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I’ve been interested in Zinc’s societal-impact driven approach to tech investing since the firm first emerged eight years ago. So it was good to speak with Principal Amy Varney about taking a biology-led approach to tackling climate challenges. Read on for our conversation!

But first:

• Concept Ventures has today announced the close of an $88 million Fund II, creating what it’s calling “Europe’s biggest dedicated pre-seed fund”.

• The new fund is intended to invest in up to 50 companies at pre-seed stage across the UK and Europe, with an average cheque size of $1 million.

• LPs for the fund include Aldea Ventures, Top Tier Capital Partners, Marktlink Capital, Dominus, and Granite Capital Management.

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Zinc’s Amy Varney on engineering climate solutions with biology

Who is Amy Varney?

Amy Varney is a Principal at Zinc, a VC firm that, in its own words, “empowers exceptional talent to build ventures and services that tackle the most pressing and complex challenges facing the health of people and the planet.”

With a PhD in organic chemistry, Varney began her career in the biotech industry, working for a startup called OxStem. Here she got experience of the business side of company building, to go alongside the science.

Feeling a draw towards working in the climate space and investing, Varney did an MBA at Harvard Business School before returning to the UK and becoming a Senior Associate at climate focused investor Systemiq Capital.

In February this year, she moved to Zinc.

Founded in 2017, Zinc is focused on mission-driven founders and creating societal impact with science. In addition to traditional VC activities, Zinc runs programmes like Inflection, which is aimed at helping mid-career professionals apply their skills for positive societal impact, and challenge-focused venture builder programmes like the Multidisciplinary Food Systems Catalyst.

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

MB = Martin SFP Bryant, AV = Amy Varney

MB: Tell me about your role at Zinc.

AV: Zinc has two focuses: health and the environment. I sit in the environment team, which means that I look at a very broad array of climate technologies and I’m really looking for IP-led innovation.

We run a venture builder and we invest, at the moment, into UK based startups at the inception and idea stage. We also invest, separate to that, into more typical pre-seed deals.

I have quite a broad remit within climate tech, but my strong focus is engineering biology. Given my background, I think there's a lot of potential to harness biology—and by that I mean genomes, epigenomes, systems, cell systems, things like that—to have a positive impact on the climate.

MB: Engineering biology and the climate are an interesting pair of focuses. How do they come together?

AV: You can think of engineering biology as a way to make things or do things. You often hear people talk about biology as a code that can be edited in the same way that software code can be. I don't completely agree with that. The analogy does hold, just it's not quite the same.

Yes, the genetic code, the genome, DNA, RNA, can be edited. Particularly with advances in gene editing technology such as CRISPR, this can be done easier and quicker, but it's not the same as editing software or writing software code. There is definitely a programmability to it that can be used as a metaphor, though.

What biology is really good at is being specific. There are chemical reactions that are difficult for typical chemistry to do, but very easy for biochemistry to do because of the way that an enzyme is folded and the way it can make things happen.

So if you're trying to make something in a different way, for example, to have a lower impact on the planet, you could consider using biology as a tool. Or if you're trying to make something totally new, totally novel that hasn't been seen before, biology could be a tool for that as well.

Biology can help you make new molecules and novel materials, but it can also help you make existing processes more effective or more specific. There are so many different things that biology can make that chemistry normally makes, and biology can do better or faster or more specific, or making something novel that chemistry couldn't access.

I have to add a caveat, which is that it's really hard. It's not simple, and so we need the smartest founders to be targeting this kind of problem.

It's hard to do, technically and scientifically speaking, but it's also really hard to do on a sensible cost curve. So to do this in a way that has parity when you're trying to replace an existing input is very difficult, but I believe that it is possible in many cases.

Where I think there is real exciting potential is where biology or biochemistry can be used to find something different, and that helps us access novel space, which I find very exciting both as a scientist and as an investor.

MB: Do you have any examples of startups that take this engineering biology approach to the climate?

AV: I'm interested in how innovation in the following areas intersect with climate impact:

1. Biological building blocks (e.g., proteins, enzymes, polymers)

2. Biological systems and organisms (e.g., cells, microorganisms, mycelium, plants)

3. Biological processes (e.g., catalysis, polymerisation, fermentation)

Sometimes this looks like making existing things, like chemicals, in new ways using biology in a way that is less damaging or extractive to the planet. Sometimes this looks like making totally novel things (e.g., materials) that have different properties or have different functions from anything else on the market. Sometimes this looks like making existing industrial processes more efficient.

For example, Intace has developed a revolutionary biofoam that transforms renewable bio-based content into a high-performance conductive material, suitable for specialised electronics and semiconductor packaging without the need for any additives.

And Potenix harnesses the power of engineered biology to turn food scraps and food waste into clean energy.

MB: We live in a very unpredictable world right now. What are some of the issues on your mind now as an investor that might not have seemed so relevant earlier in your career?

AV: We are living in turbulent times. It feels more and more turbulent with every passing week or month, and certainly since I started my career in VC a lot of things have happened.

We could point to obvious things like geopolitical instability. Linked to that are interest rates, the cost of energy… lots of things that affect VC because of the way that capital markets work. They also affect people looking at climate VC because of the interplay of all of those things and how capital gets allocated, as well as the drivers around climate change and how politicians respond to them.

One of the things that I think is most important for early stage founders is to never lose sight of the commercial path. This is a really easy trap for early stage founders, in particular, to fall into.

You can be very mission driven, but you also need to have your eyes on where the money is going to flow. My strong view is that if you're going to have impact in the world with whatever you're doing–speaking with my climate hat on here–then the best way you can have impact with your products or your services is to be profitably sustainable.

The more customers you can ultimately reach if your product or service is actually having a positive impact, the better. And to do that, you have to think numbers. You have to think money. You have to think about paths to raising money, whether that's equity or non-dilutive funding.

Never forget the revenue. It is very easy to forget where your first revenue is going to come from when you are a really early stage startup that feels like it's years from revenue still.

But it's so important, and it's more and more important given the turbulence of the backdrop that we live in at the moment, compared to, say, four or five years ago, when capital was much cheaper and it was certainly easier to raise money. Back then there was a more lenient view of when that first revenue might hit your bank account.

So that would be one of my top pieces of advice to early stage founders, based on how I've seen things change in the last four or five years.

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