Founder in Residence, Enabling CO2 capture processes

ABOUT THE ROLE

At DSV we’re looking for future Founders, entrepreneurially minded individuals with industry-specific technical and commercial domain expertise eager to solve urgent unmet challenges through venture building.

You will join DSV’s venture creation programme as a Founder in Residence and work closely with the DSV team, using our methodology, to spin-out a new company. During the programme, you’ll work on all aspects related to venture creation in this opportunity area, including working out the optimal approach to solve for the desired outcome, building a team and building a viable business case. Once the new venture is incorporated with pre-seed investment from DSV, you and your co-founders will own the majority stake in the business and continue receiving support from the DSV team post-spinout.

THE CHALLENGE

CDR is a quickly evolving field. Developing a broad portfolio will be critical to minimising risks associated with any single approach or technology and helping ensure that CDR can scale to the level needed in the coming decades. Nevertheless, emerging CDR technologies including DAC, BECCS, ocean alkalinity, enhanced weathering, and biochar depend on similar fundamental units such as contactors, compressors, and membranes whilst also relying on inputs such as alkalinity, water, and renewable electricity. Scaling these enabling units and inputs alongside the CDR processes itself will be essential to reach our goal of removing Gt’s of CO2 by 2050.

OUR APPROACH

Together with you, we want to explore business opportunities that will solve common challenges within the emerging CDR industry such as low-cost air movement, sorbents with high loading capacity, and low-cost membranes.

ABOUT DSV

Deep Science Ventures is creating a future in which both humans and the planet can thrive.

We use our unique venture creation process to create, spin-out and invest into science companies, combining available scientific knowledge and founder-type scientists into high-impact ventures.

We operate in 4 sectors: Pharmaceuticals, Climate, Agriculture and Computation, tackling the challenges defining those areas by taking a first principles approach and partnering with leading institutions.

Requirements

• We are looking for a mechanical or chemical engineer with a passion for thermodynamics and fluid dynamics. Experience in developing cooling and heating systems and bringing technology from the lab to pilot or industrial scale;
• Or a chemist with experience in polymer science and a thorough understanding of CO2 sorbents and ion exchange membranes;
• You should have an entrepreneurial mindset and be urgently motivated to solve some of the world's most pressing environmental challenges;
• You have a broad knowledge base to draw upon and a passion in keeping up-to-date with the latest technologies;
• You are a creative thinker, enjoy thinking about the exceptions to the rule, and enjoy a good challenge;
• You have a strong desire to build a company and ideally have built projects and teams in the past. You are a good communicator and work well in a team.

Benefits

OUR OFFER

By joining DSV, you’ll be joining a team of operators who have founded companies and led translation of science at some of the most respected universities, charities, funds and government agencies. 2/3 of the team have founded or led a company at C-suite and 65% have a PhD. Our team dedicate several hours every week to each Founder or founding team to provide tailored guidance, resources and feedback covering every aspect of what it takes to successfully launch a new venture from both the tech and commercial perspectives:

• We provide optimised, purpose-built, proprietary tools, resources and processes to help create high-impact ventures from scratch, using our venture creation methodology. Read more about one of our key tools here.
• We draw on opportunity area specific know-how provided by our network of Partners and Advisors;
• We provide £250k investment governed by our Investment Committee to incorporate the new venture and develop early proof-of-concept data that’s needed to attract high profile non-venture studio VCs. This funding is also key to get grant funding, which most often needs to be matched with private investment;
• We provide guaranteed income of £4,166 per month paid to each Founder in Residence as a consultancy fee until the company is launched and the pre-seed investment is secured;
• You and your co-founders will own a majority equity stake in the company;
• We provide continuous support after post spin-out, including fundraising, commercial partnerships, recruitment and team-building (amongst other things); plus
• There are dozens of Founders currently at DSV across sectors working collaboratively and supporting one another - a unique resource to draw on.

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