We recently introduced you to wastewater-zapping deep tech startup Nafura.

Nafura is a product of Deep Science Ventures, one of a number of businesses in the UK helping to turn scientific research into commercially viable deep tech startups.

So I thought it was worth taking a closer look at what DSV does and how they do it.

Read on to meet Noah Geeves, head of portfolio and partnerships at Deep Science Ventures.

But first:

• Innovate UK is launching a new accelerator programme called ‘Venture Forward’, to give underrepresented founders access to investment and support.

• Delivery partners have been selected to run the programme around England and Scotland: GC Angels (North of England), Mountside Ventures & Foundervine (London), Firstport (Edinburgh), and Stronger Stories (South of England)

• You can find the application form here

– Martin

How Deep Science Ventures launched 54 deep tech startups (and counting) in eight years

Who is Noah Geeves?

Noah Geeves is head of portfolio and partnerships at Deep Science Ventures, but he started out as chemical engineer with an aspiration to build a business in the biofuels market.

As these things sometimes go, this didn’t happen and he ended up as a drinks company founder by the time he graduated university, a role he continued for over a decade.

These days he uses his combined experience in science and entrepreneurship to oversee Deep Science Ventures’ climate startup activities.

Deep Science Ventures describes itself as a “venture creator” rather than a ‘venture builder’, “combining available scientific knowledge and founder-type scientists into high-impact ventures”.

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

MB = Martin SFP Bryant, NG = Noah Geeves

MB: Deep Science Ventures has spun out 54 companies in eight years. That’s a lot. How have you managed this?

NG: DSV has had three models in that time. The first was like an Entrepreneur First style ‘get a load of founders in a room’ approach. The second was more of a challenge model, but still following this concept of getting lots of people in a room.

And the third is what we do today, and what we’ve been doing for about five years. This is very intentionally looking at the outcome we want, and then going and building one or maybe two companies for that outcome. None of our companies in the last five years have died since we've been building with that process.

We work with a huge breadth of founders; people who are very technical but inexperienced founders, all the way through to people who have a lot of founder experience, but maybe don't have the technical depth in a given area.

We exist to help put best practice in place, whether that's working backwards from the outcome through to the best approach, or helping them go through the rigour of finding a scalable solution, and then ultimately, how to drive that into the market. That's what we're there for.

MB: One of DSV’s focuses is on the climate. What's your assessment of the current landscape in terms of early stage climate tech?

NG: I don't think there's any secret that climate has been in a tough place for the last 12 to 18 months in particular. I think here's a confluence of three reasons for that.

One is that the interest rate environment means that venture as a whole has suffered.

There have also been a number of macro trends, like changes in government policy, particularly in the US. A lot of companies were moving to the US. You've seen a lot of the departments getting sort of hollowed out of the commitments that they've made, Particularly on some of the large projects have basically had funding removed, I think, particularly for cement in the US.

Is it as rosy on the surface as it was maybe 12 to 24 months ago? No, but at the same time, I think that's not that's not a reason to not be optimistic about about building in this space. There are still some significant tailwinds that make this attractive.

One is, I think we're being realistic now. The investors who are still in space are still committed. You have some unbelievably experienced investors still investing. They know their stuff. They are not tourists, by any means. They're going to add value to your cap table when they're on it. There's still capital, and there’s still dry powder.

Secondly, SBTi commitments, for the flack that they sometimes get, are still being held to. People are still targeting them. A lot of the big corporates have not pulled back, they are still trying to honour scope 1, 2, 3 emissions reductions targets, and they are still committing to startup collaborations, and they're getting stuff done.

Thirdly, the quality bar’s moved up. The idea that people will willingly pay a green premium because it's a great company has kind of died, but that doesn't mean it has to always die. Like, if you were to build a steel company, for example, you're probably not going to try and go and hit bulk steel. You're not going to try and hit the bulk iron market. You might actually go after the very specialist steel makers who are willing to pay a premium, but they're going for the quality. They're paying for quality, rather than paying for green. So you just have to change your products slightly.

From a pre-seed perspective, there are still good programmes out there. Activate in the US is still supporting people, Breakthrough Energy Fellows is still supporting people. At London Climate Action Week we had a lot of US investors, who I wouldn't have otherwise seen here. Unlike last year, they're in Europe.

MB: And why are they attracted to Europe?

NG: I think the corporate appetite for sustainability is still high in Europe. And Europe has a lot of things going for it, in terms of the academic institutions and where a lot of IP is produced. Europe is still a powerhouse in terms of producing that, particularly the UK.

MB: How can early stage climate focused startups prepare themselves for success? What are some of the essential things you think they need to do to make sure that they're gearing up for creating something that’s going to succeed in the market?

NG: The critical thing is to have a very clear idea of what your journey is going to look like. I think we're quite lucky in that, from an engineering perspective, compared to maybe pharma, there's a relatively linear approach to scaling, in that the milestones are relatively straightforward. And so you know where you need to get to. You're targeting first commercial deployment.

I'll heavily caveat that this maybe doesn't hold for things like nuclear fusion, but for the for the vast majority technologies, you're probably targeting deployments at around Series B, and you work back from there.

So you work out that first commercial deployment then means I need to maybe have a large pilot around Series A, then need to have some form of demonstrator where, sort of taking some of the integration risk off the table.

And then in pre-seed, you need to take the science risk off the table. And so, I think about this as four buckets. There's your commercial risk, your technical risk, your team risk, and your fundraising and operations risk, and you can have a relatively clear idea of how those four things change at pre-seed, seed, Series A, and Series B, and you can go speak to investors and understand for your technology sector what their expectations are at that stage, where you should be aiming for to make yourself attractive to investors at that stage.

Then you can work backwards and figure out what you need to do and when, and how much money you need to do them. So before you've even started building, you have a relatively clear idea of the rough milestones that you need to reach over the next five to seven years to get Series A and ultimately to get to scale at Series B and beyond. That means when you're building you're largely focusing on execution, because the cost of pivoting is so high.

MB: VCs famously have relatively short timelines in which to expect an exit from their portfolio companies. Given deep tech can involve long periods of R&D before you have a commercially viable product, is VC always a good choice for funding these kinds of businesses?

NG: I think there are two things to consider. One is the size of the prize is often huge. There's a reason why VC funds are still putting money into [nuclear] fusion, and it's because the size of the prize is so large, even though they know that this is almost certainly going to stretch beyond their fund timelines. But they've also evolved things like secondary funds to account for these kind of things.

If you're building a company, you're going after an opportunity and venture is one pool of capital. There are lots of other pools of capital you can go tap into, and venture sometimes isn't necessarily the one that you should pick. Venture has demands that it makes of that startup that you need to make sure you're aligned with.

That's why things like pref stacks exist, and why they're always looking for you to get scale within seven to 10 years, so that you can sit within a fund timeline. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, provided that people are aligned. When people are not aligned, and they're not aware of what venture demands of them, then that's where conflict arises.

There are other big pools of capital, like Innovate UK are fantastic around a lot of the work they're doing. There's a lot of grants that do exist to help with the ‘first-of-a-kind gap’ at the moment. Then there are family offices and corporates. Corporates are still very active in climate funding, even if the number of CVCs has declined somewhat.

MB: So, is it a good time to be a climate tech founder?

NG: I think it's a great time to be a founder. There’s this common line ‘it's not about invention, it's about deployment’. There are a lot of technologies that now exist, and we need to get them deployed. There's a massive deployment gap, and a large amount of that gap is down to not having the talent and knowledge to go build big infrastructure projects.

And so we're very conscious of that as a problem, but I also believe it's still possible to hold that to be true and for it to be true that there are lots of technologies yet to be developed.

For example, a green iron company that we've developed will be launching in the next month or so. It is getting a lot of interest from the iron and steel industry. And you covered Nafura, which is fundamentally changing wastewater treatment.

There are still opportunities out there, and I don't think there's been a better time to be a founder, especially when you've got very high quality investors who are still in the game, and there is still corporate appetite and customer appetite for these products.

Were you forwarded this email? Subscribe here to get PreSeed Now straight to your inbox: