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, Energy, Agriculture and Computation, tackling the challenges defining those areas by taking a first principles approach and partnering with leading institutions.

THE CHALLENGE

Voluntary carbon markets are experiencing the turbulence of growth, with particular contention around the quality of the outcomes being produced by the projects underlying carbon offsets. Capital is not being efficiently channelled towards the right projects — those which result in the optimal natural capital outcomes. Even though high-quality projects do exist, demand outstrips supply — most high-quality offsets have been bought out for many years in advance.

One of the root causes of quality issues lies in the domain of objectives, protocols and methodologies. Some issues include:

• Friction, fragmentation, and bottlenecks in the development of methodologies and protocols – often being created by project developers themselves, with the attendant conflicts of interest that this obviously implies;
• Protocols, methodologies and objectives today are too general and fail to adequately cover or apply to the heterogeneity of projects themselves;
• Lack of consensus on protocols and methodologies, and lack of standardisation for recurring components of modules of protocols that are common across families of project;
• Novel or newer natural capital outcomes beyond carbon (such as soil quality, biodiversity, water) are precluded from participating due to problems above.

Objectives, protocols, and methodologies are key determinants of the quality of the environmental outcome, and therefore a key intervention point.

Hypothetically, if we are able to set the right environmental objectives, this should result in the right methodologies and protocols being created and adopted, which should result in a higher probability of the right environmental outcomes being achieved.

OUR TAKE ON BUILDING NEW VENTURES IN THIS SPACE

Our goal is to create the objective, protocol and methodology infrastructure components needed to allow natural capital markets to work as efficiently and rapidly as possible towards optimal natural capital outcomes. We envision a frictionless environment in which scientific theory, data sources and natural capital outcomes can be connected up in a transparent, machine-readable format. We are not setting out to be a new standards agency, or ratings agency, but rather to facilitate others to generate and compare protocols. We strongly believe that this is necessary to accelerate progress towards optimal natural capital outcomes.

We have spent several months developing initial concepts with our partners on the above so you can hit the ground running. However, if you have your own radical ideas to to help achieve this goal – or any other cutting edge approach – we encourage you to apply.

JOIN US TO BUILD THESE VENTURES

You’ll join DSV as the first Founder in the Natural Capital Markets opportunity area and work with us to develop concepts for, and spin-out a new climate company as the CEO or CTO.

Taking up a Founder role at DSV differs quite significantly from the entrepreneur in residence (EIR) role in other funds or venture studios. Instead of scouting for existing technologies which might overcome a specific challenge, you will start with identifying the areas where there is neglect or repeated failure yet potential solutions exist if considered from a different perspective, mapping the limitations to existing approaches at the specific and macro-level and considering the constraints of the broader ecosystem (capital, expertise, IP, knowledge, competition). You will start to build a company, iteratively determining the optimal solution for the problem, and DSV will guide you through every step of the process.