald to help tell it what might matter next.

Given what has happened to parts of Cummins’ previous vision of the future, the timing is fascinating.

Credit Where It’s Due: Caterpillar Was Fucking Fast

Caterpillar Ventures invested in Emerald Industrial Innovation LP on 17 May 2016. That date is not TCAP archaeology or an inference excavated from some forgotten filing. Caterpillar still records the investment in its own venture archive.

Contemporary reporting explained the strategy just as plainly. Caterpillar wanted greater visibility into emerging technologies, particularly through Emerald’s established European presence and corporate-investor services. Rather than assume every useful technology would emerge from inside Caterpillar itself, the company bought itself access to another window on the market.

A decade later, Caterpillar is still talking about the same basic philosophy. In May 2026, it published a retrospective celebrating more than ten years of Caterpillar Ventures and explained that technology develops too quickly for even a huge industrial company to create absolutely everything internally. External startups therefore complement the company’s own research and development rather than compete with it.

Since 2015, Caterpillar says its venture operation has invested in more than 40 companies. It has spent that time building relationships, making mistakes, learning what works and developing internal machinery for connecting outside technologies with the rest of the business.

That deserves praise.

No sarcasm required.

Caterpillar looked outside its own walls, recognised that the future would not necessarily be invented entirely in Peoria and built a system for seeing technologies before they became obvious.

Then, ten years later, Cummins walked into Emerald.

So What Has Cummins Actually Joined?

The Cummins Emerald Technology Ventures relationship sounds more complicated than it is. Cummins has not commissioned Emerald to design the next X15, while Emerald is not secretly building some miraculous battery behind a curtain in Zurich. There is no newly announced product, no specific startup partnership and no technological breakthrough attached to the press release.

Instead, Cummins has bought access to an external innovation pipeline.

Its own announcement says the relationship provides targeted startup access, tailored dealflow, regular sector analysis, priority access to Emerald investment teams, rapid pilot programmes and connections across Emerald’s wider network of corporations, investors and technology companies.

Emerald is even more explicit about what corporate investors can obtain. It offers technology and market expertise, innovation scouting, dealflow, transaction structuring, portfolio support, technology studies and introductions between major companies and startups. The firm says it sees more than 2,000 opportunities every year and has assessed more than 20,000 startups since inception.

Depending on the arrangement, corporate investors may also gain access to Emerald’s dealflow database. In some cases, Emerald can even provide corporate venture-capital services externally, supplying parts of the scouting, transaction and portfolio machinery that a large industrial business might otherwise have to build for itself.

This is therefore not Cummins buying a technology.

It is Cummins buying a better view of technologies.

Emerald Becomes The External Radar

In practical terms, Emerald becomes another radar dish pointed outside Cummins.

Somewhere among thousands of businesses developing batteries, power electronics, software, energy systems, grid technology, alternative fuels, automation and assorted industrial wizardry might be something Cummins needs five or ten years from now. Emerald’s job is partly to help find it before Cummins either misses it or spends a fortune attempting to develop an inferior version internally.

That gives Cummins a way to inspect technologies before placing enormous bets behind them. A promising startup can be introduced, the technology can be examined, a pilot can be run and a commercial relationship can follow if the idea survives contact with reality. If it turns out to be expensive PowerPoint vapour, everybody can move on.

That is not weakness. It is optionality.

And Cummins has recently received a very expensive education in why optionality can be useful.

Destination Zero Has Learned An Expensive Lesson

Accelera is the obvious receipt.

In 2021, the segment that eventually became Accelera recorded an EBITDA loss of approximately $218 million. The losses then climbed to $334 million in 2022, $443 million in 2023, $764 million in 2024 and $896 million in 2025. Through the first six months of 2026 came another $346 million loss.

Taken together, that amounts to approximately $3.0 billion of cumulative segment EBITDA losses from 2021 through June 2026.

There is an important distinction here. TCAP is not calling all $3 billion a hydrogen loss. Accelera covers batteries, electric powertrains, fuel cells, hydrogen production and other zero-emission technologies, so the segment figure reflects the whole operation rather than one technology. It also had to pay Michael Abbott, so it appears Accelera was carrying deadweight from the off.

The real numbers are ugly enough without putting a fake fucking moustache on them.

Within those losses, however, sits a particularly expensive hydrogen education.

Hydrogen Didn’t Die. Parts Of The Bet Did.

Cummins spent years promoting hydrogen as a significant component of Destination Zero. Electrolyzers, fuel cells, hydrogen engines and hydrogen production all featured heavily in the grand architecture of a lower-carbon future.

Then the market failed to arrive on the timetable.

In 2025, Cummins recorded $458 million of charges related to its electrolyzer business after concluding that electrolyzer and broader hydrogen markets had deteriorated rapidly. As a result, it stopped pursuing new commercial activity in electrolyzers while continuing to meet existing customer commitments.

Next came the low-pressure fuel-cell business. During the first quarter of 2026, Cummins sold that operation to a customer, cancelled future commitments and resolved claims, generating a further $199 million net charge.

Again, those figures should not be stacked on top of Accelera’s losses as though they are separate piles of cash. They sit inside the wider segment story.

The point is simpler. Cummins committed substantial time, capital and strategic credibility to technologies whose markets did not develop as expected.

That happens. Innovation carries risk, and the future has an irritating habit of refusing to respect investor-day slides.

Against that backdrop, another channel for identifying and evaluating technologies suddenly looks rather attractive.

HELM UnderwHELMs , But It Makes Sense

Then there is HELM.

Cummins calls it Higher Efficiency, Lower Emissions, Multiple Fuels, and the underlying idea is clever enough. Common engine architecture can support different fuel-specific configurations, allowing diesel, natural gas and hydrogen variants while retaining shared components and reducing complexity for manufacturers and fleets.

More importantly, HELM gives Cummins room to manoeuvre.

If diesel persists, Cummins has diesel. Should natural gas continue growing, Cummins has natural gas. If hydrogen internal combustion eventually finds the infrastructure and economics required to scale, Cummins intends to have hydrogen too.

That is not surrender.

It is hedging.

TCAP has already watched the natural-gas archive come roaring back in Cummins Confidential Special : Old News, New Low-Down, while recent product stories continue showing how aggressively Cummins intends to extract value from established combustion platforms.

HELM therefore gives Cummins flexibility inside the engine architecture, while Emerald gives it flexibility outside Cummins entirely. The two approaches fit together rather neatly.

One keeps several established roads open.

The other sends scouts looking for roads that might not exist yet.

The Emerald Shopping List Says Everything

Look at the technologies Cummins specifically wants exposure to through Emerald: software-defined vehicles, connected vehicles, advanced powertrains, batteries, electrification, alternative fuels, energy efficiency, digital technologies, clean firm energy, power management, data centres and grid technologies.

That is not a narrow technology thesis.

That is the fucking Argos catalogue.

Perhaps that is precisely the point. Cummins does not know exactly which technologies will dominate every market it serves. Neither does Caterpillar, and frankly neither does anybody else.

A long-haul truck is not a mine haul truck. A data centre is not a bus. Marine applications do not operate like warehouse vehicles. Infrastructure differs, energy prices vary, regulation changes and geography matters. Different applications are therefore likely to require different answers.

Instead of planting another enormous flag and declaring that one technology definitely owns tomorrow, Cummins is buying access to a system designed to keep presenting it with possibilities.

That represents something quite different from the swagger of earlier transition narratives.

It looks more like optionality.

After the hydrogen experience, optionality probably looks fucking beautiful.

Strategy Optionality. Narrative Optionality.

There is another benefit.

Cummins needs a future to sell investors.

That does not make Emerald merely a PR exercise. The relationship clearly offers genuine strategic utility. Industrial strategy and investor narrative, however, are not separate planets.

Cummins has recently reorganised parts of its financial planning, capital-management and investor-relations structure. New Vice President James Hopkins now has responsibility spanning financial planning, forecasting, target setting, analysis, capital expenditure and investor engagement.

At the same time, Cummins needs to explain what comes after the expensive first phase of zero-emission investment.

Emerald helps.

Through the relationship, Cummins can credibly tell investors that it has exposure to emerging batteries, software, grids, alternative fuels, advanced mobility, energy technologies and startups whether or not those technologies originated inside Cummins.

If the next great industrial opportunity appears outside Columbus, somebody is now being paid to fucking spot it.

That is strategically useful.

It is also narratively convenient.

Unfortunately, Caterpillar Read This Chapter In 2016

Which brings us back to the funniest part.

Cummins itself identifies Caterpillar as a primary competitor in Power Systems. This is not TCAP comparing Cummins with Google or some venture-capital specialist whose entire business is supposed to revolve around startups.

Caterpillar operates in overlapping industrial markets covering heavy machinery, power, energy, engines and customers wrestling with similarly ugly questions around decarbonisation, electrification, infrastructure and emerging technology.

Back in 2016, Caterpillar decided Emerald could help it see further.

Cummins has now reached much the same conclusion.

Ten years later.

There is nothing shameful about copying a competitor’s good strategy. Companies benchmark each other constantly, and if Caterpillar has spent a decade demonstrating that external venture networks can complement internal R&D, Cummins would be stupid to reject the model purely because somebody else got there first.

Perhaps, though, we can dispense with some of the fucking mythology.

This is not simply another glorious chapter in more than a century of Cummins innovation. Part of the strategy now amounts to looking outside, finding useful technology, getting introduced to the people building it, piloting it and investing or partnering where appropriate.

Welcome to corporate venture capital.

Your competitor has been waiting.

Can Cummins Copy A Decade?

This is the genuinely interesting question.

Caterpillar did not simply transfer money to Emerald in 2016 and wake up ten years wiser. A decade creates institutional memory. People make mistakes, networks grow, startup founders introduce other founders and investment teams learn which technologies can travel from laboratory promises into dirty industrial environments.

Caterpillar says its venture programme has now invested in more than 40 companies. Along the way, it has built internal processes for evaluating investments, linking startups with operating businesses and connecting portfolio companies with Caterpillar teams. Experience has accumulated across autonomy, energy, electrification and digital technology.

Cummins cannot download that history.

Emerald can certainly shorten the learning curve, and that is presumably one of the attractions of buying into an established platform rather than building the whole fucking apparatus from scratch.

Even so, Cummins might reasonably be asked:

Can you make up ten years of lost time simply by mimicking your competitor’s strategy?

Maybe.

Cummins has enormous scale, engineering capability, capital, customers and global reach. For a startup with genuinely useful industrial technology, that makes Cummins an extremely attractive potential partner.

What Cummins does not possess is a time machine.

The Catch-Up Advantage

There is, admittedly, one advantage to arriving late.

Cummins does not have to reproduce Caterpillar’s journey brick by brick. It can enter an established Emerald network that already possesses dealflow, startup relationships, investment experience and corporate connections.

That may allow Cummins to compress part of the learning curve considerably.

However, plugging into a mature network is not the same thing as owning the experience accumulated by a competitor that entered it ten years earlier.

That distinction matters.

Caterpillar has spent a decade learning how to integrate outside innovation into a huge industrial organisation.

Cummins is beginning that particular Emerald relationship now.

So perhaps copying Caterpillar is sensible.

The harder question is whether copying 2026 Caterpillar can compensate for not copying 2016 Caterpillar.

Perhaps Cummins Should Copy Caterpillar More Often

Here TCAP will commit the rarest of editorial offences.

We are going to congratulate Caterpillar.

Properly.

Caterpillar spotted early that no industrial giant can rely entirely upon its own walls for innovation. It launched Caterpillar Ventures in 2015, joined Emerald in 2016 and used outside funds and direct investments to increase visibility across emerging technologies.

Ten years later, Caterpillar says the system remains valuable and has developed into a portfolio exceeding 40 investments.

That looks remarkably like foresight.

Cummins, meanwhile, spent the intervening period making enormous internal transition bets, reorganising Accelera, recording roughly $3 billion in cumulative segment EBITDA losses since 2021, taking hundreds of millions in charges around parts of its hydrogen strategy and increasingly talking about pacing investment towards technologies showing the strongest prospects.

Now it wants Emerald’s external radar.

Again, that looks like a good decision.

But let’s call the strategy what it resembles.

Copy Caterpillars

Caterpillars are supposed to move slowly.

This one was fucking rapid.

While Cummins was still years away from Destination Zero, Caterpillar was already building a formal venture operation and using Emerald to widen its view of emerging technologies.

By 2026, Cummins had accumulated a rather expensive collection of lessons about betting on future markets. Hydrogen has not vanished, electrification has not vanished and Destination Zero has not vanished either. What has changed is the strategy.

It has become more selective, more flexible and noticeably more interested in keeping options open.

HELM hedges the engine while Emerald scouts the horizon. Natural gas keeps earning, diesel keeps working and data centres keep demanding power. Somewhere among thousands of startups, Cummins hopes there might be another technology worth catching before the market moves again.

There is nothing wrong with learning, and there is nothing wrong with changing strategy. There is certainly nothing wrong with noticing that a competitor had a good idea.

After all, the Caterpillar has already demonstrated one thing. Maybe this is what an accountability culture looks like.

It knows how to fucking move.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Cummins Confidential : Copy Caterpillars