Michael Pontzen

Michael Pontzen was born in Mönchengladbach, Germany, in 1969. He studied business administration at the Philipps University of Marburg, graduating as a Diplom-Kaufmann. He began his career as an assistant to the Management Board of Ferrostaal AG in Essen, then moved into investor relations — joining MAN AG in 1999 as an IR manager and, in August 2001, EADS (now Airbus) in Munich as an IR team leader. He is married with four children.

Pontzen joined LANXESS AG in November 2004 as Head of the Investor Relations group function, shortly after the company's spin-off from Bayer. He rose steadily through the finance organization: Head of Corporate Finance within Treasury (October 2008), additional responsibility for Risk and Cash Management (spring 2009), and Head of Corporate Controlling (January 2012). On March 17, 2015, the LANXESS Supervisory Board appointed him Chief Financial Officer and a member of the Board of Management, effective April 1, 2015 — a role he held for roughly eight years, through August 31, 2023, during a period of major portfolio transformation for the specialty-chemicals group.

In 2023 Pontzen asked the LANXESS Supervisory Board to release him early from his contract and joined Nobian — a European salt and chlor-alkali/chemicals producer owned by The Carlyle Group and GIC — as CFO, effective September 1, 2023. He served there until February 1, 2026, when he handed the CFO role to successor Thorsten Krekels; Carlyle asked him to take on a new project, reflecting its recognition of his industry and finance experience.

That "new project" became BASF Coatings. Effective July 1, 2026, Pontzen was named CFO on the seven-member Executive Committee leading BASF's coatings business as a standalone company following its carve-out from BASF SE and sale to Carlyle (in partnership with the Qatar Investment Authority, with BASF retaining a 40% stake). The independent company launched as Surventis on July 1, 2026, with Jens Luehring as CEO and Pontzen as CFO.

• No public, self-stated angel-investment thesis exists for Michael Pontzen. He is not documented as running a personal investment vehicle, a fund, or a syndicate, and no seed-stage checks or startup portfolio could be found.
• His professional "capital allocation" work is at the corporate/private-equity-portfolio level: as a CFO he manages balance sheets, treasury, M&A/carve-out financing, controlling, and investor relations for large specialty-chemicals companies (LANXESS, Nobian, BASF Coatings/Surventis).
• His repeated appointments by The Carlyle Group (Nobian, then BASF Coatings/Surventis) mark him as a trusted operating-partner-style CFO for PE-backed chemical assets and carve-outs.
• Where a startup intersects his actual expertise — specialty chemicals, coatings, industrial chemistry, corporate finance, carve-out/turnaround situations — his knowledge would be most relevant; there is no evidence he deploys personal capital into consumer, software, or unrelated seed deals.