Volker Berl started with atoms. Then came companies.

Before Volker Berl put money into companies, he helped put atoms into a board game. Moleko asked players to collect atoms and bonds, follow formulas, and assemble target molecules. A chemistry lesson had acquired something schoolwork rarely enjoys: the possibility that someone might ask to play another round.

Berl shares the original game's credit with Michèle Kirch and Jean-Marie Lehn. CNRS Editions published it in French, English, and German. Its intended players included children from the age of ten. The ingredients were serious; the invitation was playful. You could encounter molecular structure without first developing a taste for academic prose.

Today, Berl is the founder, managing partner, and CEO of New Age Ventures in New York. His professional history includes laboratory research, industrial process development, equity research, company building, and public-company boards. The board game is a useful place to begin because it shows him making something for people to use, years before venture capital became his principal occupation.

A laboratory small enough for the kitchen table

Moleko took shape during Berl's doctoral years in Strasbourg, in Lehn's research laboratory. The educational project drew on an earlier idea from the group. Berl worked with Kirch on its explanatory material, while the game made molecular construction tangible through models. The publisher's catalogue dates its edition to January 1998.

There was a considerable distance between the research setting and the audience. A laboratory concerned with supramolecular chemistry was helping introduce schoolchildren to atoms and bonds. Making that journey required more than reducing the number of syllables. Players needed an objective, pieces they could handle, and a reason to keep going.

The game was developed with educators and tested by children. Those are small details with large practical consequences. An explanation that satisfies its author can still leave its audience stranded. A child testing a game supplies a rather direct verdict: the pieces either invite another turn or they do not.

Years later, another team developed a new Moleko with a changed structure and scenario. Its 2018 presentation credited the original designers while naming the new creators separately. The successor imagined a laboratory on the board, with players organizing technicians and assembling molecules. The idea had acquired a second life rather than remaining a forgotten item on a researcher's résumé.

That distinction matters. Berl's role belongs to the original project. The later design belongs to its own team. Together, the two versions offer a modest but appealing story about an educational object: a scientific idea found a form that other people could pick up, revise, and continue using.

From Strasbourg to the factory floor

Berl's education crossed several borders. He studied chemistry at Karlsruhe, trained as a chemical engineer in Strasbourg, and completed an M.Sc. at ETH Zurich. His doctorate at the University of Strasbourg ran from 1996 to 2000. A postdoctoral period at Stanford followed in 2001 and 2002.

The sequence is worth reading slowly. These were different institutions, countries, and kinds of training, rather than one qualification endlessly renamed. Chemical engineering sits beside chemistry; a doctorate sits beside postdoctoral research. Later, an MBA at Concordia University's John Molson School of Business in Montreal added another vocabulary, with study recorded in 2003 and 2004.

In Germany, Berl worked at BASF in manufacturing, process research and development, and new business development. A process laboratory supplies an unromantic test for an elegant idea: can it be made? The industrial setting brings questions of equipment, repeatability, and production into the same conversation as the chemistry.

By 2006, he was working in equity research at Deutsche Bank. He subsequently held the chief technology officer role at Zymes from 2007 to 2009. These positions put technical work and business evaluation alongside one another in his career. The dates show the movement without needing a dramatic conversion scene.

New Age Ventures dates to 2009. By then, Berl's work had already involved the university, the industrial company, the bank, and the operating business. Each asks a different question of a new technology. Does it work? Can it be produced? What is the business worth? Who will carry it forward?

A portfolio with room for both lithium and laundry

New Age Ventures describes itself as a globally active generalist venture studio. Berl leads it from New York, and the firm lists investments across clean technology, consumer technology, deep technology, and applied artificial intelligence. Its portfolio makes the word generalist concrete. Some companies work with material extracted from the ground. Others work with the chores waiting at home.

Consider the investment formats. The firm's Standard Lithium entry identifies a PIPE, a private investment in public equity. Its Li-FT Power entry records multiple seed investments before an initial public offering. Aqualung, the carbon-capture technology developer, appears as a Series A investment. Those labels describe different points in a company's financing history.

The contrast continues on the consumer side. Spruce, a platform for booking household services, appears as a Series B investment. Goodhood brings mobile mechanics to places such as customers' homes and offices; its entry records seed financing. One business organizes domestic tasks, another moves the workshop closer to the motorist. Convenience still needs someone to do the work.

Tilting Point, listed as a private-equity investment, supports live games through publishing and marketing. Tabella, listed at pre-seed and seed, provides a digital platform for Catholic communities. Those businesses serve different audiences, yet both face the practical question of helping people find and use a service. A product's existence does not arrange its own audience.

Applied AI appears through investments including BootstrapLabs and Emoshape. New Age Ventures describes the latter's work as emotion synthesis for machines and records participation in multiple seed rounds as lead investor. That is an account of the technology's intended purpose and the firm's investment role, rather than a claim that a machine has acquired human feelings.

These are selected examples from the firm's published portfolio. They show breadth of subject and financing structure. They also explain why a single fashionable sector would make an awkward label for Berl. The common professional setting is company development, with science, capital, and the details of delivery appearing in different proportions.

When the chemistry reaches the boardroom

On July 20, 2021, Standard Lithium appointed Berl as an independent director. Here, the connection between his technical and financial experience becomes particularly easy to see. A lithium-development company has a chemical process to prove and a business to finance. Berl arrived with professional experience in both fields.

“I am excited to expand my involvement with Standard Lithium on the heels of the recent NYSE American listing and technological achievements”

Volker Berl, July 2021

The company's development work concerns lithium-bearing brines and direct lithium extraction. Its July 2026 description places its principal projects in the Smackover Formation in Arkansas and Texas. In partnership with Equinor, it is advancing the South West Arkansas project. The ambition is commercial-scale production through an integrated extraction and purification process.

For a director, that ambition comes with responsibilities extending beyond enthusiasm for the technology. Berl chairs Standard Lithium's Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee and serves on its Audit Committee. Those assignments put board composition, governance, and financial oversight on his public list of duties. They are part of the machinery by which a company makes and examines decisions.

At the company's July 16, 2026 annual meeting, Berl was reelected with 99.10 percent of votes cast in favour of his nomination. The number is a shareholder vote, with a specific date and purpose. It marks the continuation of a board appointment begun five years earlier.

Another current board appointment is Cohen Circle Acquisition Corp. II, where Berl has served since June 2025 and sits on the Audit Committee. In March 2025, he also gained NACD Directorship Certification. The qualification adds a formal director credential to a career that had already included private and public boards.

The pieces still have to fit

It would be tempting to turn Moleko into a prophecy: the young chemist moving pieces around a board, the future investor already revealed. A career rarely behaves so obligingly. The game, industrial work, banking, and venture studio were separate undertakings, involving collaborators, institutions, and decisions made at different times.

Still, the game offers a revealing point of entry. Berl helped make specialist knowledge usable outside its usual setting. Later work placed him at other boundaries: between research and production, technical development and financial evaluation, private company building and public-company oversight. The connection is visible in the work itself, without assigning him a private philosophy.

There is also a pleasing range of scale. A molecular model can sit on a table. A household-services app can arrange a task in an apartment. A lithium project requires a resource, a process, infrastructure, and financing. Berl's professional record contains all three kinds of setting. The distance between them is part of what makes the story interesting.

For now, New York remains the base for his venture studio, while board work connects him to businesses beyond the city. The tasks are recognizably practical: build, finance, evaluate, oversee. Back at the Moleko table, the instruction was to assemble the right pieces into a molecule. In business, the pieces have acquired lawyers and calendars. They still have to fit.