Underground fungal network restoration, insect protein, fermented marine protein. The biobased portfolio of tech venture studio Deep Science Ventures reads like a roll call of some of the trendiest areas in climate tech.
The London-based DSV sells itself as a venture incubator run by scientists, emphasising technical expertise as a criterion for picking fledgling founders. “A sense of urgency” in solving the world’s biggest collective problem is another attribute it watches for. All the while, the company has managed to distil its entrepreneur-scouting into something like a method.
Who is behind the company and how does it work?
Beginnings
DSV was co-founded by Dominic Falcão in 2016, still with DSV as part of its energy and net-zero transition segment. He had previously led Imperial College London’s science startup program where he gained experience with early-stage science startups.
DSV’s other co-founder was Mark Hammond, who had worked with Falcão at the Imperial Create Lab and is now a director of the company. His formal education has ranged from neuroscience and AI to neuropharmacology.
Falcão meanwhile does not have an academic background in the natural sciences, having graduated in philosophy, politics and economics from York.
Tellingly, however, his core interest in this BA programme, were ‘links between philosophy, economics and politics, above all on fundamental systemic drivers of social change towards greater wellbeing and fairness.’ Falcão has seemingly translated this concern for social change into a venture capital firm laser-focused on ‘high-impact’ areas.
Innovation and breadth
DSV does not work exclusively on biotech and biomanufacturing: agriculture, computation, pharma, and climate are broadly their sectors, with biobased solutions scattered through these verticals.
However, DSV’s biobased portfolio is important because it exemplifies the technologies which are increasingly favoured by investors in the space today. As the bioeconomy tries to lean away from traditional sectors like bioplastics and biofuels to tap new, less environmentally impactful kinds of biobased material design, DSV among the British biotech firms leading the charge.
The biobased ventures that DSV has taken under its wing draw on feedstocks that tend to address not just the widely-publicised metric of carbon emissions but other environmental issues like soil and water acidification and fertiliser run-off.
What also stands out about Deep Science Ventures is the breadth of their interests. The biobased sector is no exception: while VCs generally tend to specialise in a few markets in the bioeconomy, Deep Sciences’ biobased portfolio runs from foodtech and farming inputs to pharmaceuticals and biomanufacturing platforms.
It is not just the startups they nurture that are diverse. While the firm’s main focus remains on nurturing new tech and founders, it is also trying to extend its influence beyond the confines of the tech startup ecosystem.
Recently, it was revealed by UK Tech News that DSV had had dinner with the Department of Science and Technology, presumably seeking to amplify their influence on the new government.
DSV is also trying to actively mould its pool of startup candidates by entering the world of higher education. Working in conjunction with intergovernmental organisations and universities, it has founded what it calls the world’s first doctorate programme for ventures.
The DSV method for venture-building
Backing winners in the world of biotech and climate tech may seem more an art than a science but DSV aspires to make the process as methodical as possible.
One defining principle that has stayed with DSV from the start was to focus on identifying the problem to be solved, and to fit the technology to it, rather than the other way around.
DSV’s method works backwards in an ‘outcome first’ approach, starting first with a social or environmental problem. Then, zooming out on the technical or economic factors hindering progress on the issue. This constraint evaluation generates a blueprint that guides the company in hunting for potential entrepreneurs with the right skills and narrative to break down at least some of these barriers.
One member of DSV’s original founding cohort, Murat Tunaboylu, contributed to the VC’s startup-scouting methodology with his past entrepreneurial experiences. In a previous life, Murat founded a company called Antiverse, specialising in antibody drug discovery.
Tunaboylu built the company based heavily on interviews he conducted with experts in the field. Yet rather than absorb the expert input on the concrete barriers to scaling, he filtered out their opinions on whether the product could really be successful on the market. Eventually, he brought this ‘blinker’ approach to DSV and is a key pillar of its startup-scouting method, which similarly tries to filter out the noise around untried technologies.
After DSV recruits a potential startup founder, the candidate joins as a Founding Analyst under a paid salary. There, they conduct a ‘Scoping’ exercise, exploring tech and product ideas aimed at the target impact area. The company describes scoping as a ‘time when assumptions and intuitions are questions, ideas are iterated and abandoned, and new ones emerge.”
DSV prides itself on supporting its founders through commercialisation. One way the company can do this is through an openness to working with large corporate players. Last year it entered into a cleantech partnership with Coca Cola to scale solutions for water stress and to establish a new company in this space. It also holds ties with pharma giant AbbVie as it aims to create anti-inflammatory drugs. These build a direct channel between the startups it nurtures and influential global supply chains.
Growing the pool
If DSV’s ‘scoping process’ sounds like the kind of creative work that would be involved in doing graduate research, the firm has pushed its ethos further by setting up its own entrepreneurial PhD programme.
In 2023, the firm unveiled what it calls the world’s first “Venture Focused PhD Programme” where aspiring “venture scientists” can, over 3 years, gain the academic freedom to develop new core technologies designed to solve key problems in different sectors.
This commercially-facing PhD reverses the typical life history of a tech startup, which normally begins in the universities and ends up spinning off. Here, the focus is on applications and commercialisation from the get-go. The programme also aims to cast its net wider than a traditional programme, aiming to finish with cohorts that are still underrepresented in STEM research: 50% ethnic minority groups; 50% women.
Like traditional PhDs, the programme allows candidates the intellectual freedom to explore the deep tech and science associated with their product ideas. Unlike traditional PhDs, the candidates are expected to keep real-world outcomes of their new knowledge in mind. The Venture Science Doctorate, as it is known, is fully funded and lasts 3 years with sectors covering health, climate, agriculture and computation.
Its partnerships with universities and intergovernmental organisations on this project also marks DSV as more willing than most venture firms to reach out to non-profit institutions. A key partner in its venture graduate programme, for example, was the intergovernmental organisation Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), set up 53 years ago to research problems of food poverty and insecurity.
DSV’s agritech interest leads to Costa Rica
Within the biobased sector, DSV has a particularly sharp focus on agri-tech. A good example is its ongoing work on solutions within tropical agriculture and the company’s relationships with Costa Rica on the issue.
Tropical agriculture refers to a broad range of agricultural systems used in tropical latitudes. Usually, these practices are found in non-industrial or developing countries. These food production systems are varied but they tend to share a high risk of disruption from climate change. Partly this is because of the narrowness and fragility of suitable growing zones for certain tropical crops like coffee. It is also down to how developing regions are often less able to respond to food security issues.
Under its Tropical Agriculture & Bioeconomy Initiative (TABI), DSV founder candidates work with scientists in Costa Rica to develop techniques and technologies to keep existing coffee farms going through a changing climate.
DSV approaches the problem of mounting heat stress in tropical agriculture through the umbrella term of ‘“restorative cultivation”. The guiding principle here is to increase the health of the soil being farmed rather than just depleting its biological and mineral resources through intensive cultivation.
DSV’s interest in tropical agriculture makes it relatively unique among biotech VCs. Reflecting its research bent and voraciousness for gaps in the climate and biotech markets, DSV identified this so-called ‘opportunity area’ and honed in on the problem of managing heat stress in tropical crops.
One of the attractions of Costa Rica is the country’s early and deep focus on policies for building its bioeconomy and attracting investment in the area. However, DSV’s choice of country was also guided by a global perspective. The climate problems faced by Costa Rica’s food system will be more representative of those faced by the bulk of the world population. For DSV, the global view also brings wider markets: the company is planning to expand from researching heat stress in coffee cultivation to other kinds of crops.
