Erica Nemser on Scaling, Simplicity, and Building Lasting Teams in Hard Tech
Ardent Technologies CEO Erica Nemser.
As CEO of Pangaea portfolio company Ardent Technologies, Erica Nemser brings a uniquely rigorous and strategic approach to unlocking breakthrough hard tech solutions for industry, a journey that Pangaea Ventures has been proud to be a part of and support. Leading a team from early innovation through commercial deployment, Erica has guided Ardent’s transformation from a technology-driven enterprise to a company with robust commercial capabilities and a mission to scale impact. Her leadership emphasizes not only scientific ambition, but also the business execution and cultural intentionality required to bring new technologies from the lab to real-world application.
In this interview, Erica shares candid insights into the realities and rewards of building a hard tech company. She recounts the complexity of moving from a promising technical discovery to a solution with commercial traction, noting that what differentiates lasting success isn’t just breakthrough science, it’s the ability to execute as a business, build a resilient team, and nurture a culture fit for ongoing innovation. Erica’s perspective is grounded in decades of experience spanning consulting and leadership, offering lessons on scaling organizations, pursuing excellence, and aligning with investors who recognize the unique demands of industrial innovation.
Her story is an exploration of how true partnership, between founders, teams, and investors like Pangaea Ventures, propels hard tech forward and unlocks industrial decarbonization at scale. The conversation ahead delves into the strategy, mindset, and collaboration that define Ardent’s journey toward planetary health, and what’s next for membranes, separations, and the future of industrial innovation.
This feature is part of our 25th anniversary interview series, highlighting the pivotal voices, experiences, and partnerships that have shaped Pangaea’s journey towards planetary health.
And now, our interview with Erica:
Pangaea Ventures: Looking back on your journey with Ardent, what were the initial challenges you faced in bringing breakthrough hard tech solutions to market, and how did you navigate them?
Erica Nemser: When I joined Ardent, scientists and engineers had developed breakthrough tech. It was (and is) a tech platform and they were starting work on a promising application, which is the one we are commercializing now. They were a technologically capable but also a very tech centered company with gaps in commercial skills and thinking about how they were actually going to create a product and get it to market. It was clear that it had amazing, novel, breakthrough tech but not the full set of capabilities to realize that.
I had seen a lot of this before working as a consultant. Maybe an unconventional view, but when I look back and across science-based products, particularly those that are grounded in chemistry, you are bound by what the molecule will do. And that sometimes gives technologists the perceptions that it's JUST about what the technologist will do. But what separates a $50M product from a multi-$BN product most often isn’t the core tech, it's business execution. From trial design to go-to-market to team to manufacturing. Plus we were building a company, culture, and team so it was more than product strategy. I was well equipped to do all that: Doing every McKinsey study I’d ever done, all at once: portfolio rationalization, commercial strategy, org, culture, talent development, mission and vision setting.
We wanted to aim high, high, high. Build a multi BN company, which is venture scale. So I needed to get the company ready for that and create as much of a track record of performance and delivery as I could before we did that (customers, sales, partners, technical milestones). We were a non-traditional profile, which created real headwinds, so it wasn’t just about having the right pieces, it was about finding the right investors who were evaluating us on fundamentals and not just box checking against a standard profile. Given our industrial background, we were always a natural fit for strategics. Pangaea saw the vision of it all, to our enduring benefit.
PV: Ardent’s Optiperm™ olefin-paraffin separation technology has recently achieved commercial implementation with a major industry partner, Braskem. What were some of the most significant technical milestones on the journey from lab-scale innovation to successful large-scale deployment, and what lessons have your team learned along the way?
EN: At the beginning we spent a lot of time on ‘shots on goal’, basically trying to maximize chances of success by having multiple parallel technical paths at manageable levels of complexity. This paid off in getting to a product that is ‘straight down the fairway’ of being a single, straightforward, great product for a range of different use cases that fits in a clear manufacturing pathway and cost structure that makes it all work.
And that approach will continue to pay off in terms of creating a bunch of avenues that we didn’t pursue at the time, but that we can come back to in the future for product extensions, application expansions and next gen products.
It’s ok to do some things the boring way. You don’t need to have a novel, break out solution for everything. In fact, you don’t want to. It's too costly and risky. Having as many easy things as possible: system design, supply chain, etc. The core secret sauce is the innovation: make everything else as simple as you can. (Some tech people don’t like to hear that because it's less fun)
Start with the end in mind. This applies to the physical product itself, the commercial model that wraps around that, and the system design. Most importantly, the system design has to reflect what the customer needs to see in order to sign off on a commercial deal (in our case, a miniature of a full commercial plant). This is different from ‘scaling up’ which people often use to mean just making the tech bigger. Customers buy solutions in the form of products. They don’t buy tech. So you need to show a full solution to get a sale.
True, trust based partnership is critical and foundational. You can’t get there alone so a partner willing to roll up their sleeves and do technical work and not be deterred by the problems, learning, setbacks, and improvements.
PV: How has the partnership with investors like Pangaea Ventures influenced Ardent’s path, both in terms of growth and in pursuing your vision for unlocking industrial decarbonization at scale?
EN: Pangaea understands a lot about hard tech, tech development, and commercialization, and that understanding has come from direct experience built over time and across portfolio companies. That experience alone is incredibly valuable and not to be underestimated. They have provided the direct help of giving advice based on similar experiences they have seen, helping us see around corners. They have shared general insights and made valuable connections for us - for fundraising, commercial, and partnership.
What is most profound and brings it up a level further: in all that we go through, how much their experience has enabled them, the board, and the company to push forward, slicing smoothly through situations. We are aligned on the destination and they get that we all have to be flexible on the how - that there are ups we can capitalize on and downs that we need to navigate. Their steadiness and clear thinking, whether with operations, market, or fundraising - ensure that the maximum power of the company is aimed at pushing forward without distraction or crisis and WITH good judgement. As you can imagine, I have heard all kinds of stories from other founders about their companies; I feel really blessed to work with a highly skillful, highly functioning board.
PV: As Ardent has expanded, what have you found most important in building teams and company culture that can support ambitious innovation and ongoing excellence?
EN: Most important is the mindset around people and teams. For me that means keeping a few things top of mind:
First, It's always people. You are going to live or die by the people because at the end of the day, people make the tech, the product, the sales. It doesn’t make itself. Never forget that.
Second, you will have a culture. Either one you created intentionally, or one that was the accidental but inevitable outcome of all of your actions and behaviors. Better the former approach.
Third, culture is a dynamic thing and is never ‘done’, no matter how much you work on it. It is in constant evolution as the people change and the needs of the company change. It will always be a topic on the agenda and a focus of activity.
In terms of team and excellence, I look to ground everything in the reality that the excellence of the company comes from having a variety of strengths to call on - and that means a variety of people, working styles, capabilities, and mindsets. That means it's going to be a little messy because we aren’t trying to create identical profiles that all vibe on the same things, but rather a deep and wide bench of strengths and capabilities.
In terms of activity, we have done a lot of different things depending on what stage we were at. Initially it was just defining what cultural strengths we had and what we needed to have - kind of a gap analysis. Then it was taking action to tweak those and close some of those gaps over time. We did that in formal ways like hiring guides and performance reviews but also competency matrices that we use for promotion that highlight not just technical attributes but cultural ones: knowledge and people leadership and problem solving skills. It's done informally in the way that we set expectations, run meetings, and communicate. What we spend money on and what we don’t. How we role model. I talk about cultural elements and norms regularly in my All Hands meetings. I know that some people like that and some people don’t because it distracts them from ‘work’ but if we don’t do that then the work won’t work.
We are in the process of going through another cultural inflection point as we move our olefins technology to commercial deployments; the stress is increasingly on regimentation and standardization for many of the upcoming activities. You can see how I introduced that at a recent Lunch and Learn. We aren’t getting rid of our nimbleness, we are adding to it.
Lastly, I’d just say that we all know that culture is everyone’s responsibility so everyone on the leadership team is very attuned to it.
Slide from Erica’s recent Lunch and Learn meeting (image provided by Ardent).
PV: Looking ahead, what exciting opportunities or trends do you see shaping the future of hard tech and membranes, and how is Ardent preparing to lead in these areas?
EN: I am excited to see that the world at large is paying attention to hard tech and conceiving of it in a way that it hasn’t before. Hard tech isn’t just slow-moving legacy industries in the background, it's the future in the foreground. AI and datacenters - hard tech. Energy, batteries, and power generation to feed those - hard tech. Agriculture of the future - hard tech. Advanced manufacturing for robotics, chips, mining, minerals, refining - hard tech. Wherever you came from, you are in hard tech now.
The future is bright for us because separations are the core of making anything in any process industry. Often making things in the abundance you want is the easy part - separating them to a purity you need, so you can use them, eat them, or work with them is the challenging part. And we are here for that.