Founder, Decarbonising Manufacturing Industries Platform

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 lead the spin-out of 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 OPPORTUNITY AREA

Manufacturing is responsible for 29% of global greenhouse gases and much of these emissions are particularly challenging to abate. The three main sources are: 1. Process emissions, e.g. the carbon used as an integrated part of the process chemistry of material production; 2. High-temperature heat, e.g. 1100-1600°C for the core processes of melting and forming steel, steam cracking of ammonia, and clinker production for cement; 3. End-of-life treatment, e.g. the carbon released when plastics are incinerated at the end of life. While many new technologies are being developed to tackle these challenges, they are mostly not yet commercially ready, leading to considerable uncertainty. There are multiple decarbonisation pathways, which depend heavily on government climate policies and the development of low-carbon infrastructure. Despite these challenges, achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 necessitates urgent and decisive action within the next few years. Industry must significantly increase its investment in decarbonisation and make strategic decisions to adopt and scale-up emerging technologies. 

OUR APPROACH

Together with you, we want to develop a software platform to enable effective decision making and drive investment in industrial decarbonisation. This is a complex, multi-stakeholder problem that may require targeting multiple approaches and points in the overall process. Your experience and creativity, working together with your cofounder, will be important in developing and delivering the highest impact solution.

Requirements

We are looking for a process or production engineer or consultant who has:

• Worked on the implementation of decarbonisation solutions for various industrial processes
• Completed multiple techno-economic analyses on different decarbonisation solutions
• Worked with sustainability teams to analyse emissions profiles and implement solutions to manufacturing sites
• Worked with engineering and procurement on supplier identification for industrial processes

Bonus Experience

• Has on-site experience of manufacturing facilities
• Has worked on site expansions and retrofits for various manufacturing processes
• Has experience with modelling processes or energy systems

Benefits

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.

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.